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By Root 1549 0

” movement points to the importance of factors such as active social engagement, absorbing work, and freedom for human happiness. This is consistent with empirical economic research indicating that employment, marriage, religious participation, and political liberties as well as income are important indicators of reported happiness. This all seems highly sensible and plausible, and points toward policies such as avoiding unemployment, safeguarding political freedoms, and facilitating people’s natural inclinations to settle down with a life partner and take part in collective worship.

However, there is a large question mark over the claim that because reported happiness doesn’t rise in line with GDP over time, growth in GDP doesn’t make people any happier. This is a big claim based on treating GDP, constructed data that can grow without limit over time, as having the same statistical character as surveys in which people rank their happiness on a scale of one to three. This scoring has an upper limit, reached when everyone scores a 3 (and countries such as the United States and United Kingdom are currently well above 2 on average). Expecting surveyed “happiness” to carry on growing on a par with GDP is like expecting people to get ever taller as the economy grows. There is an indirect link between the economy and average height, via nutrition; nobody would deny it exists just because we’re not yet twenty feet tall after two centuries of capitalism.

Actually, the links between growth and happiness are more direct than the links between height, or life expectancy, and growth. We tend to think of “growth” in an abstract way, but what it means in practice is access to an ever-increasing array of goods and services, and ever-greater command for each individual over how they want to lead their life. The “happiness” movement is dismissive of the freedom and scope for self-definition this implies. Do we really need the freedom to choose one more variety of designer jeans, asks Professor Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice.6 He argues that too much choice makes people unhappier. Chairman Mao too was against choice: he thought everyone in China should wear the same style of clothes. Having professors or bureaucrats decide what items we should be able to buy doesn’t seem like a prescription for a happy society. The increase in consumers’ well-being from the availability of new goods and more varieties over the years—from economic growth, in other words—has been enormous. That includes everything from new flavors of breakfast cereal to the variety of books and music available to us to enrich our lives or the introduction of new medicines improving health.7

So unfortunately just stopping the economy from growing isn’t an easy answer to the multiple economic challenges of our time. Downgrading the status of consumption might, perhaps, address the problems arising from great inequality and all the social tensions that brings, on the assumption that it’s “conspicuous consumption” that keeps people in the rat race or makes them incur debts they can’t afford in order to acquire consumer goods. There are clearly many people for whom the vision of a kinder, gentler economy, with less work, more leisure for family and friends and fulfilling nonwork activities, is hugely appealing. The recession has given the sharp edge of necessity to trends such as downshifting and handcrafting, but these strike an emotional chord as well. However, I suspect this appeal is very limited—indeed, that it’s a view most likely to be found among people who are pretty comfortably off; the pursuit of “happiness” through ostentatious abstemiousness is just as much of a lifestyle choice as “conspicuous consumption.” Retreat into an imaginary arcadia of precapitalist homesteading is not a sensible proposal, no matter how strong its emotional appeal.

So the need to keep the economy growing in order to improve the well-being of citizens makes addressing the challenges set out here all the harder. As I go on to explain, there will need to be more saving and