The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [30]
There is a problem with the enthusiasm for replacing GDP with a measure of happiness. Who gets to define what makes people happy? Would it be the very same governments that would benefit if the indicator found a happy citizenry? For instance, media reports from Bhutan suggest the Bhutanese have lost interest in Langthab and other traditional sports. They are nonetheless included among the fonts of happiness. Bhutan is a fairly authoritarian nation. The government banned television until 1999. In 1989 it made it mandatory for all Bhutanese to speak Dzongkha in public places. In 1985, it passed a new citizenship law that redefined ethnic Nepalese in southern Bhutan who couldn’t prove they had arrived by 1958 as nonnationals, and subsequently expelled about 100,000 of them. It has nice things, like 72 percent forest cover and few tourists. But it also has a lot of female infanticide and feticide and a lopsided sex ratio of 89.2 females per 100 males. More democratic regimes might have problems defining the attributes of happiness. While Bhutan may be a happy nation, this probably has less to do with the many dimensions of their index than with their material wealth. In 1980, Bhutan’s GDP per person was 10 percent higher than India’s. Today it is 75 percent higher. In 2009, as the rest of the world slumped, Bhutan grew 6.9 percent. In 2008 the Bhutanese economy grew by a fifth. Like other countries around the world, it has grown happier as it has grown richer.
The World Values Survey, a set of polls performed around the world over the past twenty years, found that the happiest country in the world is rich Denmark. The least happy is poor Zimbabwe. The 2006 Gallup World Poll asked adults in 132 countries to rank their satisfaction with life on a scale of zero to ten. The citizens of Togo, whose gross domestic product per person is only $832, ranked their satisfaction at just above three. Americans, fifty-five times as rich, put their happiness at seven.
WHAT HAPPINESS IS
Happiness is a slippery concept, a bundle of meanings with no precise, stable definition. Lots of thinkers have taken a shot at it. “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony,” proposed Gandhi. Abraham Lincoln argued “most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Snoopy, the beagle-philosopher in Peanuts, took what was to my mind the most precise stab at the underlying epistemological problem. “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?”
Most psychologists and economists who study happiness agree that what they prefer to call “subjective well-being” comprises three parts: satisfaction, meant to capture how people judge their lives measured up against their aspirations; positive feelings like joy; and the absence of negative feelings like anger.
It does exist. It relates directly to objective measures of people’s quality of life. Countries whose citizens are happier on average report lower levels of hypertension in the population. Happier people are less likely to come down with a cold. And if they get one, they recover more quickly. People who are wounded heal more quickly if they are satisfied with their lives. People who say they are happier smile more often, sleep better, report themselves to be in better health, and have happier relatives. And some research suggests happiness and suicide rates move in opposite directions. Happy people don’t want to die.
Still, this conceptual mélange can be difficult to measure. Just ask yourself how happy you are, say, on a scale of one to three, as used by the General Social Survey. Then ask yourself what you mean by that. Answers wander when people are confronted with these questions. We entangle gut reactions with thoughtful analysis, and confound sensations of immediate pleasure with evaluations of how life meshes with our long-term aspirations. We might say we know what will