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exist. Rich people are happier than poor people; rich countries have happier people than poor countries; and people get happier as they get richer. The earlier study simply had samples too small to find significant differences. In all three categories of comparison – within countries, between countries and between times – extra income does indeed buy general well-being. That is to say, on average, across the board, on the whole, other things being equal, more money does make you happier. In the words of one of the studies, ‘All told, our time-series comparisons, as well as evidence from repeated international cross-sections, appear to point to an important relationship between economic growth and growth in subjective well-being’.

There are some exceptions. Americans currently show no trend towards increasing happiness. Is this because the rich had got richer but ordinary Americans had not prospered much in recent years? Or because America continually draws in poor (unhappy) immigrants, which keeps the happiness quotient low? Who knows? It was not because the Americans are too rich to get any happier: Japanese and Europeans grew steadily happier as they grew richer despite being often just as rich as Americans. Moreover, surprisingly, American women have become less happy in recent decades despite getting richer.

Of course, it is possible to be rich and unhappy, as many a celebrity gloriously reminds us. Of course, it is possible to get rich and find that you are unhappy not to be richer still, if only because the neighbour – or the people on television – are richer than you are. Economists call this the ‘hedonic treadmill’; the rest of us call it ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. And it is probably true that the rich do lots of unnecessary damage to the planet as they go on striving to get richer long after the point where it is having much effect on their happiness – they are after all endowed with instincts for ‘rivalrous competition’ descended from hunter-gatherers whose relative, not absolute, status determined their sexual rewards. For this reason a tax on consumption to encourage saving for investment instead is not necessarily a bad idea. However, this does not mean that anybody would be necessarily happier if poorer – to be well off and unhappy is surely better than to be poor and unhappy. Of course, some people will be unhappy however rich they are, while others manage to bounce back cheerful even in poverty: psychologists find people to have fairly constant levels of happiness to which they return after elation or disaster. Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

Getting richer is not the only or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality and so on. It is the increase in free choice since 1981 that has been responsible for the increase in happiness recorded since then in forty-five out of fifty-two countries. Ruut Veenhoven finds that ‘the more individualized the nation, the more citizens enjoy their life.’

Crunch

And yet, good as life is, today life is not good. Happy statistics of recent improvement sound as hollow to a laid-off car worker in Detroit or an evicted house owner in Reykjavik as they would to a cholera victim in Zimbabwe or a genocide refugee in Congo. War, disease, corruption and hate still disfigure the lives of millions; nuclear terrorism, rising sea levels and pandemic flu may yet make the twenty-first century a dreadful place. True, but assuming the worst will not avert these fates; striving to continue improving the human lot may. It is precisely because so much human betterment has been shown to be possible in recent centuries that the continuing imperfection of the