new science of happiness has blossomed. Observing that wealth has not made people happier, some economists have proposed that Western nations should focus on happiness rather than growth. Psychologists, too, have offered formulas for well-being. Jonathan Haidt's ideas about the sources of happiness, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of ‘flow' and Richard Easterlin's famous paradox (that even though at a given point of time greater income correlates with greater happiness, it does not follow that over time as a society gets richer its people get happier), have offered real insights. More often, we get truisms presented as great scientific discoveries. How can we separate the hype from the wisdom?
Skepticism is evidently in order when Forbes magazine runs an article entitled “The Secret of Happiness Revealed by Harvard Study” (May 27, 2015) and The New York Times declares that social scientists have at last arrived at “a few simple rules” to make ourselves and others happy (“A Formula for Happiness,” December 14, 2013). Do we really understand what happiness is? Should we assume that life is about attaining as much happiness as possible?
Some social scientists have proposed that instead of GDP, we should calculate a country's Gross National Happiness (GNH). Sure enough, since 2012, the United Nations World Happiness Report has ranked countries' happiness mathematically. It is nice to know that someone can scientifically determine how happy a person (or nation) is. In the 2018 UN report, Finland scores highest with a score of 7.632. I like that third decimal point.
To assign numbers as the UN does, one must assume that happiness is a single thing measurable by a single gauge. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, took it for granted that “utility”—his preferred term—was all of a piece. “By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing).” Whatever you call it, you can measure it—Bentham suggested a “felicific calculus”—and compare it with similar measurements taken elsewhere.
The UN report lists five factors contributing to a country's happiness, including “perceptions of corruption” and “social support.” Why not “perceptions of social support”? As demagogues know, it is a lot easier to create perceptions than reality. Not surprisingly, the European countries ranking worst on “perceptions of corruption” were all former Soviet republics or satellites. Compare Belgium's 0.24 with Russia's 0.025. That makes Russia 10 times as corrupt as Belgium, which sounds like an underestimate. Sometimes data on happiness is gathered by asking people to rate their happiness on a numerical scale, so perhaps perceptions of Russian corruption were evaluated this way? Such inquiries raise a nice question: can one trust self-reported data about corruption? Wouldn't one first need an “honesty in reporting index” and adjust all self-reporting accordingly?
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