HONOR FRASER
GOES BACK TO NATURE
IN JOHN GALLIANO Peter Jacob
IF
IT MAKES YOU
happy
The economics of happiness, and why we could all use a little more green in our lives
Plenty asked seven international photographers to share their visions of happiness. The diverse images—depicting wide open spaces and cityscapes, solitude and community—reveal what’s really worth our investment.
By Justin Tyler Clark
Here’s
a math puzzle worth pondering: if the U.S. economy has tripled since World
War II, how much happier are Americans for their material gains?
The answer may have you reaching for your Prozac. In 1957, 35 percent
of Americans ranked themselves as happy. In 2002 the number had dropped
to 30 percent. Even more astonishingly, the same international surveys
show that the Forbes 400 richest Americans are only slightly happier than
the Inuit of Greenland or the Masai tribe of Kenya, which lives in dung
huts without electricity or running water.
So does this mean that money can’t buy happiness? Not necessarily,
according to researchers in the boom field of happiness studies; it’s
just that Americans are buying the wrong stuff. “We put too much
into pursuing money at the expense of nonpecuniary dimensions of life,”
says University of Southern California economist Richard Easterlin, who
decades ago pointed out the discrepancy between economic and happiness
growth (a phenomenon now known in econo-speak as the Easterlin Paradox).
Instead of amassing Benjamins in our pockets and bonds in our portfolios,
we should be spending our money on what will actually make us happier:
“health and families and the environment,” Easterlin says.
As intangible as happiness is, its level as measured on surveys correlates
astonishingly well with a person’s likelihood to socialize with
friends, suffer from psychosomatic illnesses, or attempt suicide. The
survey data are also consistent with MRI data collected by neuroeconomists
(scientists who study the relationship between brain activity and economic
decision-making). Though looking at brain scans might be considered strange
for economists, promoting happiness makes sound economic sense. Longitudinal
studies show that happy people are more likely to become wealthy (and
not simply the reverse), while depression costs the United States an estimated
$83.1 billion annually in health care and lost productivity.
Unfortunately,
the upwardly mobile aren’t offsetting the happiness deficit. Getting
richer and consuming luxury commodities produces only an ephemeral spike
in life satisfaction, explains Cornell University economist Robert Frank,
author of Luxury Fever (Princeton University Press, 2000). “The
literature very clearly tells us that when everyone builds a bigger mansion,
it just shifts the definition of what people need,” he says.
Frank’s thesis is consistent with psychological research showing
that people routinely make “affective forecasting errors”—that
is, they overestimate how much happiness a salary raise or a new car will
bring them. One famous study from the 1970s showed that the happiness
levels of new lottery winners and people who had been recently paralyzed
were equal after one year. Even having lots of options doesn’t make
people as happy as you might expect: a 2000 study showed that consumers
given a choice of 30 brands of jam were less likely to buy any than shoppers
given only 6 types.
That isn’t to praise dire poverty or Communist states with only
a single brand of jam on the market. University of Chicago psychologist
Ed Diener has found that Detroit’s street prostitutes and the homeless
of Calcutta consider themselves some of the least happy people on the
planet. Yet unlike their homeless neighbors, Calcutta’s slum-dwellers
are one of the happiest groups on Diener’s list. Apparently, owning
any sort of shelter makes all the difference.
So what will make the difference for the rest of us? The newest cell phone?
A digital VCR? While a rise in per capita income increases life satisfaction
in developing countries, says Frank, societies whose median income exceeds
$15,000 face a diminishing return of happiness. In the developed world,
the reported emotional utility of an extra $1,000 in annual income shrinks
rapidly, which may explain why Bill Gates isn’t constantly having
an orgasm. (Speaking of orgasms, one recent study showed that an increase
in having sex to once a week from once a month produces an equivalent
amount of happiness as a salary raise of $50,000.) continured...
