Among these intrinsic goods is freedom or autonomy: the availability of options to lead a good life (positive freedom) and the absence of coercion that prevents a person from choosing among them (negative freedom). Sen gave a shout-out to this value in the title of his book on the ultimate goal of the development of nations: Development as Freedom. Positive freedom is related to the economist’s notion of utility (what people want; what they spend their wealth on), and negative freedom to the political scientist’s notions of democracy and human rights. As I mentioned, freedom (together with life and reason) is a prerequisite to the very act of evaluating what is good in life. Unless we are impotently lamenting or celebrating our fate, then whenever we assess our condition we are presupposing that people in the past could have chosen otherwise. And when we ask where we should be heading, we presuppose that we have choices about what to pursue. For these reasons, freedom itself is inherently worthy.
In theory, freedom is independent of happiness. People can surrender to fatal attractions, crave pleasures that are bad for them, regret a choice the morning after, or ignore advice to be careful what they wish for.9 In practice, freedom and the other good things in life go together. Whether assessed objectively through a democracy index for a country as a whole, or subjectively through people’s ratings of whether they feel they have “free choice and control over their lives,” the level of happiness in a country is correlated with the level of freedom.10 Also, people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.11 Like Frank Sinatra, they may have regrets, they may take blows, but they do it their way. People can even value autonomy over happiness: many who have gone through a painful divorce, for example, would still not choose to return to a time when their parents would have arranged their marriages.
What about happiness itself? How can a scientist measure something as subjective as subjective well-being? The best way to find out how happy people are is to ask them. Who could be a better judge? An old Saturday Night Live skit has Gilda Radner in a postcoital conversation with a nervous lover (played by Chevy Chase) who is worried she didn’t have an orgasm, and she consoles him by saying, “Sometimes I do and I don’t even know it.” We laugh because when it comes to subjective experience, the experiencer herself is the ultimate authority. But we don’t have to take people’s word for it: self-reports of well-being turn out to correlate with everything else we think of as indicating happiness, including smiles, a buoyant demeanor, activity in the parts of the brain that respond to cute babies, and, Gilda and Chevy notwithstanding, judgments by other people.12
Happiness has two sides, an experiential or emotional side, and an evaluative or cognitive side.13 The experiential component consists of a balance between positive emotions like elation, joy, pride, and delight, and negative emotions like worry, anger, and sadness. Scientists can sample these experiences in real time by having people wear a beeper that goes off at random times and prompts them to indicate how they are feeling. The ultimate measure of happiness would consist of a lifetime integral or weighted sum of how happy people are feeling and how long they feel that way. Though experience sampling is the most direct way of assessing subjective well-being, it’s laborious and expensive, and there are no good datasets that compare people in different countries or track them over the years. The next best thing is to ask people how they are feeling at the time, or how they remember having felt during the day or week before.
This brings us to the other side of well-being, people’s evaluations of how they are living their lives. People can be asked to reflect on how satisfied they feel “these days” or “as a whole” or “taking all things together,” or to render the almost philosophical judgment of where they stand on a ten-rung ladder ranging from “the worst possible life for you” to “the best possible life for you.” People find these questions hard (not surprisingly, since they are hard), and their responses may be warped by the weather, their current mood, and what they were asked about immediately beforehand (with questions to college students about their dating life, or to anyone about politics, having a reliably depressive effect). Social scientists have become resigned to the fact that happiness, satisfaction, and best-versus-worst-possible life are blurred in people’s minds and that it’s often easiest just to average them together.14
Emotions and evaluations are, of course, related, though imperfectly: an abundance of happiness makes for a better life, but an absence of worry and sadness does not.15 And this brings us to the final dimension of a good life, meaning and purpose. This is the quality that, together with happiness, goes into Aristotle’s ideal of eudaemonia or “good spirit.”16 Happiness isn’t everything. We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.
Though no mortal can stipulate what really makes a life meaningful, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues probed for what makes people feel their lives are meaningful. The respondents separately rated how happy and how meaningful their lives were, and they answered a long list of questions about their thoughts, activities, and circumstances. The results suggest that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful, such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored. But other things can make lives happier while leaving them no more meaningful or even less so.
People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied: they are healthy, have enough money, and feel good a lot of the time. People who lead meaningful lives may enjoy none of these boons. Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that people with meaningful lives masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.
We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness: when we are unhappy, we scramble for things that would improve our lot; when we are happy, we cherish the status quo. Meaning, in contrast, registers the novel and expansive goals that are opened up for us as social, brainy, and talkative occupants of the uniquely human cognitive niche. We consider goals that are rooted in the distant past and stretch far into the future, that affect people beyond our circle of acquaintance, and that must be ratified by our fellows, based on our ability to persuade them of their worth and on our reputation for benevolence and efficacy.17
An implication of the circumscribed role of happiness in human psychology is that the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric. But there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become.
* * *
Let’s agree that the citizens of developed countries are not as happy as they ought to be, given the fantastic progress in their fortunes and freedom. But are they not happier at all? Have their lives become so empty that they are choosing to end them in record numbers? Are they suffering through an epidemic of loneliness, in defiance of the mind-boggling number of opportunities to connect with one another? Is the younger
generation, ominously for our future, crippled by depression and mental illness? As we shall see, the answer to each of these questions is an emphatic no.
Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ. Eighty-six percent of those who are asked about their happiness in the World Values Survey say they are “rather happy” or “very happy,” and on average the respondents in the 150-country World Happiness Report 2016 judged their lives to be on the top half of the ladder from worst to best.18 Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.19
What about the historical trajectory? Easterlin identified his intriguing paradox in 1973, decades before the era of big data. Today we have much more evidence on wealth and happiness, and it shows there is no Easterlin paradox. Not only are richer people in a given country happier, but people in richer countries are happier, and as countries get richer over time, their people get happier. The new understanding has come from several independent analyses, including ones by Angus Deaton, the World Values Survey, and the World Happiness Report 2016.20 My favorite comes from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and may be summarized in a graph. Figure 18-1 plots ratings of average life satisfaction against average income (on a logarithmic scale) for 131 countries, each represented by a dot, together with the relationship of life satisfaction to income among the citizens of each country, represented by an arrow impaling the dot.
Figure 18-1: Life satisfaction and income, 2006
Source: Stevenson & Wolfers 2008a, fig. 11, based on data from the Gallup World Poll 2006. Credit: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.
Several patterns jump out. The most immediate is the absence of a cross-national Easterlin paradox: the cloud of arrows is stretched along a diagonal, which indicates that the richer the country, the happier its people. Bear in mind that the income scale is logarithmic; on a standard linear scale, the same cloud would rise steeply from the left end and bend over toward the right. This means that a given number of extra dollars boosts the happiness of people in a poor country more than the happiness of people in a rich country, and that the richer a country is, the more additional money its people need to become happier still. (It’s one of the reasons that the Easterlin paradox appeared in the first place: with the noisier data of the era, it was hard to spot the relatively small rise in happiness at the high end of the income scale.) But with either scale, the line never flattens out, as it would if people needed only some minimum amount of income to see to their basic needs and anything extra made them no happier. As far as happiness is concerned, Wallis Simpson was half-right when she said, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.”
Most strikingly, the slopes of the arrows are similar to each other, and identical to the slope for the swarm of arrows as a whole (the dashed gray line lurking behind the swarm). That means that a raise for an individual relative to that person’s compatriots adds as much to his or her happiness as the same increase for their country across the board. This casts doubt on the idea that people are happy or unhappy only in comparison to the Joneses. Absolute income, not relative income, is what matters most for happiness (a conclusion that’s consistent with the finding discussed in chapter 9 on the irrelevance of inequality to happiness).21 These are among a number of findings that weaken the old belief that happiness adapts to ambient conditions like the eye, returns to a set point, or remains stationary as people vainly stride on a hedonic treadmill. Though people often do rebound from setbacks and pocket their good fortune, their happiness takes a sustained hit from trials like unemployment or disability, and a sustained boost from gifts like a good marriage or immigrating to a happier country.22 And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.23
Since we know that countries get richer over time (chapter 8), we can think of figure 18-1 as a freeze-frame in a movie showing humanity getting happier over time. This increase in happiness is yet another indicator of human progress, and among the most important of all. Of course this snapshot is not an actual longitudinal chronicle in which people all over the world are polled for centuries and we plot their happiness over time; such data do not exist. But Stevenson and Wolfers scoured the literature for what longitudinal studies there were, and found that in eight out of nine European countries, happiness increased between 1973 and 2009 in tandem with the country’s rise in GDP per capita.24 A confirmation for the world as a whole comes from the World Values Survey, which found that in forty-five out of fifty-two countries, happiness increased between 1981 and 2007.25 The trends over time close the books on the Easterlin paradox: we now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time).
Happiness, of course, depends on much more than income. This is true not just among individuals, who differ in their life histories and their innate temperaments, but among nations, as we see from the scatter of dots around the gray line in the graph. Nations are happier when their people are in better health (holding income constant), and, as I mentioned, they are happier when their citizens feel they are free to choose what to do with their lives.26 Culture and geography also matter: true to stereotype, Latin American countries are happier than they should be given their income, and the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe are less happy.27 The World Happiness Report 2016 found three other traits that go with national happiness: social support (whether people say they have friends or relatives they can count on in times of trouble), generosity (whether they donate money to charity), and corruption (whether they perceive the businesses in their country as corrupt).28 We cannot conclude, though, that these traits cause greater happiness. One reason is that happy people see the world through rose-tinted glasses, and may give generous assessments of the good things both in their lives and in their societies. The other is that happiness is, as social scientists say, endogenous: being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.
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Among the countries that punch below their wealth in happiness is the United States. Americans are by no means unhappy: almost 90 percent rate themselves as at least “pretty happy,” almost a third rate themselves as “very happy,” and when they are asked to place themselves on the ten-rung ladder from the worst to the best possible life, they choose the seventh rung.29 But in 2015 the United States came in at thirteenth place among the world’s nations (trailing eight countries in Western Europe, three in the Commonwealth, and Israel), even though it had a higher average income than all of them but Norway and Switzerland.30 (The United Kingdom, whose citizens place themselves at a happy 6.7 rungs up from the worst possible life, came in at twenty-third place.)
Also, the United States hasn’t gotten systematically happier over the years (another decoy that led to the premature announcement of the Easterlin paradox, because the United States is also the country with happiness data that stretch back the farthest). American happiness has fluctuated within a narrow band since 1947, deflecting in response to various recessions, recoveries, malaises, and bubbles, but with no consistent rise or fall. One dataset shows a slight decline in American happiness from 1955 to 1980, followed by a rise through 2006; another shows a slight decline in the proportion saying they are “very happy” starting in 1972 (though even there the sum of those who say they are “very happy” and “pretty happy” has not changed).31
The American happiness stagnation doesn’t falsify the
global trend in which happiness increases with wealth, because when we look at changes in a rich country over a few decades we’re peeping at a restricted range of the scale. As Deaton points out, a trend that is obvious when you look at the effects of a fiftyfold difference in income between, say, Togo and the United States, representing a quarter-millennium of economic growth, may be submerged in the noise when you look for the effects of, say, a twofold difference in income within a single country over just twenty years of economic growth.32 Also, the United States has seen a greater rise in income inequality than the countries of Western Europe (chapter 9), and its growth in GDP may have been enjoyed by a smaller proportion of the populace.33 Speculating about American exceptionalism is an endlessly fascinating pastime, but whatever the reason, happyologists agree that the United States is an outlier from the global trend in subjective well-being.34
Another reason it can be hard to make sense of happiness trends for individual countries is that a country is a collection of tens of millions of human beings who just happen to occupy a patch of land. It’s remarkable that we can find anything in common when we average them, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find that as time passes, different segments of the population go in different directions, sometimes jerking the average around, sometimes canceling each other out. Over the past thirty-five years African Americans have been getting much happier while American whites have gotten a bit less happy.35 Women tend to be happier than men, but in Western countries the gap has shrunk, with men getting happier at a faster rate than women. In the United States it has reversed outright, as women got unhappier while men stayed more or less the same.36
The biggest complication in making sense of historical trends, though, is one that we came across in chapter 15: the distinction between changes across the life cycle (age), in the zeitgeist (period), and over the generations (cohort).37 Without a time machine, it’s logically impossible to disentangle the effects of age, cohort, and period completely, to say nothing of their interactions. If, for example, fifty-year-olds were miserable in 2005, we couldn’t tell whether the Baby Boomers had a hard time dealing with middle age, the Baby Boomers had a hard time dealing with the new millennium, or the new millennium was a hard time to be middle-aged. But with a dataset that embraces multiple generations and decades, together with a few assumptions about how quickly people and times can change, one can average the scores for a generation over the years, for the entire population at each year, and for the population at each age, and make reasonably independent estimates of the trajectory of the three factors over time. That in turn allows us to look for two different versions of progress: people of all ages can become better off in recent periods, or younger cohorts can be better off than older ones, lifting the population as they replace them.