Who's Happy?

The economic realignment of the last year has been an opportunity for many of us to re-examine some key aspects of how we live. Specifically, the question of living with less — less money and fewer things, or at least, less acquiring of things. I'm old enough to remember a time a few decades ago when most people got by with many fewer things. Was I less happy then? Was I happier in the last few years when I did indeed have more things? I've done enough travelling, seen enough of other cultures, to know that people find happiness in all kinds of situations.

This discussion has had even more relevance the past week as we've seen the pictures and heard the descriptions of the scenes in Port au Prince. There is no doubt that happiness is rare in that city right now, but what are the prospects for the future? After all, much of the conversation has been about how poor and miserable life in Haiti has been for most of its history. So what should Haiti's future look like in the future? If we're doing a reboot of the society, how do we write the new program?

Just for argument's sake, let's say we set "happiness" as one of our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), using France as an example of a country that has done just that. The first issue is how to define happiness. The French, working with Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, define it as "people’s well-being and the sustainability of a country’s economy and natural resources." For France, it's about making measurements of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) reflect not just money changing hands, but the value of the outcomes to the commonwealth. It's also about closing their GDP gap vs. the US (where every oil spill or auto accident boosts GPD).

But there are other ways to measure happiness. In fact, an organization called the World Values Society (WVS) has been looking at this issue and compiling data going back to the 1947 (the data referred to below can be found at the WVS website) . They have developed a continuum of Survival-WellBeing (SWB) as one way to measure basic contentment: "Is my life about staying alive or about getting the most out of what's available to me?" Where you fall on that continuum is where you say it is, your perception. The wealth metric is an entirely different issue, the other axis in a graph. 

When GDP-per-capita is graphed against SWB it turns out GDP has little correlation to a sense of well-being. For example, Colombia and Albania have very similar GDP-per-capita, but are virtually on opposite ends of the SWB scale. Colombia and Mexico also rank higher in WellBeing than the USA, at the opposite end of the GDP scale. At the same time, almost all the low scoring SWB nations are also low in GDP. And the high GDP correlates with higher SWB scores. So, greater wealth does bring greater security, but happiness exists across the spectrum of income.

WSV has validated nine key variables that it tracks: subjective well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, GPD per capita, level of democracy, strength of religiosity, level of national pride, tolerance of outgroups, and sense of free choice. From these they compile profiles describing Subjective Well-being, Happiness, or Life satisfaction. For my purposes, I'll lump these profiles together as "satisfaction."

Of those indicators, the one most strongly identified with Satisfaction turns out to be the sense of free choice, specifically in terms of the general sense of freedom in the society. That sense of freedom is also connected to a general sense of tolerance. All in all, as the sense of personal control rises, so does satisfaction.

There is one other factor that seems to matter — the sense of community, or connection. That seems to me to be one key explanation why poorer countries like Mexico or Columbia rate so highly in the WellBeing. Sense of community, when it reinforces ethnic or religious stereotypes may also link to the kind of pride that is less tolerant of “others.” Nonetheless, a culture that combines inclusiveness with connection would be on the road to a new level of satisfaction, and perhaps even “happiness.”

A model for this might be cultures like Sweden or Denmark, which rate higher in WellBeing than the US, or France or Germany for that matter, even though GDP-per-capita is somewhat lower. Those Scandinavian cultures also seem to me to have embraced one other key factor that I think is key to civil happiness: fairness, especially in social areas like income disparities, access to health care and education, and so on.

The current economic reshuffling may give us an opportunity, individually or as a society, to reconsider how we proceed from here. The primary obstacle I see to a more sane, let alone happy, commonwealth is the rising oligarchy in the US, and the growing gulf between the few winners at the corporate/financial casino and the rest of us. Fairness has been overwhelmed by enlightened self-interest and the fiction of efficient markets, at least at this time, in this place.

The larger American culture is deeply entwined in its own stunted mythology: rugged individualism battling with social entanglement, protestant certainty at war with cosmopolitan questioning, I opposed to Thou. If we are to forge our own conditions of wellbeing-as-happiness we will have to do it on some smaller, more personal scale, in the nooks and crannies of the larger society. We will tend our oranges and make our own worlds the best they can possibly be, in this world of infinite personal possibilities.