The Price of Everything (11 page)

Most psychologists and economists who study happiness agree that what they prefer to call “subjective well-being” comprises three parts: satisfaction, meant to capture how people judge their lives measured up against their aspirations; positive feelings like joy; and the absence of negative feelings like anger.

It does exist. It relates directly to objective measures of people’s quality of life. Countries whose citizens are happier on average report lower levels of hypertension in the population. Happier people are less likely to come down with a cold. And if they get one, they recover more quickly. People who are wounded heal more quickly if they are satisfied with their lives. People who say they are happier smile more often, sleep better, report themselves to be in better health, and have happier relatives. And some research suggests happiness and suicide rates move in opposite directions. Happy people don’t want to die.

Still, this conceptual mélange can be difficult to measure. Just ask yourself how happy you are, say, on a scale of one to three, as used by the General Social Survey. Then ask yourself what you mean by that. Answers wander when people are confronted with these questions. We entangle gut reactions with thoughtful analysis, and confound sensations of immediate pleasure with evaluations of how life meshes with our long-term aspirations. We might say we know what will make us happy in the future—fame, fortune, or maybe a partner. But when we get to the future, it rarely does. While we do seem to know how to tell the difference between lifelong satisfaction and immediate well-being, the immediate tends to contaminate the ontological.

During an experiment in the 1980s, people who found a dime on top of a Xerox machine before responding to a happiness survey reported a much higher sense of satisfaction with life than those who didn’t. Another study found that giving people a chocolate bar improved their satisfaction with their lives. One might expect that our satisfaction with the entire span of our existence would be a fairly stable quantity—impervious to day-to-day joys and frustrations. Yet people often give a substantially different answer to the same question about lifetime happiness if it is asked again one month later.

Sigmund Freud argued that people “strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.” Translating happiness into the language of economics as “utility,” most economists would agree. This simple proposition gives them a powerful tool to resist Bobby Kennedy’s proposal to measure not income but something else. For if happiness is what people strive for, one needn’t waste time trying to figure out what makes people happy. One must only look at what people do. The fact of the matter is that people mostly choose to work and make money. Under this optic, economic growth is the outcome of our pursuit of well-being. It is what makes us happy.

This approach has limitations. We often make puzzling choices that do not make us consistently happier. We smoke despite knowing about cancer and emphysema. We gorge on chocolate despite knowing it will make us unhappy ten pounds down the road. Almost two thirds of Americans say they are overweight, according to a recent Gallup poll. But only a quarter say they are seriously trying to lose weight. In the 1980s a new discipline called Prospect Theory—also known as behavioral economics—deployed the tools of psychology to analyze economic behavior. It found all sorts of peculiar behaviors that don’t fit economics’ standard understanding of what makes us happy. For instance, losing something reduces our happiness more than winning the same thing increases it—a quirk known as loss aversion. We are unable to distinguish between choices that have slightly different odds of making us happy. We extrapolate from a few experiences to arrive at broad, mostly wrong conclusions. We herd, imitating successful behaviors around us.

Still, it remains generally true that we pursue what we think makes us happy—and though some of our choices may not make us happy, some will. Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln was riding in a carriage one rainy evening, telling a friend that he agreed with economists’ theory that people strove to maximize their happiness, when he caught sight of a pig stuck in a muddy riverbank. He ordered the carriage to stop, got out, and pulled the pig out of the muck to safety. When the friend pointed out to a mud-caked Lincoln that he had just disproved his statement by putting himself through great discomfort to save a pig, Lincoln retorted: “What I did was perfectly consistent with my theory. If I hadn’t saved that pig I would have felt terrible.”

So perhaps the proper response to Bobby Kennedy’s angst is to agree that pursuing economic growth often has negative side effects—carbon emissions, environmental degradation—that are likely to make us unhappy down the road. Still, it remains true that American citizens—and the citizens of much of the world—expend enormous amounts of time and energy pursuing more money and a bigger GDP because they think it will improve their well-being. And that will make them happy.

Happiness doesn’t depend solely on money, of course. People who don’t have sex report being less happy than those who do. People are unhappier in areas with higher unemployment, more crime, higher inflation, and more sulfur-oxide pollution emitted by coal-fired power plants. Happier people are more likely to be married, less likely to divorce, and have more friends. Right-wingers are happier than left-wingers.

A survey by the Pew Research Center found that even as the Republican candidate John McCain headed for disaster in the presidential election of November 2008, 37 percent of Republicans rated themselves as “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats. A similar trend has held since 1972, when the General Social Survey started asking the question. This is true around the world. Apparently, it has to do with the left’s guilt. A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it.

But improve people’s economic outlook and chances are you will make them happier. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, former East Germans remained unhappier than their fellow citizens from the western side. They would have been even less satisfied were it not for the income boost following unification. East Germans’ satisfaction with life rose about 20 percent between 1991 and 2001. Much of that jump was due to the freedoms gained with the demise of their police state. But a 60 percent increase in household income also played a part.

The gross domestic product of the Russian Federation declined by a quarter between 1990 and 1995, as the Soviet Union fell apart. Unsurprisingly, Russians’ reported satisfaction with life dropped 17 percent. Analyzing the surge in male suicides following the dismemberment of the former USSR, researchers concluded that a $100 increase in per capita GDP lowered the suicide rate among Russian males by somewhere between 0.14 percent and 0.20 percent. Similarly, an increase of one percentage point in the share of the population who held a job reduced male suicides by about 3 percent.

Consider how unhappy you would feel if you had to live with nothing but dirt under your feet. In 2000 the government of the state of Coahuila in northern Mexico launched a program called Piso Firme, or Firm Floor, that offered people living in homes with dirt floors up to fifty square meters of concrete cement flooring, at a cost to the government of about 1,500 Mexican pesos—equivalent to about $150 at the time, one and a half months’ income. Families would be told in advance of the delivery date so they could prepare the rooms to be covered. Large trucks rolled through poor neighborhoods, pouring cement from house to house, leaving each family to smooth it down.

A few years after the cement was laid, researchers from the World Bank and two American universities deployed across the shanty-towns of Torreón, the state capital, armed with portable scales and medical testing paraphernalia to measure how it changed people’s lives. Dirt floors are a breeding ground for worms and several types of protozoa. Children catch parasites from them, suffer from diarrhea, and become malnourished. Anemia is common, as are developmental disabilities. The researchers weighed and measured the kids. They took stool samples. They pricked the kids’ fingers to check for anemia. And they subjected them to cognitive development tests. Parents were asked about how well babies recognized basic words for animals, household items, and the like. Older children were made to relate pictures to words. Then the researchers asked mothers about how satisfied they were with their lives.

To assess the impact of the new floors, they compared the health and well-being of families in Torreón with those in its twin city of Gómez Palacio, which is part of the same metropolitan area but happens to lie across the state line in neighboring Durango—where the program wasn’t available. The researchers found that paving floors led to a 78 percent drop in parasitic infestations among children. Diarrhea cases declined by half and the prevalence of anemia plummeted four fifths. Children in homes where cement had been laid got the answers right to the cognitive tests 30 percent to 100 percent more often than those still living on dirt. And the moms became much happier. Depression among mothers fell by half. And their stress levels fell. Mothers in homes with new cement floors reported a 69 percent increase in satisfaction with their life. This happiness cost about $150 per family. Unsurprisingly, the Mexican federal government expanded the program to the rest of the country.

 

 

MONEY IS MORE
abundant in industrialized countries. But even there it will add to happiness. The Eurobarometer surveys have been asking European Union citizens about the satisfaction with their lives for more than three decades. Among the richest 25 percent of the population, almost a third reported being “very satisfied,” according to a study in the late 1990s. Among the poorest 25 percent, only about 23 percent are equally pleased.

Results were similar in the United States. The General Social Survey, a set of polls taken since the early 1970s of Americans’ behaviors and beliefs, finds that more than 40 percent of Americans in the richest quarter of the population are very happy. But among the poorest quarter of Americans, only 25 percent are equally satisfied.

Money might not ensure happiness forever. But as Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, put it: “There’s no one single change you can imagine that would make your life improve on the happiness scale as much as to move from the bottom 5 percent on the income scale to the top 5 percent.”

New York’s Eleventh Congressional District, where I live, is of modest means—stretching from fairly poor areas like East Flatbush and Crown Heights to the fairly posh Park Slope. The typical family in the district earns $51,300 a year, according to the census, about $12,000 less than the national median. It is a grumpy place. In 2009, pollster Gallup, the health-care consultancy Healthway, and America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry lobby group, released a district-by-district index of well-being based on surveys of people’s satisfaction with life, work, and health. My district came out in 421st place in the nation, fifteen rungs from the bottom.

The happiest congressional district in the country is about as far from New York’s eleventh as one can get without leaving the contiguous United States. California’s fourteenth district hugs the Pacific between San Francisco and San Jose, encompassing much of the high-tech corridor of Silicon Valley. It has lovely scenery, and certainly better weather than Brooklyn. It also has a median family income of $116,600 a year.

There is a limit to the link between money and happiness. It derives from one of the most distinctive human traits: our capacity to adapt. People bounce back from bereavement. A British study found that while people who became disabled reported a big drop in happiness, many recovered much of the lost happiness within a year or two. A study of marriage and happiness in Germany found that German widows recover from the blow of their husband’s death within two years.