According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, Utah is the happiest state in the nation (I'm looking at you, Mormons) and West Virginia is the least happy (I blame the ham). The index also measured six subcategories: life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment and basic access (whatever that means). What does wealth have to do with it? Take a look at this scatter plot showing the relationship between a state’s median household income and its well-being:
Seems...scattered, doesn't it? As usual, there is a correlation...
Mr. Thinley will continue to implement the government policy of GNH. Happiness is not hedonistic, "it is not the kind of fleeting pleasures that we seek." It has to do with "being able to balance material needs of the body and the spiritual needs of the mind."
He says the conditions for the pursuit of happiness have four pillars: Equitable and sustainable socioeconomic growth; conservation of the fragile Himalayan economy and environment; cultural preservation and promotion -- and good governance.
Interesting read, but I wonder if the four pillars make people happy, or if Mr. Thinley has decided the four pillars are good and should make Bhutan happy. I suspect, for instance, that sustainable growth has a negligible effect on the current happiness of the Bhutanese because of the availability heuristic: almost nobody is drastically, directly or immediately effected by the consequences of unsustainable development. I also suspect that conservation has a negligible effect on the subjective well-being of the Bhutanese because of adaptation effects: people tend to adapt to bad conditions (such as smog) if they increase gradually, over a long period of time. I doubt the four pillars are the result of rigorous empirical testing, but I imagine you could link them all to subjective well-being in a roundabout way.
I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.
1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers. The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotionduring social decision-making."
3) Often, when we think about egalitarianism or distributive justice, we think about the distribution of goods, rights or opportunities. In a recent paper, "Happiness Inequality in the United States," Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discuss...happiness inequality. According to Wolfers, "there is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s" even though there have been "large increases in income and consumption inequality."
You can read the trilogy of articles on the topic, here. You can also read a brief summary of these findings, here.
4) Check out this tantalizing tidbit about the well known benefits of smiling.
6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry.
7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."
Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...
This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."
8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."
9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."
10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.
11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.
According to the World Values Survey, overall, the world is getting happier. More people are happier today than was the case 25 years ago; the survey found increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries analyzed. As usual, Denmark, Columbia and Puerto Rico top the charts. The United States maintains about the same relative position (19 out of 96) as it did in the 2000 survey. Countries whose respondents reported high levels of happiness were much likelier to be democracies than were countries that rank lower in terms of their citizens' happiness. Apparently, there is a strong correlation between happiness, economic development (this is distinct from wealth, y'all) and democracy!
The hustle and bustle of activity that has occured since my haitus is a bit overwhelming, but I am going to do my best to cover it here:
1) Peter Clough (University of Hull), in collaboration with AQR, has shown it is possible to teach kids to be tough (which they claim you can measure using the MTQ48) and that doing so has the beneficial effects you would expect, given other research on the benefits of resilience.
2) Research on hedonic adaptation has shown that “Within a few years, paraplegics wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed.” Recently, researchers have shown that, ironically, functionally impaired patients with diseases such as amytrophic lateral sclerosis might be depressed (and, consequently, decline life sustaining treatment) because they don't realize that having the disease won't nessecarily compromise subjective quality of life (if they accept life sustaining treatment). It was also shown that, unsurprisingly, educated patients adapt to the illness better, from a hedonic point of view (this might be surprising if you buy into the myth of the melancholic genius).
3) Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have shown that having strong family ties is a much bigger predictor of contentment than income. This research seems to support the jist of the Easterlin Paradox: money matters up to a point (when basic needs are met), then, other things matter more. In the words of Rebecca J. North, one of the researchers,"Our findings underscore the importance of additional policy indicators that can tap the well-being of individuals and families at the psychosocial level to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a nation's well-being." As I have argued in other places, researchers often forget that money is extrinsically valuable. If it has any influence on subjective well-being, it is probably because of how it is used.
4) It has previously been shown old people are as happy as young people. This is puzzling, in part, because old people spend more time alone, which has been shown to cause (and be caused by) depression. In the current issue of Psychology and Ageing, Bill Von Hipple has shown that "older people are just as satisfied with their social lives because they seem to get much more from the few interactions they have." In other words, the old aren't lonely because the elderly simply adapt, hedonically, to being less social than they used to be.
The authors don't address the truly puzzling cases that troubled Easterlin: why, for example, are Venezuelans happier than Americans? Why, exactly, are extremely wealthy nations (such as Japan) as happy or slightly happier than poor nations (such as Jamaica)?
As far as I'm concerned, this chart reveals the gross hedonic inefficiency of wealthy nations (and, conversely, the hedonic ingenuity of less wealthy nations). Remember, money is extrinsically valuable, and this data provides us with reasons to reconsider the way we use it.
Social Networks