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We know enough now to see which social philosophies will increase happiness and which will reduce it. Here are some of the main things that we know and their implications - twelve truths about happiness:

1. Happiness is an objective dimension of all our experience. And it can be measured. We can ask people how they feel. We can ask their friends or observers for an independent assessment. Also, remarkably, we can now take measurements of the electrical activity in the relevant parts of a person's brain. All of these different measurements give consistent answers about a person's happiness. With them we can trace the ups and downs of some-one's experience, and we can also compare the happiness of different people. The measurements are still quite crude but improving rapidly.

So happiness is a real, objective phenomenon. Moreover, good feelings drive out bad feelings and vice versa, so that happiness is a single dimension of all our waking experience, running from the utmost pain and misery at one extreme to sublime joy and contentment at the other.

2. We are programmed to seek happiness. One source of happiness often conflicts with another, and we choose our sources according to their comparative costs and how they benefit our happiness. Generally, what makes us happy is good for us, and has therefore helped to perpetuate the species. This applies not only to our love of food and sex, but also to our instinctive capacity for cooperation: most, but not all, “integrity behavior” makes a person feel better. If we are programmed to seek happiness, it is no wonder that happiness is so central an issue in our lives.

3. It is thus self-evident that the best society is the happiest. This means that public policy should be judged by how it increases human happiness and reduces human misery. Likewise, private behavior should aim at producing the greatest overall happiness.

Many arguments have been brought against this philosophy, but none of them stand up. Indeed, many of them vanish in the light of our new psychological knowledge. And no one has proposed any other "ultimate" principle that could arbitrate when one moral rule (like truth-telling) conflicts with another (like kindness).

4. Our society is not likely to become happier unless people agree that this is what we want to happen. Hence the greatest happiness ideal has two functions. It can help us think dispassionately about how to organize society. And it can also inspire us with a passionate commitment to the common good. Modern society desperately needs a concept of the common good around which to unite the efforts of its members. Here is the right concept. We want to increase the general happiness and we commit ourselves to that end. No individual will ever com­pletely reach that ideal. But if we acknowledge the ideal, we are likely to live closer to it.

5. Humans are deeply social beings. Most people prefer to be in company most of the time. Friendship and marriage make people happier. Unemployment causes misery that goes far be­yond the effect of losing income, because it breaks a social tie. In fact to a large extent our social ties define our personal identity and give meaning to our life. So it is a deep fallacy of many economists to think of human interaction as mainly a means to an end, rather than also an end in itself. This applies also to the political process. Many economists complain that people care about processes and not simply about "outcomes." But if people are like that, who are we to say they should be different?

6. As social beings, we want to trust each other. The average happiness in one country compared with another can be largely ex­plained by six key factors (and so can the suicide rate). These are: the proportion of people who say that other people can be trusted; the proportion who belong to social organisations; the divorce rate; the unemployment rate; the quality of government; and religious belief. Unhappily, over the last forty years levels of trust have fallen drastically in Britain and America, though not in continental Europe. In the United States and Britain today the percentage of adults who think that most people can be trusted is half that of the 1950s. Policies that encourage trust are thus extremely important. These include moral education in schools, and policies to build stable families, communities and work-places.

We do not want high turnover in jobs, in housing or in mar­riages, except where clear advantages outweigh the human and other costs. Nor do we want our firms and public services to be repeatedly restructured, with massive loss of trust at every stage. Unfortunately, political leaders in the United States and Britain have elevated "flexibility" and "change" to the same level as motherhood and apple pie. But there are huge advantages to in-flexibility and predictability, as continental Europeans appreci­ate. The evidence shows that continuous reoptimization is not the best route to happiness: you are more likely to be happy if you settle for what is "good enough" than if you feel you must always have the most.

People also want to be trusted and respected themselves. This requires that they have some autonomy. Most of us like to feel we are working well or helping others because we could not expect to be respected otherwise. That is a key element in the motivation to work—the satisfaction of the professional norm. Yet in recent years employers have used more and more financial incentives to motivate people; performance-related pay has been creeping in everywhere, including the public services.

Those who favor it believe that if they add an extra incentive, people are bound to work harder. They assume that all other incentives will retain their existing force. Yet that is not how people are. If you pay people for something, they stop feeling that you automatically expect it of them. In consequence they may even work less. So introducing targets and paying people to achieve them may not be the best way to revolutionize the public services.

7. People are also deeply attached to the status quo. They hate loss of any kind, and they care less about gains than about losses. Researchers typically find that an income loss of £100 hurts twice as much as an income gain of £100 helps. This is not an inconvenience to be ignored, but a fact to be respected. Yet rationalizers happily reorganise things without weighing properly the cost to happiness from breaking up a settled order.

More generally, people like what is familiar to them. Crime and mental illness are higher in transient or mixed communities, other things being equal. This is an important cost of high mobility. Anglo-American economists may preach to Europeans that they should move house more often. This would surely increase productivity, but it is not desirable unless the gains from higher productivity would outweigh the costs of greater crime and family instability. Happiness, not dynamism, should be the goal of public policy.

8. Human beings are also status conscious. Natural selection has planted in us the desire to do better than other people, or at least to keep up with them. This is what causes the rat race. In any race there is a fixed number of winners. For every winner there is a loser: it is a zero-sum game. This is equally true of the race for status, since the total amount of status in a society is fixed. That is one major reason why as a society we have not grown happier.

So what can be done? If a person works harder and earns more, he may himself gain by increasing his income compared with other people. But the other people lose because their in-come now falls relative to his. He does not care that he is pol­luting other people in this way, so we must provide him with an automatic incentive to do so. Taxation provides exactly this in­centive. If we make taxes commensurate to the damage that an individual does to others when he earns more, then he will only work harder if there is a true net benefit to society as a whole. It is efficient to discourage work effort that makes society worse off. Thus taxation is a way of containing the rat race, and we should stop apologizing for its "dreadful" disincentive effects. If tax-cutters think people should work still harder, they need to explain why.

There is also another tactic for limiting the rat race: education. We are past the period of evolution when only the fittest can survive. So we should teach our young to give less value to status and more value to helping other people. This idea is not new, but it is taking a real beating in the current era of unre­strained individualism. It can only win with the backing of solid intellectual argument.

9. Human beings are also very adaptable. Like other animals, our feelings adapt to our experience, so that when things change, our initial reactions eventually diminish and we revert towards our initial state of feeling. If things get better, we after a while take them for granted. If they get worse, we also eventu­ally largely accept them. This is another reason why economic growth has not increased welfare as much as we expected. The number of people who are dissatisfied with their financial posi­tion is still as high as it was thirty years ago, although people are many times richer. How depressing!

In other words, income is addictive. Suppose my income and spending rise this year: next year I will need more income still in order to achieve a given level of happiness. In fact to a large extent it is the change in income rather than income itself that affects happiness—unless you are very poor. In this respect income is very different from, say, friendship, because if I make more friends this year, that has permanent effects on my happi­ness—I do not take them for granted and need still more friends in the year that follows. We habituate more rapidly to things that money can buy than to things it cannot buy—more to goods than to relationships.

Since most people do not foresee the addictive effects of in-come and spending, taxation has again a useful role, just as it has with other forms of addiction like smoking. Taxes discourage us from overwork, from running on a treadmill that brings less advance in happiness than we expected.

If we combine this habituation argument with the one about status-seeking, we can argue strongly that up to some level taxes are not inefficient, as is so often alleged. Rather, we need the tax on income from work in order to maintain a tolerable work-life balance. By contrast, tax cuts would of course increase production, but would they improve the quality of our lives?

10. In any case extra income increases happiness less and less as people get richer. This was the traditional argument for redistributive taxation, and modern happiness research confirms it. The argument applies both within countries and across countries. In poor countries extra income increases happiness much more than in rich countries, and that is why helping the Third World should be one of the major ethical goals for Western society. Moreover, policies that will certainly increase misery, like easier laws on gambling, can never be justified by the income they would generate. Income is not everything.

11. In fact happiness depends on your inner life as much as on your outer circumstances. Through education and practice, it is possible to improve your inner life—to accept yourself better and to feel more for others. In most of us there is a deep positive force, which can be liberated if we can overcome our negative thoughts. To develop this inner strength of character should be a major goal of education. For adults there is a range of spiritual practices that help to bring peace of mind, from meditation to positive psychology. For those who are struggling, cognitive therapy has a good record of success. For those in the extremes of misery, psychiatric drugs and cognitive therapy have probably helped more than any other changes in the last fifty years, and we can expect further major advances.

12. Public policy can more easily remove misery than augment happiness. This is because the causes of misery are the more obvious, especially when we look beyond the family circle. It is also morally right to give extra weight to removing misery. So that should be a major focus for public policy. In the West the most miserable group of people are the mentally ill. We know how to help most of them, but only about a quarter are currently in treatment. We owe them better.

With thanks to "Happiness" by economist Richard Layard

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