The World Values Survey recently released their latest “happiness survey,” ranking a number of countries by how happy their citizens claim to be. I think I’m always secretly pleased when the United States, with all our hyped benefits and pleasures, isn’t at the top of the list. What surprised me this time, however, was that Colombia made number three. This is the country that, until Iraq came along, was the most likely place in the world to be kidnapped. Obviously money isn’t everything if Colombia is third and the U.S. doesn’t even figure until sixteenth. (Also surprising is that, despite all the bad news we hear about every day, “happiness is rising around the world.”)
Reading about this new survey reminds me of an essay I wrote last semester on the “happiness research” of the past fifty years. Here it is, in slightly modified form:
Relative Happiness: Nothing to Worry About
Happiness research over the past fifty years seems to tell us that people today are no happier despite the incredible economic growth the world has experienced over the past half century. This news is absolutely horrifying to those economists, especially Christians, who have dedicated their lives to improving other people’s lives. Yet when we consider this research we must keep two things in mind: relativity and alternative measures.
Happiness research creates a sort of happiness index as people are asked whether they are very happy, pretty happy, or not happy. That the value of this index has remained constant over time reveals the relative or positional nature of happiness. Simply put, the degree of happiness any given person feels is going to be directly influenced by their economic situation relative to the people around them. Thus, a more affluent society is still going to have the same happiness distribution as an impoverished society because people still rank themselves in relation to the Joneses.
To truly understand the implications of this relative positioning, we must engage in a thought experiment and picture a society over time. In other words, let us imagine that everyone who ever lived is put together in a room and can see each other’s condition. Suddenly those people from today have a basis upon which to rank their happiness. Now they are in the upper quartile or more of the population and will, presumably, rank themselves much higher on the happiness scale. This is because more money does tend to indicate greater happiness within a given society, and people today have more money than those who came before.
In addition to this simple happiness index, it is worth keeping in mind other measures of contentment. Over the past 200 years since the industrial revolution, many areas of human life have seen dramatic improvement. Longevity has increased dramatically around the world at the same time that infant mortality has fallen. Hunger has decreased and even been almost completely eliminated in some areas. If instead of simply asking people how happy they are, we built an index based on these other factors, the results might be very different. Further research could, and should, be done in this area.
Where, then, does the happiness research leave us? It has taught us a valuable lesson about the human perception of the world as relative to those around us. Insofar as we learn from this, the research is good. What it does not give us the right to do, whether academically or Christianly, is abandon the pursuit of understanding economic systems or assisting the poor. We must learn from the research, apply its lessons, and continue to seek further information and solutions to economic problems.
Tags: Colombia, happiness, research, United States, world
that ‘s very intersting!