According to the new gurus of happiness, most of us are mugs.
We spend our lives pursuing money, wealth and the good life for ourselves and our children only to find that it makes us unhappy. Indeed, as a society we are a failure. Our pursuit of economic growth and wealth has only led us down the path of unhappiness.
All the good things of life, from washing machines to plasma TVs to reliable and safer cars to modern medicine, have made us unhappy. And it has led to an epidemic of depression, environmental destruction and social dislocation.
Of course, the "money is evil" claim is not new. It has been the rallying cry for collectivist movements through the millennia. The Bible, Karl Marx, Timothy Leary and Greenpeace all rail against the innate evilness of the pursuit of money.
What's new is the so-called science of subjective happiness, which is a growth area in our universities. It is providing apparent evidence supporting the old claim that money does not make you happy and the collectivists are using it in aid of their every cause -- often to the point of absurdity. Happiness researchers have undertaken thousands of surveys around the world over many decades assessing happiness and its cause.
They have come up with, at least superficially, some surprising findings. Neither income nor wealth correlate with happiness. Surveys have found virtually the same level of happiness between the very richest Americans and the Maasai herdsman of east Africa living on less than $1 a day. Surveys in Japan found that between 1960 and 1987 per capita income increased fourfold while the level of happiness remained unchanged. Other studies found a negative relationship between income and level of happiness and a slight positive relationship between wealth and level of happiness.
This is surprising because the evidence is that most people clearly would choose to live the life of Donald Trump than a Maasai herdsman. Most people -- whether it be through education, entrepreneurship or the lottery -- seek greater wealth and go to great lengths to avoid poverty.
And research shows people on low incomes suffer disproportionately from things such as obesity, depression and early death, which would tend to make people unhappy.
So what gives? The problem lies in people's innate tendency to be happy, but not too happy or too unhappy.
Research shows people are highly resilient. We can adjust and find happiness in extreme conditions. Research has shown that quadriplegics eventually report the same level of happiness as the able-bodied and winners of lotteries, after a period of euphoria, revert to their pre-rich state of happiness. Our level of happiness does not change much with our circumstances -- whether it be money, wealth, age, peace, social capital or friendships.
In short, happiness is not a good empirical measure of people's desires, wellbeing or lifestyle choices for public policy purposes.
Its use leads to all sorts of silly ideas such as those offered by Prof Mirko Bagaric on these pages last week. He suggests crippling tax rates of 75 per cent on people earning more than $70,000 so as to stop such people from "earning vast sums of money" and becoming unhappy. He and his joint author claim this will not only make us a happier society, but make the wealthy happier by making them poorer.
The proposal has a few problems. First, it is mad. No one believes an extra quid makes them unhappy. Second, it would lead to the ousting of any government that proposed it. Third, it would lead to mass tax evasion.
More vigilant happiness researchers caution against jumping to the clearly absurd conclusion that less money leads to happiness. Many have spent their careers researching poverty and know it's not a happy state. They know that while people may be happy with their lot in life, they'd prefer to improve it with a bit more money.
While income and wealth don't necessarily make one happy, they sure help.
We know this from the choices of Australians at the ballot box, at schools, in their choice of jobs and at home. This is reality, and a happy one.
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