The Happiness Equation E-Book

Nick Powdthavee

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 361

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Why is marriage worth £200,000 a year? Why will having children make you unhappy? Why does happiness from winning the lottery take two years to arrive? Why does time heal the pain of divorce or the death of a loved one – but not unemployment? Everybody wants to be happy. But how much happiness – precisely – will each life choice bring? Should I get married? Am I really going to feel happy about the career that I picked? How can we decide not only which choice is better for us, but how much it's better for us? The result of new, unique research, The Happiness Equation brings to a general readership for the first time the new science of happiness economics. It describes how we can measure emotional reactions to different life experiences and present them in ways we can relate to. How, for instance, monetary values can be put on things that can't be bought or sold in the market – such as marriage, friendship, even death – so that we can objectively rank them in order of preference. It also explains why some things matter more to our happiness than others (like why seeing friends is worth more than a Ferrari) while others are worth almost nothing (like sunny weather). Nick Powdthavee – whose work on happiness has been discussed on both the Undercover Economist and Freakanomics blogs – brings cutting-edge research on how we value our happiness to a general audience, with a style that wears its learning lightly and is a joy to read.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK in 2010 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

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This electronic edition published in 2010 by Icon Books

ISBN: 978-1-84831-224-1 (ePub format)

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Printed edition (ISBN: 978-1-84831-166-4)

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Printed edition distributed in Canada by

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Text copyright © 2010 Nattavudh Powdthavee

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any

means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

1: THE PURSUIT

2: HAPPINESS – WHAT HAS SCIENCE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

3: MONEY CAN’T BUY ME LOVE, BUT CAN IT BUY ME HAPPINESS?

4: THE PRICE OF WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY: PART I

5: THE PRICE OF WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY: PART II

6: DOES TIME REALLY HEAL ALL WOUNDS?

7: JUST AS LONG AS I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE

8: FOCUSING ILLUSIONS

9: WHY SHOULD WE BE HAPPY?

10: WHO GETS TO DECIDE?

11: AND THE FUNNY THING IS?

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthaveeis a behavioural economist at the University of York (shortly to move to the Department of Economics, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). Discussions of his work on the economics of happiness have appeared in over 50 major international newspapers in the past five years, including theNew York Timesand theGuardian, as well as on TV, including Channel 5 News andThe Wright Stuff. He is originally from Thailand.

To Andrew, for telling me, all those years ago, that it’s okay to do the things other people don’t do.

Also to Nateecha, for telling me, some years later, that it’s okay to do the things other people do, too.

Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.

Rabbi Hyman Schachtel

CHAPTER 1

THE PURSUIT

Most of us go through life believing we know exactly what we need to make us happy. For the most part, we believe that all we ever need is to have someone we love loving us back. Or it’s a combination of more money, a good job, a stable marriage and perfect health. Sometimes it’s the little things in life, like a day off work; a clear blue sky on an autumn afternoon; a nice cup of cool mochaccino on a hot day; an hour-long foot rub; a day spent laughing with friends and family; 45 minutes of uninterrupted sex with our partner, and the energy to last for the best part of it.

But unfortunately – in the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – we can’t always get what we want. At least, we can’t always get what we want all the time. A day off work every so often sounds like a good idea until, of course, we realise that we will become a little poorer because of it. And that’s no good because, according to the abstract idea we have in our heads of what makes a good life, money matters a lot. Okay then, in that case, we’ll put in more hours at work. But wait. That will also mean less time to be spent with friends and family, and that doesn’t seem so good either.

So what do we do, then? What do we do when our lives are a series of trade-offs between different combinations of ‘what ifs’? What do we do when there is an endless horizon of time and resource constraints constantly telling us that whatever we do, we can’t possibly have it all? Well, according to economists, who are supposedly experts on decision-making, what usually happens is that we try to do the best we can with our choices. We gather all necessary information about our options. We engage in rationalisation and mental calculations. We quietly argue and debate within ourselves over the potential impacts of each individual decision on our happiness. We cross-refer them to the rule-book of ‘All the things that makemehappy’, put each possibility into an order of preference, and then, subject to both time and resource constraints, choose the best combination of bundles that we know would optimise our well-being.

Easy.

Bounded rationality

But of course, if that were true – if we always chose the best possible combination of options according to stable preference functions and the constraints facing them – then the way we led our lives would literally be disappointment-free. Whatever decisions we made, we would know exactly well in advance what we were getting ourselves into. After all, our rationality would have already done the homework for us: we would be getting the greatest reward at the lowest cost.

How could we possibly not be happy with that?

The reality, however, is that our lives are too often filled with disappointing and regrettable decisions, whether big or small. The holiday we went on last summer; that antique car we bought; or even the job or college degrees we picked. The following anecdotal evidence from a chance meeting between two economists and a dentist makes it all too clear.1

Two economics professors and friends, John Bennett and Chuck Blackorby, were attending an economics conference. On the first evening, they met a dentist at the hotel bar who was at an annual conference for dentists just next door to them. After a brief introduction and a couple of drinks, Chuck, who was known for his sometimes brash and direct manner, decided to ask the dentist, by then a little tipsy, a somewhat personal question.

‘So, tell me, are you very happy being a dentist?’

‘Happy? I’m miserable as a dentist’, replied the man.

Chuck smiled to himself. ‘What? If you’re so unhappy, why on earth did you choose to become a dentist in the first place?’

‘I didn’t choose to become a dentist.’ The man took another swig of his drink before delivering the final hammer blow. ‘It’s that stupid kid eighteen years ago that chose to become a dentist. Not me.’

And even when we’re not too disappointed; when we actually think we’re fairly satisfied with the choices we made, sometimes there’s just no way for us to know for certain whether or not we would have been happier if we’d gone with the alternatives. Take having children, for example. For most parents, a natural and genuine response to the question, ‘Would you be happier without children?’ would be a screaming ‘No!’ However, there’s no real way of knowing precisely what life would have been like if these parents had decided not to have their little David or Sarah – simply because the childless alternative didn’t take place for them. The same argument holds true for partners who choose not to become parents.

One of the main reasons why we aren’t always able to choose the best options for ourselves is that our rationality is often bounded by the amount of information it possesses, the cognitive limitations of our brains,2and the finite amount of time we have to make a decision.3According to the so-called ‘bounded rationality’ concept, we human beings are only partly rational – and downright irrational in the remaining part of our actions. While economists believe that all human beings are approximatelyHomo economicus(economic man), rational and broadly self-interested by nature, the reality is that we are just as likely, if not more likely, to let emotions overrule rationality and completely dictate the way we behave.

That we are not wholly rational is shown by studies that have identified two distinct sides to our brains: one that is rational – controlled, slow, deliberative and deductive; and one that is emotional – automatic, rapid, associative and affective.4The mesh between the two is extremely complex, and one does not always dominate the other. And while economic theories of decision-making have tended to emphasise the operation of the rational side of our brain in guiding choice behaviour, it’s often the case that, when making decisions under pressure or under conditions where information is incomplete or overly complex, we tend to rely on simplifying heuristics or ‘gut feelings’ rather than extensive algorithmic processing.5These ‘rules of thumb’ are far from perfect, and it’s precisely why we sometimes spend too much money on food when we go grocery shopping with an empty stomach,6or find it increasingly difficult to walk away from a bus stop the longer we have been waiting for a bus to come – even if it would have been a lot quicker to walk than to wait for that damn bus to arrive.7

The adaptive unconscious and past experiences

But maybe it’s not always such a bad thing to trust our emotions. Research carried out by psychology professor Timothy Wilson suggests that, in situations where we have had a lot of experience, decisions made without thinking (those made on impulses and gut feelings) can often lead to better and happier outcomes than if they had been made under a strict rule of optimisation, simply because this is when the emotional part of our brain works best at detecting that something is out of the ordinary – even if we may not know ourselveswhatthat something is at the time – and alerts us in the form of emotional alarm bells such as sweaty palms and butterflies in our stomach.8And it’s in these scenarios that practice really makes perfect. It’s also where thinking too much about our past experiences can actually hurt rather than help us.

The question is: Why?

One reason. According to psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the cognitive part of our brain tends to suffer from what he called the ‘peak-end’ effect, which is the tendency to judge past experiences – both pleasant and unpleasant – almost entirely on how they were at their peak and how they ended.9

Kahneman and his colleagues illustrated the core concept of the peak-end theory in a series of experiments, most notably that involving hospital patients and the very painful colonoscopy procedure.10While undergoing a colonoscopy, the patients reported their level of discomfort every 60 seconds throughout the procedure. Afterwards, the patients were asked to remember how unpleasant the procedure was, using several different scales including a ten-point scale, and also about the relative unpleasantness of the colonoscopy compared to other unpleasant experiences such as stubbing a toe, or an average visit to the dentist. What Kahneman and his colleagues found was astonishing. While there was almost zero correlation between the duration of the colonoscopies that different patients experienced and the global rating of the procedure, the relationship between the peak-end average (the average of the peaks and how the patients felt at the end of the procedure) and the global rating of the procedure was simply undeniable. In other words, we are more likely to remember our experience of a colonoscopy as being awful if the peaks of unpleasantness were very high or if it ended awfully for us, than if the entire procedure itself took a long time to finish. What matters is not the duration of an experience; we hardly ever think about it when we try to recall and judge how happy or unhappy we were in the past. It’s how we were feeling at the peaks and at the end of our experience that count the most.

What about frequency? Surely having experienced something often can teach us to repeat only the things that we remember with pleasure and fondness, and avoid those that we remember with embarrassment and regret? The trouble is, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we are just not very good at remembering them correctly. He illustrates his point by prompting the readers of his book –Stumbling on Happiness– to think about where they were, whom they were with, and what they were doing when they first heard the news about the 9/11 attacks in 2001.11Okay, that sounds easy enough. Closing my eyes, I can still remember that I was standing at one of the check-in counters at London Heathrow airport, trying to get on the evening flight to Bangkok. Sitting behind the Finnair counter was a man in his late 50s who, as I recall, spoke with a very thick Glaswegian accent.

‘So you’re off to Thailand then, eh? Ah, what a beautiful country! Lovely food, gorgeous beaches, very pretty women!’ His eyes twinkled as he said this.

I smiled politely, acknowledging his appreciation of my country of birth. I knew he was just trying to be friendly in what seemed to be a surprisingly empty airport on a Tuesday afternoon.

‘Okay, sir. Here’s your boarding pass. Have a nice flight … Oh, and have you heard? Two planes hit the World Trade Center not half an hour ago. Probably a terrorist attack. But since you’re flying to Finland first, I’m sure you’ll be just fine.’ He ended with a beam while I stood there, rigid as a board.

Like me, most people will be able to remember in fine detail what they were doing when they first heard the news. But, Gilbert added – would the same people also remember precisely where they were, whom they were with, and what they were doing on the morning of 10 September 2001, one day before the attacks?

I personally couldn’t, of course. And I’m confident enough to bet that not many people could either – a fact that is also true for most Americans.

The main reason why it’s relatively easier for us to recall the exact details of 11 September 2001, but nearly impossible to remember what happened a day earlier, is because momentous events like the 9/11 attacks do not happen frequently in our lifetime. While 11 September 2001 defied our every sense of normality, 10 September, by contrast, was like almost any other day. And unless we religiously keep a diary of everything that ever happened in our lives, any other day is nothing more than a blob in our memory bank.

Daniel Gilbert’s message is clear: it is the infrequent and unusual experiences that are most memorable. These are the ones that stick like glue to the clipboard of our memory cortex. Not the other way round.

Conventional wisdom and imagination

There are two lessons we can draw at this stage. The first is that, in situations where we have had a lot of experience, it’s perhaps better to trust our instincts when it comes to making a decision. And the second lesson, related to the first, is that it seems important not to rely completely on emotions in situations where we have had little or no prior experience. The explanation is simple: in these circumstances, the emotional part of our brain will not have had enough chances to adapt and learn from our past experiences, which will inevitably make it impossible for it to distinguish which decision is better for us.12

That sounds perfectly reasonable. All we need to do now is follow any great professional’s advice and just practise, practise, practise. Then afterwards, we can sit back in situations where we have had a lot of these experiences and just make snap decisions without having to think too much about the best outcomes.

Two problems, though. First, how do we know when we have had enough practice doing something? How do we know when we can let the rational brain take a back seat and the emotional brain do all the work? Will 10,000 hours of doing something repetitively be enough?13Or will it take a lifetime of experience? Second, what about other, more novel situations? How do we know that we will be happier being married than staying single? How do we know whether we will be happier in a job that pays less but is nevertheless much closer to home? How can we be sure that rationality will not fail us when we have to face dilemmas that we have never faced before?

So now we’ve come full circle: economists’ description of how the world works – though somewhat incomplete – actually turns out to be useful advice on what weshoulddo in situations where we have had little or no prior experience. According to theories on rational choice,14there are perhaps two essential ingredients to successful decision-making when a degree of rationality is involved. The first istime. Unlike the emotional part of our brain where all decision-making is done instantaneously, the rational part of our brain needs time to think things over, to mull over the information. The second ingredient is getting therightinformation. It’s important that we have perfect awareness of all relevant information regarding the outcome of our choice before making a decision, especially one that could change our lives.

Since we can often find time to think things over before coming up with a solution for many of our life problems, could it just be the case that we don’t always have the right information about the choices we plan to make? Going back to the unhappy dentist, could it be possible that he decided to obtain a degree in dentistry on a whim or, worse, on a dare? Maybe. Nevertheless, considering the potentially life-changing impact of choosing the right career, it’s perhaps more likely that hedidtry to seek all the available information about how happy a career in dentistry would make him in eighteen years’ time. How could he then have been so wrong?

There are usually two ways of getting the information we need about the potential impacts of a novel experience. First, we can do some research about the experience. So in the case of the unhappy dentist, his decision to study dentistry could have been influenced by what he was expecting to get objectively from becoming a dentist, such as financial return, or by other people’s accounts of their subjective experiences as dentists, or even by conventional wisdom passed down from generation to generation.

Second, if all else fails, we can still use our imagination to conjure up the information we need to undertake a decision. We can try, for example, to picture ourselves in the future: what life would be like being married, or having kids, or having so much money we don’t know what to do with it.

The trouble – and we know it’s never going to be good news when a sentence starts with ‘The trouble’ – with these two ways of gathering the necessary information for our rational brain to digest is that both are subject to serious cognitive distortions. Take asking other people about their subjective experiences, for example. Would everybody admit, as the unhappy dentist admits after a few drinks, that they regret undertaking a decision, one that they can’t redo or undo? Not always, as it turns out. Studies in psychology suggest that people tend to rationalise the costs of their decisions – especially the ones that can’t be undone, such as parenthood or career choices – and then conclude that, given the high price they pay, they must be happy with their choices.15In other words, we are more likely to look for and find a positive view of the things we arestuck withthan of the things we are not.16

Our very own imagination is not much better. For example, research in psychology has found that we tend to overestimate the length or the intensity of our feelings – both pleasant and unpleasant – whenever we make a prediction about our future emotional states. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues illustrated by a series of experiments that people overestimated, by a long shot, the duration of their emotional reactions to various negative events that included, among other things, the break-up of a romantic relationship, rejection from a job interview, and an account of a child’s death.17The psychologists attributed this so-called ‘impact bias’ to the fact that, whenever we attempt to predict our affective reactions to a particular event, we naturally focus our attention on that event to the exclusion of others.18So, for example, in the case of Gilbert’s study, when a mother is asked to imagine what life would be like seven years after the death of her child, she is likely to focus exclusively on the tragedy and fail to consider the many other events that will also happen along the way, and which may also affect her general happiness state. Of course, it would seem absurd for any mother to pause and consider how her unhappiness might be eased by a holiday in the Bahamas, a promotion at work, or seeing a good film over that time period. But the truth is that life does go on, and the things we don’t normally think about when imagining our emotional reactions to a particular event do happen and do have affective consequences. It’s also the very reason why we often find our future selves not as happy (or unhappy) about a particular event as we thought we would be when we first imagined experiencing it.

So our search for happiness goes on in a somewhat stumbling manner. Sometimes we learn from our past mistakes; sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we make the right decision just from asking other people about their affective experiences; sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we make a spot-on prediction about the duration and intensity of our affective reactions to a particular event; most of the time we don’t. It doesn’t matter how hard we try, there just doesn’t seem to be a formula to happiness, especially one that is scientifically credible.

Or is there?

The happiness equation

This brings us to the present. What if thereisa scientific way of constructing a happiness formula? What if we can, with some degree of accuracy, measure and study atypicalperson’s emotional reactions to different life events, and then write a complete guidebook about the average impact of each one of them on our well-being? What if there’s no need any more for us to ask other people for advice about a particular experience, or use our own imagination to picture what life would be like in the future if we made this choice and not the other? What if we could go back in time to eighteen years ago and say to that unhappy dentist-to-be: ‘Hey! Don’t become a dentist! You’re guaranteed to be miserable for life’, even if we’re not dentists ourselves? How would we react to that kind of information? What if we can actually put a value or a price on each different life event so that we know which is more worth our time, relative to the others? Will this new knowledge change anything or everything in the way we think or act?

This book is hardly the definitive book about all the things thatreallymake each and every one of us happy. That book doesn’t exist and probably never will. Rather, this book is about the journey towards achieving that kind of possibility; the possibility of havingperfect foresightabout our emotional reactions to the many different events our lives have to offer. Weaving together findings and theories from the new science of happiness, this book provides a snapshot of what the world would be like if we could truly measure people’s happiness and use the data to answer previously ‘unanswerable’ questions, many of which are absurdly controversial. Does money make us happy? If so, then byhow muchdoes money make us happy? And if not, then why not? Would we be happier married than remaining single? If so, for how long would we stay happy? How about divorce? Will having children make us happy? What matters in a job? How unhappy will we be after the death of someone we love? And if we want to be compensated for that kind of tragedy, how much money would be enough to make us feel indifferent about the death of our child or partner? How much is a friendship worth? To what extent can my happiness make my partner and my children happier? Will I become more productive, more generous, and live longer if I’m happier today? Would I like any of the answers to these questions? And more importantly, would they change the way I make decisions? Should the government be involved in trying to make me and everyone else happier? I attempt to answer these important questions as best I can by drawing on my own experience in the field of the economics and psychology of happiness, as well as research ideas and findings from the key players in the arena, including, among others, Richard Easterlin, Daniel Kahneman and Andrew Oswald.

Here’s my plan of attack.

In Chapter 2, ‘Happiness – what has science got to do with it?’, I will set the scene for the book by telling you about the history behind the science of happiness; the long feud between economists whose central tenet is ‘objectivity’ – i.e., what you can’t see, you can’t measure – and psychologists who believe that human happiness can’t be understood without, in part, listening to what people have to say; and how recent improvements in technology and survey designs have helped bridge the gap between these two important fields.

The first and foremost question about our happiness will be tackled in Chapter 3, ‘Money can’t buy me love, but can it buy me happiness?’. For centuries, we have been wired to believe that an absolute increase in our incomes will automatically make us happier with our lives. But is that always the case? In this chapter, I will tell you about the importance of relative incomes and how this can be used to explain the paradox of happiness, i.e., that the rich are often observed to be happier than the poor, yet an increase in incomes for all doesn’t always lead to an increase in happiness for all. I will also tell you how evolution can help explain why, despite the existence of this income–happiness paradox, the pursuit of relative wealth continues to be one of human beings’ primal motivations.

There are opportunity costs to almost all of our decisions. In order to be economically efficient, one choice often means that we have to go without another. But how do we know whether a choice is better than the one forgone? How do we make comparisons between life experiences, some of which can’t be bought or sold in the marketplace? In Chapters 4 and 5, ‘The price of what money can’t buy’, Parts I and II, I will tell you about the causality issue in happiness studies, what we need to be concerned with when estimating a simple happiness equation, and how we can calculate the true effects of many of our life events, including an absolute increase in our incomes, on our happiness. I will then tell you how we can actually calculate how much money will need to be given to somebody who is either friendless, or single, or is experiencing a bereavement, to be ‘just’ as happy as if they had an active social life, were married, or had not experienced the death of a loved one.

In Chapters 6 to 8, I will tell you how the price tags of these life events can vary significantly across different environments and over time. I will also tell you how a shift in the allocation of our attention can make one thing easier to cope with, while making another difficult to live with; and also how a misallocation of our attention can make us overestimate the well-being impact of some of the things in our lives – like winning a lottery and having children – when their true effects are actually almost negligible.

So why should we care about the need to try to improve everyone’s happiness? In Chapter 9, ‘Why should we be happy?’, I will tell you about the social benefits of happiness; how happiness can be contagious and how big the contagion could be. I will also tell you about the beneficial impacts of happiness upon our productivity, health, and various pro-social behaviours.

Finally, who should decide what we should do in order to improve our well-being further? Of course, a natural answer to this question is ourselves: we should be in charge of our own happiness. But what if that also fails? Should the government then intervene? In Chapter 10, ‘Who gets to decide?’, I will tell you about the opposing views: for and against the government’s involvement in trying to make the nation happier. Can there be a middle-way solution to this?

This book is also an account of a personal journey, the attempt to satisfy many of my own curiosities about the true determinants of happiness. I hope that it will help you to form your own hypotheses about what really makes us happy, and to question the credibility of our past experiences, our prior beliefs, and our own ability to imagine.

CHAPTER 2

HAPPINESS – WHAT HAS SCIENCE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Imagine yourself waking up one sunny morning. It’s been raining for days, but this morning the sky is bright blue and there’s virtually no cloud in sight. The birds outside your bedroom window are happily chirping away. You’ve slept a full ten hours, which is something you haven’t done for a long time. You turn to your left and see the love of your life lying there peacefully. You smile to yourself and think: ‘My life is perfect.’

Rewind.

Imagine yourself waking up one sunny morning. It’s been raining for days, but this morning the sky is bright blue and there’s virtually no cloud in sight. The birds outside your bedroom windows are happily chirping away. You’ve slept a full ten hours, which is something you haven’t done for a long time. You turn to your left and see $500,000 in crisp banknotes – that’s 5,000 Benjamin Franklins staring back at you. You smile to yourself and think: ‘My life is perfect.’

There’s something not quite right about this picture. To many of us, the thought of swapping the love of our life for a $500,000 pay cheque seems preposterous and disturbing at the same time. Waking up next to the one we love is priceless, I hear you say. No amount of money could ever replace that. And I, for one, couldn’t agree more.

But let me play devil’s advocate for just a moment. Imagine the following scenario. Sarah has been married to Bob for more than ten years. They share many happy memories together, and have never been apart for more than a week ever since their wedding day. But then tragedy strikes. Bob dies following a fall from the building he’s working on.1When the news of Bob’s death reaches Sarah, it engulfs her and shatters her world into pieces. A couple of weeks after Bob’s funeral, Sarah’s family lawyer tells her that she should seek compensation for the diminution of quality of life following the death of her husband. In court, the judge agrees that Sarah should be compensated for the non-pecuniary losses associated with Bob’s death, and awards her a lump-sum, one-off payment of £10,000 (approximately $15,000 at 2010 prices), which happens to be the compensation package for bereavements normally awarded in tort cases in the UK.2

Is a £10,000 payment for her husband’s untimely death too small for Sarah when Bob’s life was priceless to her? Of course, the court couldn’t have awarded a ‘priceless’ sum of money, as this is unfeasible in any circumstances. But £10,000 compensation for diminished quality of life for the one who remains behind sounds like an insult to any widows and widowers out there. So what should the court do? We can’t measure Sarah’s loss of happiness following Bob’s death and put a price on it now, can we?

Can we?

* * *

‘Let’s study death!’

I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard this said to me over a plate of sashimi and hot green tea. But as I let the words sink in, I remembered one of the things I have learned over the years from working with Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick and one of the world’s most respected experts on the economics of happiness – which is always to expect the unexpected. It was the end of summer in 2005, and it had been a while since Andrew and I had last got together; in fact, we hadn’t seen each other since I took up my first post as a research officer at the Institute of Education, University of London. And so it wasn’t until Andrew emailed me one afternoon to say that he was coming down to London for a day that we decided to meet up at one of those tacky Japanese restaurants off Goodge Street tube station.

‘Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein at the University of Chicago are organising a conference on legal implications of the new research on happiness, and they want us to write something for it. So let’s do something on death and happiness,’ he beamed.

Bentham, Robbins and Hicks

The idea that we can study the interplay between death and happiness seems far-fetched, but certainly not impossible – at least, not any more. For over 200 years since the British economist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s first creation of the ‘felicific calculus’ – an algorithm used to calculate the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to cause3– the notion that happiness should be measured and studied has taken quite a battering from people in academia. Leading the charge against Bentham’s so-called ‘happiness calculator’ in the early 1930s were Lionel Robbins and John Hicks, two of the most prominent economists of the time.

The method of simply asking people to report their levels of happiness is unscientific, chorused the two dons. Since happiness is subjective, we can’t compare one person’s happiness with another person’s happiness. Unlike money, the happiness of two different people is considered incommensurable. We can’t add it or subtract it. We can’t count it or put it in a jar for future use. We can’t even see it. The lack ofinterpersonal comparabilitymakes happiness something of a defunct concept. If we can’t really compare happiness, then why should we bother measuring it?

Both Robbins and Hicks went on to argue that we can work out what is good for the people in a given society by simply observing their behaviours or ‘revealed preferences’. If person A chooses to eat an orange rather than an apple, assuming that A is rational (in that A always makes careful, logical calculations before making any decisions), then it’s reasonable to say that A prefers oranges to apples and that eating oranges makes A happier than eating apples. We don’t even need to knowhow muchin metric terms an orange can make A happier than an apple can. All we really need to know in order to work out what makes people happy is the ordinal ranking of these preferences.4Ergo, according to both Robbins and Hicks, happiness as we knew it is dead. Rest in peace, Jeremy Bentham; it seems that we, the neo-classical economists, have the final word.

The psychologists’ fortress

But out in the wilderness, away from the critical and judgemental eyes of economists, were hundreds of psychologists working on the same idea as Bentham: that happiness is quantifiable and should therefore be measured. As an attitude that is not accessible to public observation, these psychologists believed that a concept such as happiness should be studied, in part, by asking how people feel. They embarked on their research journey by asking hundreds and thousands of individuals some of the following examples of happiness questions:

‘Taken all things together, how happy would you say you are these days? Would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?’

‘On the whole are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not satisfied with the life that you lead?’

‘Have you recently been feeling reasonably happy, all things considered? More so than usual, same as usual, less so than usual, or much less than usual?’

Each response to these happiness (or life satisfaction)5questions was then given a numerical score; so, for example, the response to the first happiness question is coded so that ‘Not too happy’ is given a value of 1, ‘Pretty happy’ a value of 2, and ‘Very happy’ a value of 3.6And for decades, psychologists have been showing that these ‘happiness data’ are not what economists believed them to be – i.e. just random noises – by showing that they in fact correlate really well with participants’ subjective recalls of positive and negative events that took place in their life,7assessments of how happy they are by their friends and family,8and reports from clinical experts,9as well as the duration of the genuine or so-called ‘Duchenne’ smile,10and measures of response to stress such as heart rate and blood pressure.11Not to mention that these responses to the happiness questions have been shown by psychologists to predict, with reasonable accuracy, the risk of getting coronary heart disease in the future.12

The rapid technological advances in medical research over the past several decades have allowed Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, to take the debate on whether or not happiness is measurable to a new level. In his seminal study published in 2000, Davidson and his research team asked a group of randomly selected volunteers to enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine in order for their brains to be scanned. While lying face-up in the machine, the volunteers were shown two different photographs: one of a happy, smiling baby and the other of a baby with clear physical deformity. The fMRI machine, which is normally used to record the flow of oxygen to replace the energy used up in electrical activity, showed some striking images of brain activity while the volunteers were shown these two photographs.

When the volunteers were asked to closely examine the photograph of a smiling baby, the fMRI scan picked up a significant flow of oxygen to the left side of their prefrontal cortex (the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain). By contrast, when the photo of a severely deformed baby was shown to them, it was the right side of their prefrontal cortex that was activated.13Davidson’s main conclusion was that positive feelings correspond to the left side of the brain, while negative feelings correspond to the right side of the brain.

Davidson followed this up with another powerful study, but this time an electroencephalography (EEG) analysis was used on volunteers instead of the fMRI machine. The aim was to study how people who have been experiencing different emotions react when they are prompted to evaluate their own feelings. By using EEG to record the electrical activity along the scalp generated by the firing of neurons within the brain, Davidson and his team were able to show that people whose left side of the brain was especially active (‘left-siders’) were likely to report more positive feelings than those whose right side of the brain was more active (‘right-siders’). They also smiled more and were assessed to be happy by their friends and family. By contrast, the right-siders reported more negative feelings, smiled less, and were rated as unhappy by their friends and family.14

In the late 1980s, in an equally groundbreaking study, the American professor of neurology and epidemiology David Snowdon began his pet project on ageing and Alzheimer’s disease by conducting a longitudinal study – a study that tracks the same individuals over long periods of time – of a group of American Catholic women who became members of the Sisters School of Notre Dame in 1932. The sisters, on joining the order, were each asked to write an autobiography. And it’s these handwritten autobiographies that were the subject of Snowdon’s interest.

For hours on end, Snowdon and his research team counted the number of times each nun used positive words and negative words in her autobiography. So, for a lucid example, the following extracts demonstrate the differences between what Snowdon classified respectively (and informally) as the ‘happy’ and the ‘not-so-happy’ nuns:

Sister 1 (low positive emotion): I was born on September 26, 1909, the eldest of seven children, five girls and two boys … My candidate year was spent in the Motherhouse, teaching Chemistry and Second Year Latin at Notre Dame Institute. With God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order, for the spread of religion and for my personal sanctification.

Sister 2 (high positive emotion): God started my life off well by bestowing upon me a grace of inestimable value … The past year which I have spent as a candidate studying at Notre Dame College has been a very happy one. Now I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine.

Once in the nunnery, the sisters followed the same diet and the same daily rituals, which included morning and evening prayers, as well as charitable works and the day-to-day chores. Their ‘same food, same work, same routine’ ritual provided Snowdon with a very powerful tool to study the ageing process of these nuns, as it helped him to minimise unexpected extraneous variables that may have confounded other research. What he and his team found was something remarkable.

Among the group of ‘not-so-happy’ nuns, only 40 per cent lived to see their 85th birthday. Among the ‘happy’ nuns, almost 90 per cent lived to pass their 85th milestone. On average, concluded Snowdon, the group containing the most positive nuns lived nine years longer than the group containing the least positive nuns.15This is a huge effect when you think that smoking takes approximately three years off your life.16

Happy people live longer, so to speak.

And more recently, four psychologists from the UK, together with a dermatologist and a physiotherapist in the US, decided to take the ‘happiness is good for your health’ research to another level. In a study published inPsychoneuroendocrinology(yes, that reallyisthe name of the journal) in 2004, Marcel Ebrecht, Justin Hextall, Lauren-Grace Kirtley, Alice Taylor, Mary Dyson and John Weinman presented evidence that people’s self-reported level of stress correlates nicely with how quickly the same people heal from a puncture wound.