August 2, 2006
Are you happy?
Back in December of '04, I mentioned an article from Wired in which Daniel H. Pink argued that along with metrics such as GDP, happiness should be considered an economic indicator. It was an interesting argument. (Read it if you haven't.)
Recently, I've noticed a couple of related stories. One was from last week, about research that created the "first world map of happiness." According to this study, Denmark is the happiest country in the world. The U.S. came in 23rd, Britain 41st, and France 62nd. The D.R. of Congo, Zimbabwe, and Burundi were at the bottom of the list.
However, according to another national happiness index (by Nef), Denmark is 99 and the U.S. is 150th. The tiny south Pacific island nation of Vanuatu rates highest in that list. (The Nef study is interesting because it takes consumption of planetary resources into account and shows that "well-being [does] not have to be linked to high levels of consumption.")
It's not really surprising that there are such widely divergent views of how to calculate so-called 'gross national happiness'. (This quote is telling: "He admitted collecting data based on well-being was not an exact science, but said the measures used were very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes.")
How do you define happiness? (Or worse, quantify it?) Ask anyone what happiness is, and you'll usually find that they don't have a very simple answer. Plus, answers will vary from person to person and culture to culture. (It usually involves comfort, health, love, family, environment, etc., but the relative importance of each seems to vary quite a bit.)
Despite the difficulty (or impossibility?) of measuring happiness, I think "how happy are we?" is a crucial question for humanity, and this sort of inquiry seems useful and important. When you look around at.... well, everything we do, all the frenetic economic activity, all the resource extraction and energy consumption, all the airplanes and barbie dolls and newspapers and pets and electronics and grocery stores and pipelines and multinational corporate mergers and media conglomerates and refrigerators and junk mail... it only makes sense to ask what the end purpose is or should be (or if indeed there should even be an end purpose in mind, but that's a topic for another day).
Humans are in the interesting position of feeling like we should be driving for something more than mere survival & reproduction. Much like the answer to what happiness is, I'm sure the answer to what the end purpose of our activities should be varies greatly from individual to individual, culture to culture. But I think most people would say that part of the purpose for all of this hectic high-energy human activity should be happiness... whatever it is. My general view is that humanity should have at least three major long-term ambitions and goals. The primary one should still be simple survival, which is far trickier than it sounds. If we can manage to stick around, we should aim for increased happiness and increased understanding of ourselves and our universe. Survival, happiness, knowledge, wisdom. No doubt it's difficult to balance all those things and find an equation in which they all fit correctly. With some care, and perhaps some thoughtful tradeoffs, the hope is that ultimately they can all go hand in hand.
02 Aug 0:45 | Link | Category: Current Events, Opinion & Thoughts, Science