The Pursuit of Unhappiness: the Connection Between Economics and Well-Being

Last week I spent much of my computer time browsing through more well-known blogs and the websites of different periodicals, searching for topics that piqued my interest. For the periodical websites, I'd rummage through the archives for this year and last and found several that I wished to print out and keep. And so it was that I chanced upon an article in the Mother Jones archives titled "Reversal of Fortune."

The article, a little over a year old, describes how even though Americans have been getting progressively richer, our happiness is not improving. The author, Bill McKibben, begins by describing how we, as a country, mistakenly believe that greater economic growth by default also means greater prosperity for everyone. He has an strong environmental bent: he cites that uncontrolled economic growth uses up nonrenewable resources, setting itself up to eventually becoming unsustainable, and that it also changes the climate in drastically negative ways (no news there). But he further develops this argument into how rampant economic growth is also having a negative impact on people--and not just the poor or disadvantaged.

A major theme throughout McKibben's article is how our current system is slowly (or perhaps not-so-slowly) eroding the ties that bring people together, and that these ties are the key to a happier life. People are now more isolated than they've ever been, and McKibben thinks this accounts for the relative constant of happiness despite a growing economy since the 1950s. He also notes that these ties previously put a check on unbridled economic pursuit; people used to be more mindful of the communities they belonged to. McKibben points out that Adam Smith (who developed the economic theory that would become capitalism in The Wealth of Nations) had this in mind when he envisioned capitalism working to make everyone richer. But now, with the decreased power of these ties, the economy is left to its own devices at the expense of the people, far from Smith's vision.

McKibben does note that happiness will increase with more money--but only up to a certain amount. (The breaking point appears to be $10,000 per person.) People who live in financial insecurity and poverty typically aren't meeting their basic needs: healthy food, adequate housing, access to medical care, etc. But once these needs are met, the level of happiness correlates more with one belonging to a strong network of people (i.e., relating to a larger community) rather than how many possessions one can rack up.

McKibben ends by suggesting that we move ourselves more toward a more localized, sustainable economic system rather than the present rampant global economic network. He addresses potential skepticism by explaining how smaller, independent farming methods are actually more efficient than large-scale, agribusiness-based farming. McKibben connects this to the beginning of his article by noting that smaller farms would also put less strain on the environment, relying less on industrial machinery and more on human and animal labor (i.e., energy from bio-fuels instead of fossil fuels). And better yet, smaller, more decentralized enterprises such as these would promote the community ties that increase happiness (and personal autonomy), creating a more-fulfilling system for everyone.

Although it has a few typos here and there, McKibben does a good job of developing his point, providing numerous examples, statistics, and quotes. The article can be found here if you want to read it for yourself. However, it equals thirteen pages printed out, so I don't expect many to actually read all the way through it--hence my long description above. If you're really into this kind of stuff, supplementary information for the article can be found here, including this 25-page study on the relationship (or lack thereof) of economics and happiness.

However, while I was browsing on the Freakonomics blog a few days earlier, I remembered running into a series of posts labeled "The Economics of Happiness," most of which support the finding that happiness actually will increase with money--directly at odds with the conclusions in McKibben's article. The first and second posts specifically ("Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox"and "Are Rich Countries Happier than Poor Countries?") point out that happiness can increase with money, providing data to support this finding (including a graph that portrays the correlation as nearly linear). However, Justin Wolfers, the author of these posts, does note some anomalies that he can't account for, such as trends relating to Belgium and Ireland ("Will Raising the Incomes of All Raise the Happiness of All?"). Also, in an unrelated series of posts called "The Politics of Happiness," Arthur Brooks explores the relationship behind political identity and happiness, and possible reasons for it. One of his findings is that conservatives are, on the average, happier than liberals, with one of the reasons being that conservatives tend to be more religious--i.e., they have stronger community ties, which is right in line with McKibben's point that communities increase happiness. In Brooks's third post he even cites one of the same people McKibben cites in his article. In an article for the Atlantic Monthly, David Brooks (unrelated to Arthur Brooks, as far as I know) describes his experience observing a small, rural, poorer conservative town, and how their sense of community was much stronger than in the liberal suburb that he lived in. When Brooks spoke with some of the townspeople, most liked where they lived, despite the fact that Brooks's suburb was wealthier. But nonetheless, Wolfers findings can't be ignored, and essentially puts the question back in a state of being unanswered. Is the pursuit of happiness conditional on the pursuit of riches?

This contradiction aside, there is another interesting point about McKibben's article: its message is somewhat similar to that of the Unabomber's essay (albeit McKibben is more toned down, more thought-through, and offers realistic suggestions). Both authors share the view that the current system of economic-technological development is a detriment to our well-being (defined as either happiness (McKibben) or self-fulfillment and autonomy (Kaczynski)) because it has disrupted the strong social ties that originally supported people and kept the economy in check, in addition to destroying the environment. Moreover, Arthur Brooks's posts (and David Brooks's observations) finding lower happiness levels among liberals vaguely echo Kaczynski's explanation of people affected by "leftism" dedicating themselves to the causes of oppressed groups as a surrogate activity due to their supposed feelings of inferiority. However, I would say that McKibben and the others are a better source of information than Kaczynski, due to their citations of statistics and other studies to support their conclusions.

Of course, this has left us in a conundrum. Can money indeed buy happiness? Or is our pursuit of happiness being constantly hampered by our belief that it can be bought?