CHAPTER 2
We believe these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness … that to secure these rights governments are instituted.
—THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, 1776
By now, we hope you agree that simply increasing the GDP is not necessarily the best goal for the economy. But what should we measure instead? What is the economy for, anyway? Our answer comes from a little-known pamphlet written by Gifford Pinchot, then the first chief of the United States Forest Service. Pinchot was no wild-eyed radical. He was a Republican with progressive views. One day in 1905, Pinchot penned a memo offering his view of the job he’d been hired to do.
His task, Pinchot explained, was to manage the public forests of America to achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run.”1 The forests, he thought, should be used to benefit all Americans, rich and poor. They should not be locked away. But they should be managed carefully, to provide all generations to come with lumber, clean water, and recreation.
The greatest good.
For the greatest number.
Over the longest run.
We suggest that this trinity, Pinchot’s mandate, should provide the new goals for our economy. Yet even in Pinchot’s day, they were not new ideas. Utilitarianism, a movement started in eighteenth-century England by the economist Jeremy Bentham, had long argued that the first two elements in the trinity were the true purposes of an economy.2
But Pinchot worried about posterity. The greatest good for the greatest number might mean using up everything now to make everybody happy in the short run. And that wouldn’t be very good for those who came later. So Pinchot added the longest run. But in practice, what do these terms—the greatest good, the greatest number, and the longest run—mean? We think they are synonymous with (1) a high quality of life, (2) social justice or fairness, and (3) sustainability. We’ll get to justice and sustainability later in the book. But now, let’s consider the following question: If the greatest good means a high quality of life, what are the elements of such a life?
The Greatest Good
We asked people on the street about this. They answered, “A job that you care about, good health, family life, security, and friends ‘to get you through hard times.’ ” Though no one actually mentioned needing a lot of money, we suspect they didn’t consider money irrelevant either. But one interviewee put things in the simplest of terms: “I want to be happy.”
Indeed, a high quality of life is one that makes people happy. That’s what Bentham believed, and he wasn’t alone among Enlightenment thinkers. Thomas Jefferson famously enshrined “the pursuit of happiness” as a right in the Declaration of Independence, adding that to secure such rights, “governments are instituted among men.”
Jefferson even went so far as to conclude that the “only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.” Likewise, the American Constitution declared that the new government was established to, among other things, “promote the general welfare” of the people. So Pinchot’s ideas were not novel even in his time.
To see whether the economy is accomplishing this first goal—promoting the greatest good, or the happiness of the people—we need to know what makes people happy and how our economic policies either enhance or thwart our pursuit of happiness. This is a subjective matter, of course, but not nearly as subjective as many people think.
There is now a respected “science of happiness,” and interestingly, its findings mirror the teachings of our great religions; it is, indeed, “better to give than to receive,” for example. An entire legion of books on the topic has been written in the past few years, some of them insightful, some of them fluff. None of the books conclude that the economic route to happiness consists of endlessly widening the superhighway of accumulation.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) increasingly takes happiness studies seriously. The OECD (made up of representatives from thirty of the world’s richest nations) is looking for a whole new set of indicators on which to judge the progress of member countries. Its new Global Project aims at collecting so-called best practices—social and economic policies that are clearly shown to increase life satisfaction.
Gross National Happiness
The newfound interest in happiness has a surprising origin, a tiny landlocked Himalayan country called Bhutan, believed by some to be the model for Shangri-La, the utopia in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon. Here, an old way of life continues. Beneath soaring, icy summits, shepherds tend their flocks amid impossibly green terraces of rice and potatoes. Prayer flags flutter above dramatically beautiful palaces and fortresses. Bhutan is still idyllic.
But this little country of less than one million people is home to a great, and modern, experiment. “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product,” its then sixteen-year-old king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, proclaimed upon his coronation in 1972.3
In most countries, and especially in ours, King Wangchuck’s proclamation might have been greeted with a polite smile, a yawn, and a quick return to the business of making money. But not in Bhutan, where people take their king’s pronouncements seriously.
So for nearly forty years, Bhutan has actually been implementing the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH ), seeking ways to measure its progress toward greater well-being and shape its institutions with that goal in mind. Especially in the past decade, the Bhutanese have brought many of the world’s smartest happiness researchers to their country in an effort to apply scientific rigor to the task of making their fellow citizens happier. It almost seems like a fable: one of the smallest and poorest of nations teaching the rich and powerful how to live.
November 2009. The cavernous ballroom at the Rafain Palace Hotel in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, is full, for the Fifth International Gross National Happiness conference. The audience of eight hundred people, many of them jet-lagged from transcontinental flights and wishing they were soaking in the splendor of the world’s largest waterfall only ten miles away, would be a tough sell for any speaker. But in his quiet, humble way, Karma Ura engages them. Ura, the director of the Center for Bhutan Studies in Thimphu, Bhutan, explains that years of research into Gross National Happiness have led the Bhutanese to consider nine “domains” for assessing happiness.
1. Psychological well-being
2. Physical health
3. Time use (work-life balance)
4. Community vitality and social connection
5. Education
6. Cultural preservation, access, and diversity
7. Environmental sustainability
8. Good governance
9. Material well-being4
Bhutan’s king found out that good, democratic governance was one of the important pillars of well-being. He became determined to make Bhutan a democracy and traveled throughout the country promoting the change. He then abdicated his throne despite popular pressure to remain in power. In 2008, Bhutan peacefully elected its first parliament. Its constitution enshrines Gross National Happiness as the purpose of government.
Bhutan has developed questionnaires with which to measure life satisfaction in each of these dimensions. Officials use these in regular polls of the Bhutanese people. Included are such questions as: How often do you feel safe from human harm? Rarely? Usually? Always?
The Bhutanese now base major policy decisions in part on an analysis of how changes might affect each of these domains, for better or worse. At a minimum, any change should not diminish the overall satisfaction derived from the domains; at best, it should enhance many of them. Recently, when considering a proposal to join the World Trade Organization, Bhutan used the policy tool established to analyze legislation. Needing a score of 69 on this measure, the proposal failed miserably (with a 42), and Bhutan has not joined.5
Bhutan’s GNH undergoes consistent improvement. In March 2011, the National Statistics Bureau of Bhutan invited Dave and colleagues Bob Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski to help conduct a workshop there about natural capital and ecosystem services, part of Dave’s regular work with Earth Economics. Bureau director Kuenga Tshering outlined a five-year goal to improve Bhutan’s environmental sustainability (one of its nine domains of happiness) with practical physical measures of the content and benefits of the nation’s resources, from lowland wetlands to Himalayan glaciers. Participants also advocated designing measurements for climate change threats such as glacial outbursts, forest fires, and flooding. At the workshop, Kuenga Tshering explained the kind of happiness Bhutan seeks to measure, “Gross National Happiness is not about momentary happiness, as from buying something new. It is about contentment that comes from family, community, spirituality, education, yes, material things, but also good governance, good relationship with nature, good physical health. We think this is the best path for Bhutan. We hope other countries can find value in what we’re doing.”6
As part of Bhutan’s GNH calculations, Tshering’s National Statistics Bureau may develop the world’s most robust natural capital accounting system.
It’s necessary to make clear that we don’t put Bhutan on a pedestal; Bhutan’s happiness levels, life expectancy, and quality of life have improved greatly in recent years, but its human rights record regarding Nepalese immigrants earns criticism, much of it deserved. But to suggest, as some have, that we pay no attention to Bhutan’s ideas about measuring and improving happiness because it is not Utopia would be like rejecting those of Thomas Jefferson because he had slaves.
Diminishing Marginal Happiness
Traditional economics holds that marginal utility, the value added by each new widget to life satisfaction, for example, decreases with each additional acquisition of the same item. Happiness scientists have found that the same thing holds true with overall material consumption. For poor nations, happiness tends to rise quickly when purchasing power and standard of living increase. But past a certain level of annual income, perhaps as low as about $10,000 per person, the curve of increased satisfaction flattens and eventually becomes a straight line. It may even begin to decline. So, for instance, in the United States, surveys of self-reported life satisfaction show a slight downward trend over the past half century, despite average incomes more than doubling.7
It is true that in virtually all societies, rich people are happier than poor people, a phenomenon that reflects status and power differences and the psychological fact that we tend to judge our success, and therefore rate our satisfaction, in comparison to others. Yet as an entire society’s income rises past a minimum of modest comfort and economic security, overall levels of happiness do not rise with it.
This finding led the former Harvard president Derek Bok to a sensible observation: “If it turns out to be true that rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier, as much of the recent research suggests, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?”8
Good question.
But if rising incomes don’t do the trick, is there any hope at all? Is economic policy totally irrelevant to happiness? Is it all merely a matter of personal attitude? We don’t think so. A certain portion of happiness is genetic—perhaps 50 percent, according to researchers. Some people are born more cheerful than others. But genetics can’t explain the wide variation between countries in measures of happiness. Environmental and social conditions matter too, and policy often shapes these conditions.9
Measuring Happiness
In his influential book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, the British economist Richard Layard catalogs the many methods psychologists now use to measure how happy people are. Self-reported happiness or well-being is generally quite accurate. It is usually confirmed by physical evidence from brainwave tests and by assessments from friends and associates. We actually have good evidence that psychologists’ measurements of happiness not only are accurate but also operate effectively across cultures.
The Gallup-Healthways organization conducts regular polls of life satisfaction: a daily poll in the United States and annual surveys in about 150 other countries. The annual country survey tends to find that residents of Nordic countries are, by and large, the happiest people on Earth. While most of the nations at the top of the list are affluent, moderate-income Costa Rica is always high on the charts. The 2009 survey ranked Denmark number one (it usually is), followed by Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden.10
And it’s not just the pastries, cell phones, wooden shoes, or bikini teams.
A 2009 article in the conservative-leaning Forbes magazine explained what the top four countries all have in common: They are highly egalitarian, having among the world’s smallest gaps between rich and poor; they pay great attention to work-life balance, having some of the world’s shortest average working hours; and finally, perhaps shockingly to Americans, they pay some of the world’s highest taxes! We’ll explore exactly why these things matter later in this book.11
Lessons from the Happiest Countries
The University of British Columbia economist John Helliwell, considered one of the world’s leading happiness experts, points out that “the happiest countries, like Denmark, are, first of all, countries with a higher sense of community. They give people opportunities to engage with each other. And they have higher levels of trust, which is so essential to happiness. If people lose a wallet in these countries, they expect it will be returned with everything intact, and it is, almost always.”
Helliwell adds: “They are generous. Denmark ranks at the top in per capita foreign aid and expenses to fight global warming. Generosity is huge where happiness is concerned. We give students twenty bucks each and tell one group to spend the money on themselves and the other group to give it away. The ones who give it away always report higher happiness levels afterwards.
“The Danes also encourage everyone to participate. In their eldercare facilities, everyone works, not just the staff. The people who live there are treated as citizens, not clients. Their summer camps bring kids to spend time with seniors in eldercare facilities, and the kids don’t want to leave.” Helliwell notes that although Americans sometimes think of Denmark as a nanny state, with great restrictions on personal freedom, the Danes rank highest in the world when asked, “Do you have the freedom to make your life as you choose?”12
At a 2010 Gross National Happiness conference in Vermont, Line Kikkenborg Christensen, a young Danish graduate student, explained why Danes feel free. “I feel secure for me and for my children, so I can follow my passion,” she declared. The Danes’ strong social safety net (including excellent free health care, free higher education, and generous unemployment insurance) means they feel less need to get the highest-paying jobs and can choose the work they find most satisfying.13
Jennifer Lail, a University of Washington graduate student, observed the Danish attention to social connection while she was studying in Copenhagen. Her experience was eye-opening. “It’s not a cultural norm to work after five there,” she says. “Outdoor cafés fill up, even in winter. There’s lots of attention to health as well. Hiking maps are everywhere, and half of all trips are on bicycle. Neighborhoods have public sports halls that most people belong to, from childhood on.” Despite working less, the Danes are very productive while working, and Denmark is a wealthy country.
You always see many people in the streets, and there is this sense of people taking care of each other, trusting each other. It’s common to leave babies sleeping in their strollers outside stores. Everyone feels safe doing that. They are also serious about the design of things. They have lots of ways to make cars slow down. You find tables and benches on ordinary sidewalks so people can stop to rest and chat awhile with friends or strangers. Before I came to Copenhagen, I thought I knew what livability was, but I didn’t.14
“Happiness is about time with family and friends, trust in neighbors, attachment to place,” says John Helliwell. “Atlantic Canadians are happier than people in Alberta or British Columbia, even though they have lower incomes. They have more social connection.”15
Helliwell’s observations were confirmed for John de Graaf on a recent flight from Seattle to Houston. He sat next to a vivacious young woman, an actress and singer from Beirut, Lebanon, named Milia Ayache. She was on her way from Vancouver, where she’d been visiting her grandmother, to enjoy Thanksgiving with other relatives in Texas.
Milia had learned what matters most in life from her experiences during bombing raids in Beirut. When Hezbollah or Israeli bombs fell on her city, her middle-class family fled their home for nearby mountains. She remembered her mother telling her she had only minutes to pack a small suitcase. What would she take, knowing that her home might be only rubble when she returned? In such times, it was clear what mattered most—not expensive electronic gadgets, but a few clothes and items of sentimental value, like photographs, connections to the people in her life.
Friends Are Fun!
Not only does social connection matter for long-term life satisfaction. As Derek Bok points out, it also brings the most immediate pleasure. Researchers have found that the following activities, ranked on a scale from 1 to 5, are among the most productive of positive emotions when subjects are asked how happy they feel throughout the day: intimate relations (4.74), socializing after work (4.12), dinner (3.96), relaxing (3.91), and socializing at work (3.75).
By contrast, the least enjoyable activities include the evening commute (2.78), working (2.65), and that mother of all downers, the morning commute (2.04). For most people, these are solitary activities.16
Research on well-being finds that people are often poor judges of what will make them happy. In the United States, we are often encouraged to seek material wealth; President Ronald Reagan once said that he hoped America would always remain a country where everyone had the opportunity to “get rich.” Compared with the 1970s, a far higher percentage of college students now rank “making a lot of money” above “contributing to society” on their lists of what they hoped to gain from a degree. Yet the psychologist Tim Kasser found that people whose key motivation is material wealth wind up less happy than those whose goal is service.
“You can be rich and happy, especially if your original motivation was to make a positive difference in the world,” Kasser says. “But you are far more likely to live an unsatisfied life if you go for the money first, if your primary motivation is to get rich.”17 If wealth is your goal, you are less likely to develop strong social bonds; and if you succeed in becoming wealthy, you may always sense that others are befriending you only to gain a share of your cash.
The Time Balance Problem
What social connection requires most is adequate time. (We examine this issue more thoroughly in chapter 6.) The Bhutanese have elevated the issue of time balance nearly to the top of their list of domains of Gross National Happiness. Bhutanese do pretty well in this regard. Karma Tshiteem, secretary of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission, points out that Bhutanese have thirty to forty paid vacation days plus twenty-four paid national holidays a year, and they want to keep it that way!18 Yet time pressures present clear challenges to happiness in most countries.
Michael Pennock, a population health specialist and statistician at the Vancouver Island Health Authority in Victoria, British Columbia, was invited to Bhutan to help develop its happiness questionnaire, and spent several months in the mountainous kingdom. Bhutanese officials, he explains, wanted the survey to be detailed and comprehensive. Early versions took more than a day to administer. One woman fainted while taking it.
Apparently, the Bhutanese were patient enough for such a long survey. But Pennock knew people in Western industrial countries, growing up in a culture of instant gratification, instant oatmeal, and instant messaging, would never tolerate a long questionnaire. So he developed one that takes only about thirty minutes.
If you’re interested, the new, shorter questionnaire is available online at www.sustainableseattle.org. The questionnaire has been used in a scientific sampling of more than 2,400 residents in Victoria by a group called the Victoria Happiness Index Partnership. The same results regarding time use prevailed: While Victoria residents gave their overall quality of life a high rating of 76 (out of 100—Denmark typically scores in the low 80s; the United States in the low 70s), their time balance score was only 46 (the lowest of all dimensions surveyed).
One finding from the survey was particularly revealing. Residents of Victoria scored highest in “freedom from deprivation” (92). Only 6 percent of them thought they’d be happier if they had more possessions. Yet 66 percent hoped for more financial security. They gave their financial security a 53 score; only time balance came in lower. Clearly, they were nervous about keeping their jobs and about what kind of safety net might await them if they were to be suddenly laid off work. This is a serious concern—and even more so for Americans who also stand to lose their health care when they lose their jobs.
“The results suggested that stress and problems of time-balance were the most important factors in limiting well-being across the regional population,” surmised the Victoria survey report. Interestingly, the Victoria results seem representative for Canada as a whole. Victoria is a prosperous community. But even in the economically depressed coal mining and fishing town of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, the results were similar.19 People are satisfied with the amount of stuff they possess, but worried about their financial security and badly pressed for time.
Susan Andrews says that the time crunch is also a powerful limit to happiness in Brazil. Andrews is an energetic American who moved to Brazil in 1992 and now runs Future Vision, a model “eco-village” and environmental learning center near São Paulo. Andrews helped persuade a small Brazilian city, a university, and a large company to assess the life satisfaction of their citizens, students, and employees. Natura, a large natural cosmetics company, polled its workers using the Bhutanese survey. While majorities reported overall satisfaction in every other area, only 30 percent felt positive about their time balance.20
As the Italian economist Stefano Bartolini of the University of Siena points out in his new book, Manifesto for Happiness (not yet published in English), these findings suggest that focusing our economic strategies and priorities on economic growth may well be counterproductive since it is likely to lead to even more overwork and time stress, while the methods we have used to speed economic growth over the past generation—tax cutting and deregulation—have led to even greater economic insecurity. (We cover this topic in more detail in chapter 5.)
We are now measuring life satisfaction in a major American city. With encouragement from the city council president, Richard Conlin, citizens of Seattle are forming a partnership like that in Victoria, and using the Pennock survey to assess their own life satisfaction.
Sustainable Seattle (the first organization in the world to develop local indicators of well-being back in 1991) has been leading that effort. Laura Musikanski, executive director of Sustainable Seattle, says she wants “to see Seattle become America’s first Gross National Happiness City.” Once the survey is complete, town meetings will be held in Seattle neighborhoods to analyze the results and make policy recommendations to the city council. Repeating the survey every couple of years can then tell Seattle if it has made progress.21
The Problem of Depression
Most Americans are fairly happy, and nearly a third of them are very happy. Yet while the share of Danes calling themselves “very happy” increased by 22 percent from 1975 to 2005, the American results, as pointed out earlier, have been roughly stable for half a century.22
Even then, the scores sometimes seem removed from the mood in the land. Indeed, while overall life satisfaction in the United States is very high, Americans rank far down the list when it comes to measures of negative emotions. According to Gallup-Healthways, people in 144 other countries report being less stressed than Americans, people in 88 countries report less worry, people in 68 countries report fewer periods of sadness, and people in 74 countries are less angry than we are. A quarter of Americans report feeling the blues each day, while two fifths are stressed out.
John Graham, a former diplomat who founded the Giraffe Heroes Project, which honors Americans who “stick their necks out for the common good,” warns of desperation beneath all the smile buttons.
There was a brawl in a major league baseball game between the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals. Fights happen in sports, and the only thing special about this one was the reaction on sports talk radio the following morning. The consensus among hosts and guests was that the brawl was a good thing, not just because it had helped revive flagging interest in baseball, but that it added juice to fans’ lives. It became clear, listening, that both pundits and fans agreed that violent anger in sports generated excitement in fans when so little else in their lives did. Nobody expressed the thought quite this way, but the point of these commentators and their call-in guests was clear: we Americans have lost the passion and energy that makes life fun and exciting, and watching others lash out (and presumably lashing out ourselves) can pull us back from the land of the living dead.23
American rates of anxiety and depression have increased substantially during the past half century. Roughly a quarter of Americans suffer from mental illness, and some 16 percent will experience a major episode of depression during their lifetimes. These figures are among the highest in the world, and double to triple those in most other wealthy countries (about double the European average, for example).24
Treatment of depression costs the U.S. economy roughly $80 billion a year. Most treatment is pharmaceutical: Americans consume a staggering 66 percent of all the antidepressants used in the entire world each year—isn’t that a depressing thought! For those who suffer, the pain is acute. Many cannot afford treatment and do not receive it.25
In all of our major cities, one sees this human catastrophe: lonely people mutter to themselves or curse others; many of them are homeless and consumed by drugs or alcohol, wasting away, desperate, and of little value to a society obsessed with market transactions. Indeed, Derek Bok suggests that one of the most important things we could do to increase American happiness levels would be to devote more resources to providing mental health services to those who need them.
The Battle over Happiness
Happiness is hot. Happiness studies have exploded on American campuses. It seems as if everyone is talking about it these days, even the economists. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke gave the 2010 commencement speech at the University of South Carolina. His title: The Economics of Happiness.
Bernanke suggested that the Gross Domestic Product is a not a reliable measure of economic welfare and warned students about focusing on making a lot of money after graduation. “Money is not enough,” he said. “Indeed, taking a high paying job only for the money can detract from happiness if it involves spending less time with your family, stress, and other such drawbacks.”26
In the past year and a half, some twenty-seven thousand books and articles about the science of happiness have been published. Some, like Derek Bok’s The Politics of Happiness, are balanced, thorough, and profound. But others, such as Arthur Brooks’s Gross National Happiness, are ideological and shallow. “The data,” writes Brooks, support the conclusion that “government, important as it is, has inherent happiness-lowering tendencies … taxation is inherently coercive … as government grows—measured in the percentage of GDP it soaks up—the percentage of the population that is satisfied with life shrinks.”27
Really? Brooks’s “data” seem to have eluded most happiness researchers and the Gallup polls that consistently rank high-tax Nordic countries as the world’s most satisfied. Even another conservative, the economist Bruce Bartlett, an adviser to President Reagan, acknowledges that “one would expect the happiest countries to be the lowest-taxed countries. In fact, this is not the case. Most of the world’s happiest countries are high-tax countries.” As a percentage of the GDP, Denmark, the happiest country, pays 49 percent in taxes; Finland pays 43 percent, the Netherlands 39 percent, and Sweden 49 percent. Americans pay 28 percent of total income in taxes.28
Moreover, Brooks’s suggestion that higher taxes cause a decline in happiness conveniently ignores that Americans’ taxes are the lowest they’ve been since the 1950s, while happiness has remained flat and depression increased. Brooks also argues that policies that would increase time balance, including time away from work, would actually reduce happiness, because “most Americans regret that they can’t work more, not that they can’t work less” (italics his). Though satisfying work is important for happiness, the idea that Americans, whatever their jobs, want to work more will no doubt come as a surprise to those who check out Gallup’s daily happiness poll: Americans rate themselves 20 percent happier on weekends (and happier yet during holidays) than on workdays. What a surprise! Interestingly, these results are confirmed precisely by a method of analysis that tracks Americans’ moods by the words they use on Twitter or on Facebook.29
Except in the case of the unemployed, Brooks’s opposition to leisure runs counter to the study of American happiness during daily activities cited earlier in this chapter and other surveys: A 2008 poll found that 69 percent of Americans would favor a law mandating paid vacations, for example; more than 70 percent support a paid family leave mandate; and more than 80 percent favor a law guaranteeing paid sick days.30
Despite the fact that happiness researchers have generally come to conclusions opposite his, Brooks seems determined to wrap the idea of happiness in his ideology in order to convince people that his economic policies, those favored by the government in recent years, are as good as it gets.
We’ll return to some of the (often contradictory) arguments and policies Brooks advances later in this book. Most have been tried and found wanting for at least a generation. Still, even Arthur Brooks understands the lack of connection between GDP and life satisfaction: “Economic growth is not, and never can be, a direct measure of our national happiness. A narrow focus on gross domestic product without a conversation about how it meshes with and enhances our culture and values, will not necessarily enhance our gross national happiness. In fact, it may take us in the wrong direction altogether.”31
Amen to that!
So What Can We Do to Be Happier?
It should be clear by now that psychologists know quite a lot about what kinds of behaviors lead to greater happiness. So what can we do with our economy to improve well-being? We need to pay more attention to time balance, security, and social connection. As individuals we can focus more of our time on family and community, and on building trust. We can devote less attention to maximizing incomes and more attention to generosity. As workers, we can ask our employers for more time off instead of higher pay. Less stuff and less debt allow for a better life with less income, less stress, and more time. In our local communities, we can find ways to design more relationship-friendly places. Farmers’ markets are one great example. Shoppers there engage in ten times as many conversations with other people as those in supermarkets.32 In our cities, as in Denmark, we can design public and private spaces that facilitate social connection, instead of discouraging it, as our pattern of urban sprawl surely does. For more suggestions, you’ll need to keep reading …
Meanwhile, let’s get beyond the GDP and see how our economic policies affect the quality of our lives.