Happiness: It’s Always Sunny in Costa Rica
Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.
—David Lee Roth
Big bucks, long life, realizing who we are—technology must be making us amazingly happy, right? Well, that depends on what we count as happiness.
Happiness consists of at least two different concepts. One is a longer-term feeling or sense of general satisfaction. It can be conscious or subconscious, and it can change depending on whether you’re thinking about it. You might go contentedly about your daily routine and not really notice it, but when you sit down and consider your life, you might realize you really aren’t happy with it. It can also work the other way around. Maybe you’re usually a miserable cur, but when you stop to take stock you realize that life is actually pretty good. Either way, satisfaction with life is an ephemeral quality that we all contemplate from time to time in different ways.
The other flavor of happiness is more short term. It comes in bursts and is generally more extreme than the longer-term type. It happens when someone tells a funny joke, when you plunge down that incline on a roller coaster, when you orgasm, or when you trip out on drugs. The elation feels strong, but it often fades after a time. You may remember it for a few days afterward, but otherwise it becomes just another fond memory.
The age-old nature-versus-nurture dichotomy ultimately governs and influences both types of happiness. Studies have found that genetics and brain chemistry determine up to half of our potential emotional happiness, whether fleeting or long term. We can get happier in this regard with psychological treatment or with external stimulants such as antidepressants or narcotics.
This particular kind of happiness will continue to improve as our understanding of the brain deepens. With new discoveries, we’ll have more ways—drugs, psychological treatments, and possibly even mental tricks—to make ourselves happy. Then, of course, the question will come down to whether we’ll actually bother with them or not.
Neuroscience is one of the fastest accelerating sciences. Its practitioners are routinely challenging long-held theories. For much of the twentieth century, for example, the consensus held that after a period of flexibility in childhood the brain was relatively immutable. Science thus supported the theory that people become more set in their ways the older they get and that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Recent research, however, has cast considerable doubt on this line of thinking. Many scientists now believe in neuroplasticity, the ability to change both the brain’s physical structure and functional organization.
It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Simple tricks are often able to change behaviors. With just a box and mirrors, neuroscientists at the University of California at San Diego have succeeded in relieving amputees’ “phantom pain,” a sensation that manifests as itching or intense discomfort in places where they used to have limbs or appendages. The box has two compartments, one for each arm or leg. Placing the mirror in the middle of the box creates a reflective illusion for the amputee of seeing a whole limb in place of the missing one. Through simple movement exercises involving the whole limb, patients subconsciously fool their brains into thinking that they still have the absent part. Painkillers and surgical treatment had little success in treating such phantom pains, but the box trick has worked remarkably well. In 2007, the US Army tried it on a group of amputees, and all of them reported a reduction in pain. The project was then extended to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Rwanda to help treat land mine victims and people afflicted with leprosy. Similar results followed.
Neuroplasticity will play an increasingly important role in treating all manner of addictions, from drugs to gambling. Scientists have surmised that addictions happen when certain neural pathways become inflexible through prolonged indulgence. Imagine the neural pathway as an electrical cord and a particular drug as an outlet. Addiction happens when you can’t pull the plug from the wall, thereby making the connection itself rigid and immutable. Pain, depression, anger, and a loss of self-control result unless the habit is fueled continually. External treatments such as quitting cold turkey or even other drugs may help in the short term, but they often don’t alleviate the long-term issue because the neural pathways exist as before, which can result in relapse. “We are probably not going to find new therapies by trying to understand the modifications caused by a drug in the brains of drug addicts since their brain is anaplastic,” wrote researchers Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Olivier Manzoni, from the Neurocentre Magendie in Bordeaux, in a 2010 report. “The results of this work show that it is in the brain of the non-addicted users that we will probably find the key to a true addiction therapy . . . Understanding the biological mechanisms which enable adaptation to the drug and which help the user to maintain a controlled consumption could provide us with the tools to combat the anaplastic state that leads to addiction.”1
The Brain Activity Map launched by the US government in 2013 is expected to net the same kind of breakthroughs in neuroscience as the Human Genome Project did and will continue to do for plain old biology. Beyond that, there’s also neural engineering. It won’t be long before scientists can identify and then eliminate or lessen the impact of those parts of us that make us sad or unhappy. The question then becomes—as it does with all scientific methods of instilling happiness—whether we should use them.
As with all potentially transformative technologies, there is considerable consternation about neural engineering. Mirroring the fears of genetic manipulation and designer babies—where parents pick and choose which traits, such as gender or eye color, they want in their kids—critics worry that neural engineering will lead to the wholesale elimination of certain behaviors and thought patterns that we don’t understand fully. Depression and bipolarity, for example, could be eliminated, even though recent studies have found that people who suffer from these conditions are often more creative.
Such fears are overblown, though, because they don’t acknowledge how such technologies are absorbed into society. They don’t arrive suddenly, but rather incrementally over a long period of time.
Robots are a good example. Society didn’t go from computers to cyborgs in a single year or even a century. Robotic technology has been creeping into our lives slowly. Take the robot cars predicted to hit the mainstream by 2020. They won’t just appear from the clear blue sky then, fully autonomous and ready to go. Each year’s new models add one more piece of that eventual puzzle. Carmakers have been doing it for decades by slowly adding cruise control, lane detectors, rear cameras, and even automatic parallel parking abilities. This incremental transformation allows plenty of time to assess, discuss, and prepare for new paradigms. With the world barreling toward fully autonomous vehicles, the conversations about what changes they’ll bring are already happening now. (It’s also the main reason that Singularity University exists.)
The initial applications of neural-engineering will be, like bioengineering, therapeutic in nature. Once scientists have a fuller understanding of how to change the brain, demand will call—with virtually no resistance—for applying such techniques to debilitating conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cerebral palsy. During this phase, we will have plenty of opportunity to debate the scope of the technology and how far it should go. Should it treat or eliminate depression? What if people want to use it recreationally?
But technology can sometimes move too quickly for such conversations to take place, which squares with what we know about Moore’s Law. The NSA’s wide-scale privacy violations, discussed earlier, stand as good examples of technological capabilities running amok and forcing society to play catch-up with its values and laws. Technology automatically outpacing social reaction to it may be the new status quo, which certainly is cause for concern because it necessitates a new mode of collective thinking. Transformative technologies need to be assessed early in their development processes. We have to start thinking about the ramifications sooner and faster. Fortunately, our ability to gather data, have conversations and come to evidence-based conclusions is also improving quickly, thanks yet again to Moore’s Law. So it may be just the legal aspect that needs to speed up.
But lest we forget, only about half of our happiness is internalized. The rest depends on the world around us and what we do to it. Biological happiness will improve, so are we getting happier according to nonbiological measures? In a word: Yes. As happiness experts put it—and, yes, happiness experts exist—health and life expectancy are the biggest affective factors on positive happiness levels. No matter what fatalists or goths may say, people aren’t happy when they’re sick or dead or when everyone around them is. In that sense, happiness is increasing in lock step with prosperity and life expectancy. As the United Nations’ 2012 World Happiness Report puts it:
Life on earth has, at least on average, become much less brutish, nasty, and short over the past five hundred years. The evidence for this ranges from falling murder rates to rising life expectancies. There are no long-standing happiness measures available to track these life improvements, but it would be no surprise if individual and community-level aspirations and standards have risen over the same centuries, even if at a lower rate.2
Just as with health, happiness ties to economic prosperity. Where one increases, so does the other. However, happiness shares further similarities with economic growth and, in particular, what’s happening with global equality. The world is becoming happier, but happiness within certain countries isn’t necessarily keeping pace. Some countries, in fact, have stalled. The United States, despite amazing economic growth over the past half century, has seen little to no improvement in reported life satisfaction levels over that time.
Rigidly thinking economists believe that happiness is linked solely to financial prosperity, but they’re wrong. If people were purely rational, then money could buy happiness . . . and Justin Bieber and Jersey Shore would never have become cultural icons.
Many other factors besides income come into play. How secure people feel, whether they have other people around whom they love and trust, how long their commute is all determine an individual’s happiness. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs states that physiological necessities—breathing, food, water, and sleep—plus safety issues such as security of resources, employment, and health must be fulfilled before anyone can approach life satisfaction. More ephemeral factors build upon that baseline, including love, belonging, friendship, intimacy, confidence, achievement, having the respect of others, creativity, spontaneity, and self-actualization. All of those are necessary for humans to achieve true happiness and life satisfaction. As we’ve seen, technology plays a role in every one of those areas.
MAKING MORE THAN THE JONESES
A number of ongoing efforts exist to measure happiness, including the Gallup World Poll and the European Values Survey. Happiness research, unfortunately, suffers from the “giggle factor.” There’s a tendency not to take it seriously. But we should pay attention to such studies because researchers have been refining their methodologies for decades, formulating and testing more incisive questions every year. Such social scientists are benefiting from their own version of Moore’s Law, where the efficacy and accuracy of their surveys are improving. This isn’t just touchy-feely nonsense.
According to the Gallup World Poll’s Cantril ladder, which measures overall happiness levels from one to ten (ten being the highest), about half the world rates moderately happy, scoring between four and six. Fewer than 3 percent of people rate themselves as very unhappy, a one, while almost a similar proportion is extremely happy, at ten. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have the highest percentage at eight or above—almost a third of their respective populations—while at the other extreme lies sub-Saharan Africa, where almost a third of people are at three or below. The top five happiest countries in descending order: Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada. The United States still ranks relatively well at tenth, despite its lack of improvement in recent years.
Given the highest-scoring countries, the correlations with economic prosperity are obvious. But then what? Income obviously plays a significant role, but the Easterlin Paradox—coined by economist Richard Easterlin in 1974—eventually comes into play. His theory holds that richer people are generally happier than poorer people, but they don’t get much happier as they get even richer. This is also known as the diminishing marginal utility of income. An extra dollar improves a poor person’s satisfaction much more than for someone who is already rich. Put another way, a ten-thousand-dollar raise for someone making ten thousand dollars a year results in a measurable increase in happiness, yet a ten-million-dollar raise to someone already making ten million probably won’t make much of a difference to their overall satisfaction—apart from a brief, euphoric spike that might involve a big party on a yacht.
The hedonic treadmill theory holds that people generally return to a relative state of happiness after major events or windfalls. So that extra ten thousand dollars makes somebody happy temporarily, but if he was a miserable sort to start, eventually, even as a twenty-thousand-dollar earner, he’ll return to being just as crusty as before. In this case, happiness is a social measure that’s relative compared to how everyone else is doing. Ask yourself this question: Would you rather make a hundred thousand dollars a year if that’s what everyone else was making, or would you prefer seventy-five thousand if everyone else was getting only fifty thousand? Many people would take the lower amount because it means they’re surpassing the Joneses.
These theories explain why some poorer countries do well in the various happiness studies. Costa Rica tops average life satisfaction in Gallup Polls, while Puerto Rico leads the same measure in the World Values Survey. Bhutan, a tiny kingdom nestled between Nepal and India, has an average life satisfaction of six out of ten, despite having a per-capita income of fewer than three thousand dollars. The rest of the explanation falls to those other factors from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—the fuzzy stuff like friends, family, love, and cute bunnies.
Social capital—such as the relationships and trust discussed in chapters six and seven—is very important to happiness, and it’s been tested in various ways, most notably by Reader’s Digest Europe in 1996. The magazine performed an experiment in which it dropped ten cash-bearing wallets, which included identifications with names and addresses, in twenty different Western European and a dozen US cities. The frequency with which the wallets were returned, cash intact, correlated highly with previously established levels of national trust in international surveys. In Canada, meanwhile, surveys have found large measures of trust for neighbors, police, strangers, and co-workers, which helps explain why Canadians rank well in happiness ratings, and why they value privacy so much. We trust each other not to violate it, so an erosion of privacy equals an erosion of trust.
Trust has fallen substantially over time in countries such as the United States and United Kingdom and has risen in places such as Denmark and Italy. The United States hasn’t seen its overall happiness levels increase in decades. By way of explanation, the World Happiness Report points to “a decline in the quality of human relationships, as measured by increased solitude, communication difficulties, fear, distrust, family infidelity and reduced social engagement.” Basically, everything we’ve discussed in the past few chapters.3
Equality is also an important measure, and, as we’ve seen, it’s worsening in some places such as, again, the United States. Greater inequality leads to increased social tensions—Occupy Wall Street, for example—more poverty, and higher crime. Those problems build upon themselves, with racial unrest, endemic corruption, and police abuses following, all of which contributes to an erosion of social trust.
Ironically, our deepening individuality may be having a detrimental effect on happiness. Take marriage, for example. People already happy on their own have a higher chance of attracting a partner, and statistics show that marriage boosts happiness, at least for a time, because such unions typically fulfill many of Maslow’s needs: a spouse provides love, support, a buffer against life’s shocks, sex and intimacy, plus a financial partner. Studies also have shown that substance abuse occurs less often with married people.4
Conversely, divorced people tend to be happier than unhappily married people and having children—perhaps surprisingly—has no net benefit on life satisfaction levels. Kids may bring joy to a person’s life, but they also entail economic commitments and a significant loss of personal time. That changes as children get older, but as my own mother cheekily says: That’s when the disappointments start. Your little bundle of joy may not take up your time or money when he’s older, but he could end up dealing drugs, joining a gang, or not calling every couple of days.
Some evidence suggests that declining religious belief may be affecting happiness levels too, although this is something of a paradox. While there generally is, as the World Happiness Report puts it, “strikingly more positive emotion and less negative emotion among those people who are more religious” in countries where life is tough, prosperity counters some of that. In other words, having your own home and a reliable source of food beats believing in God any day. Even still, greater religiosity has some correlation with fewer depressive symptoms, and most studies find at least some positive effect of religion on well-being. Which makes sense. Most religions warn against materialism, another word for the hedonic treadmill that opposes happiness.
Religion also helps breed altruism. Most faiths encourage adherents to help their neighbors. Plenty of evidence proves that people who are more selfless are happier. In fact, the links go beyond correlation to causality. For example, many volunteering opportunities arose after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When the two Germanies formally reunified a year later, those opportunities ended abruptly. People who had volunteered in the East experienced bigger drops in happiness levels than those who hadn’t. Another experiment had a group of test subjects undertake three extra acts of kindness to strangers per day, and found that significant boosts in happiness resulted.
The bad news, according to the World Giving Report, is that charity—whether donating money or time or simply helping a stranger—has declined. The study measures incidents of charity, not currency amounts, and covers 146 countries. In 2011, “hundreds of millions fewer people have helped others than was the case last year. This has inevitably resulted in a dramatic reduction in charitable support for millions of vulnerable people the world over.”5 Between 2007, the first year of the survey, and 2011, donations of money, volunteering, and helping strangers each dropped several percentage points. The report authors couldn’t explain why this had happened, other than speculating that the global economic crisis may have curtailed people’s generosity.
The most generous country in the world by this measure is Australia. Two-thirds of the population down under donate money and help strangers, while a third volunteer their time. The top ten are a relatively diverse bunch: Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, the Netherlands, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Paraguay, and Denmark. Over the survey’s five years, countries such as Liberia and Sri Lanka have also ranked near the top.
The good news is the report counter-proves the more recent trend because charity appears strongly linked to economic prosperity. A few developing countries rank among the most giving, but prosperous ones dominate the list. We can assume, then, that a country generally becomes more giving as it gets richer, despite periodic fluctuations. As the world becomes more economically prosperous, charity will continue increasing across the board as well.
When we put all these measures together, a clearer picture of the causes of happiness—and the role that technology plays in it—emerges. Economic prosperity and good health provide the baseline upon which more intangible needs can be met. On the flip side, erosion of trust, envy of others, the decline of group institutions, and the rise of individualism act as counter-forces to long-term happiness. The world as a whole is becoming happier as more of it moves toward the baseline, but then what? Is there a point to all of our technologically driven prosperity and good health if they don’t move us beyond that baseline?
The importance of that question proves the validity of happiness surveys and the measure of life satisfaction in general. It makes sense for less happy nations to look to happier countries to see how they’re doing it. In other words, we should all be looking to Denmark. The tiny Scandinavian kingdom of just six million people ranks atop most happiness surveys thanks to an impressive array of world-leading statistics in various measures. It’s wealthy, ranking sixteenth in gross domestic product per capita, and it’s one of the most equal countries in the world, ranking first to fifth in terms of the Gini coefficient depending on who’s doing the measuring.6 Denmark is also first in entrepreneurship and opportunity. Starting a new business is easy there, so people do it a lot.7 Danes are thirty-third globally in life expectancy, although the seventy-nine years they typically live falls only a few years short of world leader Japan’s eighty-three. They don’t get married much, having the eighth-lowest rate in the developed world. Denmark is also the third least religious country in the world, with only 5 percent of the population admitting to attending church.8 So how did the Danes arrive at this curious stew of happiness, and what role does technology play in it?
VIKING GAME THEORY
After exchanging hugs and hellos, my friends in Copenhagen lead me to the train into town, which is a robot. No human drivers operate it, which results, I’m told, in highly efficient and on-time service. The only downside is that you have to hurry on because the doors close promptly. A system run by efficient yet heartless machines doesn’t allow time for lollygagging.
The train delivers me into the heart of old Copenhagen, a wonderful conglomeration of historic buildings and cobblestoned streets, some cordoned off for pedestrians only. The juxtaposition of the modern transportation system against the storied architecture is a little jarring. I’m here to see Peter Gundelach, a professor in the department of sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He has been Denmark’s representative in putting together the European Values Survey for more than twenty years and is something of an expert on Danish happiness.
Gundelach, thoroughly academic in his speech, sidesteps the question of whether he himself is happy. Answering it would be untoward, he almost quips. Instead, he gives me a quick history lesson. Denmark’s most recent big event, he says, happened in 1864, when Germany conquered about a third of its territory. Some of that land was regained in the twentieth century, but the traumatic experience helped unify Danes and shape their expectations in life. “People were able to adjust to this defeat,” he says. “The defeat meant that Denmark had to have small expectations on what it could achieve internationally. They managed to build a feeling of [being] one people that could manage serious circumstances.”9
Happiness levels are linked to such big, catastrophic events, which other countries have experienced more recently. It took Germans and other Europeans decades to get over World War II, while many Americans are still living in the psychological shadow of the 9/11 attacks. If there’s a bright side to such tragic and traumatic events, it’s that they can ultimately unify people and lead to higher happiness levels, but the effects often take time to coalesce. Countries where catastrophes don’t generally happen tend to be happier than those that routinely experience war, terrorism, and other such trauma. Again, stability and economic prosperity rear their heads as all-important factors.
Gundelach’s point, however, is that people everywhere—not just Danes—need to manage their expectations in life if they want to be happy. The prototypical “American Dream” encourages people to dream big and want the world (“and everything in it,” as Tony Montana says in Scarface), but they’re more likely to achieve satisfaction if they set modest goals. This might be hard to do in the current climate, where the media continually and subtly encourage people toward more. Britney Spears literally sings, “Gimme More”—but we’ll get back to that shortly.
The other secret to Denmark’s happiness, Gundelach explains, is that the government is integrated into almost every aspect of people’s lives and beneficently so. My friends in Copenhagen frequently regale me with tales of the benefits and advantages the state makes possible: People get paid to go to university, rather than the other way around; taxes on fatty foods are redistributed to make organically grown goods cheaper; generous maternity benefits are supplemented by psychologist house calls to “see how you’re doing,” and so on. Much of this sounds like insane, interventionist socialism to my market-forces-hardened North American ear, but it’s hard to argue with success. The Danes are a happy bunch.
The small population, in conjunction with the highly integrated government, also results in one strong positive happiness effect: trust. In that way, Denmark is like a small town. “It’s a small homogeneous society where people know each other,” Gundelach says. “They almost consider the state as a friend, compared to southern Europe, where it’s considered an enemy.”
That adds credence to the notion that growing individualism may be negatively affecting happiness, and it’s certainly the case for loners in Denmark. It’s a great place if you go with the crowd, but swimming against the stream can be tough. This is perhaps why we shouldn’t trust international happiness surveys too much. “It’s a way for people to tell that you are integrated into society more than it is a measure of happiness in a general philosophical sense,” Gundelach says.
Alexander Kjerulf seconds that notion. His background is IT, but he quit that unfulfilling career path to become a unique sort of human resources consultant. He bills himself as a “chief happiness officer” and advises companies on how they can improve their employees’ morale and work satisfaction. He comes at the issue of technology and happiness from an intriguing perspective: He’s a big fan of progress, but he’s also aware of the negatives it can create, especially its tendency to alienate people.
One of the big problems with workplaces today, he says, is that employees tend to spend their breaks browsing Facebook. In the past they used to talk to their colleagues while having a cigarette or coffee. People are less likely to talk to one another while out in public because typically they’ve glued their eyes to a smartphone. We also use these devices to navigate foreign cities and translate signs into our native tongues, whereas before we might have asked strangers for help. “That’s too bad because that can make your whole vacation, that one stranger who showed you the way or bought you a cup of coffee,” Kjerulf says. “That doesn’t happen as much now.”10
His point rings true. I switch off my phone’s roaming capability while in Copenhagen because doing otherwise would cost a fortune. The upside? It forces me to ask a passerby for directions to the cafe in which Kjerulf and I met. I don’t have any life-altering experiences along the way, but I also can’t remember the last time I approached a stranger and initiated a conversation.
“We’ve taken away a lot of the things that make us unhappy, but we’ve forgotten a lot of things that make us happy,” Kjerulf says, echoing the Venerable Noh Yu.
Still, there is that plus side, and Denmark is a big beneficiary. One of the biggest contributing factors to the country’s overall life satisfaction levels is Flexicurity, an ingenious employment system that benefits every stakeholder in the country’s economy. “If your job sucks, you can actually quit,” Kjerulf says. “You don’t necessarily need to wait until you find another job. You can say, ‘Screw this.’ ” For workers, the government offers some of the most generous unemployment insurance benefits in the world—up to 80 percent of an individual’s former salary, paid out for up to two years.
Employers also get considerable benefits from the Flexicurity system. It’s relatively easy for them to fire someone if they can show that the person is underperforming or if the economy takes a turn for the worse. Knowing that someone can be cut easily makes companies less hesitant to bring them aboard in the first place and improves the hiring process. That’s in stark contrast to the typical North American way of doing things, where hiring and firing are both laborious processes for employers and employees alike. It’s even worse in France and Spain where overreaching labor laws often prevent companies from firing even the worst employees.
Finally, the third wedge of the Flexicurity model—the Danish government—uses a good chunk of high personal income taxes to fund retraining programs, thereby providing for people who are looking to change careers.
A person’s job—what people spend most of their lives doing—obviously has a major effect on overall life satisfaction. In Denmark, people generally don’t work at jobs they hate. If only that were true in North America, where large swaths of the population toil at jobs they despise with co-workers and bosses they loathe. Danes, on the other hand, generally don’t hesitate to quit their jobs, train for new ones they like more, hold out until something better comes along, or even start their own businesses because a safety net allows them to do so and because, as we saw in chapter four, technology also enables them to do so. All of these factors together do much to explain why the country ranks atop entrepreneurship rankings. Not surprisingly, the European Commission is trying to implement the Flexicurity model in various forms across the continent.
The plumbing that underlies Denmark’s labor system is, of course, technology. Like South Korea, Denmark is one of the most wired and wireless countries in the world. Its land-based and cellular Internet connectivity rank among the fastest and cheapest available. My friends’ home Internet connection is the fastest I’ve ever seen and it costs less than a third of what I pay back home. Smartphone service, meanwhile, is among the cheapest in Europe—an amazing feat in a country where virtually everything is expensive. As such, everyone is well connected regardless of whether they live in big cities or small towns, making Denmark one of the few countries in the world with no digital divide between rich and poor. Enlightened social policy works hand-in-hand with technology to create an egalitarian society that offers numerous possibilities. Starting a business, taking retraining courses, and accessing government services are all cheap and easy.
Still, it’s not all rainbows and roses. Kjerulf worries that Danes are succumbing to that hedonic treadmill. “The American dream used to be a small house with a bedroom that your two kids could share. Now, it’s MTV Cribs,” he says. “Danes are becoming more like Americans in this sense.” One of the biggest and most ironic negatives of technology, particularly the communications kind, is that it expands people’s awareness of what else is out there. The positive effects are obvious, however, as seen in recent years in the Middle East. In countries such as Egypt and Iran, connected citizens have risen up to demand more from their leaders after seeing the freedoms and wealth enjoyed by people in other parts of the world. The more people know about what their neighbors have, the more they tend to want it—and more of it.
That Danish trait of managed expectations that Gundelach mentioned is facing pressure worldwide. People everywhere are seeing everything that everyone else has. Rising conspicuous consumption, materialism, and greed have become the new danger. The phenomenon may be even worse or more powerful in a highly connected country such as Denmark.
The role that media plays in an individual’s relative happiness can’t be understated. A steadily increasing stream of advertising for an exponentially increasing stream of new products is creating wants and needs we never had before. Take the iPad, for example. It’s fantastic and I can’t imagine my life without it now. But has it made us any happier? That’s the big question. The Buddhists say no, and maybe they’re right.
Then there’s the news media, continually telling us that the world is going to hell. It’s become a cliché. Go to any news website or flip on the evening report on TV. All you’re likely to read or see is what’s going wrong in the world: death, corruption, crime, scandal, suffering—and, oh yes, maybe a story about a cute puppy to balance all that horror. The arrival and maturation of the Internet has kicked media—and our exposure to it—into the exponential. With so much of it out there and so much of it negative, that can’t be good for us.
Tor Nørretranders, a veteran science journalist and author, has some unique views on how technology and the media interrelate with happiness, particularly as it pertains to Denmark. He believes the news media functions as an extension of our biological selves in terms of how it approaches what’s going on in the world. Positive news—such as the world’s rapid rise out of extreme poverty, discussed in chapter two—goes largely unreported, but the smallest negative event gets a lot of coverage because we’re hard-wired for that sort of information. In that way, the media is our collective nervous system, delivering only the data pertinent to continued positive operation. “It’s like your body: you get bad news from it in the form of pain, but you don’t get happy news that your liver is actually functioning as normal,” he says. “You don’t get that because you don’t want to pay attention to being happy all the time.”11
The problem with this hard-wiring is that it creates a cloud of psychological negativity that can be difficult to escape and which can actually eat away at our happiness. The problem exacerbates when it comes to technology. The media loves stories about the possibility of Terminator-like robots running amok or about humans losing jobs to them, but the positive aspects of machine automation—how it leads to better, smarter jobs for humans—are rarely if ever discussed. The result is that people become fearful or distrustful of new technology.
Nørretranders worked at a science journal back in the 1970s, when the predominant public view on technological issues was that nuclear power was bad and IT stole human jobs. The publication’s staff took a different perspective and focused on the positive effects of those issues. They framed the growth of IT and computers, for example, as a turning point for society—which quickly earned them the enmity of left-leaning thinkers, of which there are many in Denmark. The din of disagreement swallowed their point about how IT could make society enormously more democratic or potentially even more hierarchical. “There’s this constant discussion over side effects instead of the effects of technology,” he says. “It’s easy to discuss. It’s not intellectually or morally as demanding to discuss. We have to talk about where we want to take [technology]. That is the discussion.”
Nørretranders also worries that media negativity is affecting the all-important trust factor in happiness. Trust really is Denmark’s secret sauce, he says, because people don’t worry about danger, which ultimately lowers transaction costs for the economy and contributes to the efficiency of the system. Lawyers don’t have to be brought into every situation, and even rich people believe in taxes and charity since they understand the benefits those institutions deliver to them. A well-functioning public transit system, for example, ensures that employees get to work on time and that they’re not miserable when they get there, which ultimately pays dividends to the business owner. In the United States, it’s no coincidence that technology companies are leading the way with this sort of thinking. Many have instituted happiness-building measures for employees, including on-site day-care centers, gyms, and even movie theaters.
My conversation with Nørretranders eventually loops back to the game theory discussed back in chapter two. Despite the ever-present danger of greed and materialism growing, Danish people over the course of decades have come to understand the value of collaboration, sharing, and equality on a deep psychological level. Denmark’s finely tuned trust system, although increasingly susceptible to American-style materialism, means that everyone understands the benefits of everyone else benefiting from the country’s wealth. It’s a truth the rest of the world is slowly discovering, Nørretranders says. “It’s not to be romantic or nice to people, it’s just more rational to do it that way.”
NOTHING GROSS ABOUT HAPPINESS
The future of happiness may not lie in pharmaceutical or even neuroscientific breakthroughs but rather in analytics. It’s a fancy word also known as “Big Data,” but it’s really just a modern application of an age-old concept. Governments have been taking census polls of their subjects since Blarg and his compatriots picked a tribe leader. Census results are invaluable tools for setting policy because they give governments clarity on who they’re governing, where those people are, and what their needs might be.
Census-inspired policies are generally aimed at boosting the public’s happiness, but no government has gone as far in this regard as Bhutan’s. The tiny kingdom of just 740,000 people boasts a similarly small GDP per capita of only about twenty-four hundred dollars. Its main businesses are agriculture and selling electricity to India, its huge neighbor to the south. Yet Bhutan long ago realized that money can’t buy happiness.
As far back as 1729, the country’s legal code declared that, “if the government cannot create happiness for its people, there is no purpose for the government to exist.” In 1972, Fourth King Jigme Singye Wangchuck declared “gross national happiness” (GNH)more important than GDP. In 2008, Bhutan added that line of thinking to its constitution:
Gross National Happiness measures the quality of a country in a more holistic way and believes that the beneficial development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occurs side by side to complement and reinforce each other.12
More touchy-feely nonsense, right? Nope. The Bhutanese government isn’t just talking, it’s doing. It conducted its first national happiness survey in 2006, then again in 2008 and 2010. In each case, the questions asked were assessed and improved, the government calling the whole exercise a “living experiment.” The 2010 survey consisted of nine domains further subdivided into thirty-three indicators that measured pretty much every aspect of a person’s life, including assets and housing, household income, hours spent working versus sleeping, faith in government and political participation, health and spirituality levels, time and money donated to charity, and caring for the environment.
The ongoing survey provides an alternate measure of development by letting the government specifically target areas that need improvement. Officials can see that one region of the country may be lagging in essential services such as hospitals, for example, or that people in another area aren’t getting enough sleep for one reason or another. Then they can deploy resources to fix the issues.
It’s micro-management at its finest and also state-oriented—a very Danish approach—in that the government decides the factors that make people happy. But the survey and its weighting of indicators purposely contains some leeway to account for personal choice. Literacy level is one indicator, but a citizen can be considered quite happy without knowing how to read by scoring well in other categories.
This is a low-tech version of Big Data in action. The same exercise, applied with online analytics in a more technologically advanced nation, can provide governments similarly fine-grained information with which to set policy and deploy resources. Many countries already are doing that in a variety of ways, from managing electricity grids and police forces to urban planning and education spending. There are privacy issues, of course, which we discussed in chapter seven, but Big Data holds the promise of improving everyone’s happiness levels by enabling the better deployment of state resources.
So how happy are the Bhutanese? About a tenth of the population scored under the 50 percent mark in the 2010 survey, meaning they were considered unhappy. Close to half scored between 50 and 65 percent, or the narrowly happy category. A third rated extensively happy with a score between 66 and 76 percent, with the remaining 8 percent of the population rating “deeply happy.” Close to 60 percent of people are considered to be “not yet happy,” which means that Bhutan still has a long way to go. The country does relatively well in international surveys, but its own internal measures are obviously more strict.
The funny thing about Bhutan’s GNH is that it’s somewhat hypocritical. While striving for the admirable goal of boosting the happiness of its people, the country also has one of the highest levels of refugees per capita, with some observers claiming that up to a sixth of the population has sought asylum in other countries since 1991.13 The refugees consist mainly of the Lhotshampas, people of Nepalese origins discriminated against and encouraged to leave out of fear that they will overwhelm the native Bhutanese population. The government aims to promote happiness—but only for a select group of people. Bhutan’s GNP also proves that, despite all the touchy-feely nonsense, a country still needs economic prosperity and safety as a baseline for other happiness endeavors.
Nevertheless, the ideal behind Gross National Happiness is good. The goals of strong family structures, respect for culture and traditions, a clean environment, and peaceful coexistence with others all lie at the heart of Bhutan’s efforts, if not always in its actions. As Fifth King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck said in a 2009 lecture, “The duty of our government must be to ensure that these invaluable elements contributing to the happiness and well-being of our people are nurtured and protected. Our government must be human.”14
SUNGLASSES FOR THE FUTURE
The governments of Denmark and Bhutan have it mostly right. Closer relationships, trust, altruism, equality, and freedom matter most to happiness in a post-prosperous world. Technology is helping with some of these factors and harming with others. It’s key to keep in mind, during a period of exponential and ubiquitous technological growth, that we must identify both the positive and negative effects so that the good can be accentuated and the bad ameliorated. Above all, people and governments must realize—or be reminded—that happiness should be the ultimate goal of society.
So far, many of the world’s developed nations, especially the United States, have focused mainly on the bottom half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the basic physiological and economic necessities. The rest of the world, as we saw in earlier chapters, is benefiting from this focus. Millions in developing nations are rising from mere subsistence into a life that offers options and even potential happiness. It’s happening because of a global realization of advanced nations’ best economic practices. Driven by technology, open markets and inter-operation are the best ways known to facilitate the fulfillment of those particular needs. As more countries join the world market, humanity will speed ever faster to a future in which no one needs to despair and everyone has hope.
But globalization is a two-way street—or rather a multi-way intersection—where the best practices of different societies can and will rub off on others. Happiness studies and Big Data are invaluable resources and tools with which all nations can learn about the more advanced stages of Maslow’s hierarchy and what effects higher levels of happiness. Countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, where happiness has stagnated recently, can learn from the efforts of places such as Denmark or Bhutan and figure out how to emulate them within their own systems. American-style corporatism may be bringing the world to a certain level of prosperity, but other countries can help take humanity to the next level.
In that sense, we stand at a novel point in history. As noted earlier in this chapter, there hasn’t been a way to tell how happy people have been historically because we’ve started only recently to keep track in any large-scale way. Now that we’re paying attention and developing the tools, we can form best happiness practices not based on deceptive economic trickle-down theories. That’s a big reason to be optimistic about the future because it’s going to be a lot happier than today.