Chapter 4 Can the Happiness Movement Succeed?
One of the things I can’t stand about this town is the back-stabbing. Where I grew up, we’re front-stabbers.
–– Anthony Scaramucci, 2017
There are two opposing strands in human nature. One says, ‘I am at the centre of the universe and my needs come first.’ The other says, ‘I owe so much to others and I must give back.’ One stresses the differences between my own needs and wants and those of others. The other stresses the similarities and what we all have in common. The relative strengths of these two influences is determined to a large extent by the prevailing culture in which we live.
The rise of excessive individualism
In modern culture the selfish strand is now legitimized as never before. The chief goal on offer to young people is success relative to others – better grades, higher pay, more friends and greater fame. This is especially so in the United States. For example, among college entrants more and more of them think it is important to be very well off financially and fewer think it essential to develop a philosophy of life (see Figure 4.1). Increasingly, young people compete in every possible avenue of life.
These trends in youth culture have been studied intensively by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University.1 She finds that 31 per cent of high school students expect to be famous one day,2 and an increasing percentage of college entrants think they are above average.3 Similar narcissistic tendencies are exemplified in the candidate whom American electors knowingly chose as President in 2016. As Donald Trump elegantly put it, ‘Show me someone without an ego and I’ll show you a loser.’ Or, as the director of counselling at the University of Nebraska put it, ‘If you don’t have a me-first attitude, you won’t succeed.’4
Such attitudes are not much fun for other people. They are also bad advice. For research shows that successful businessmen are no more narcissistic or self-confident than average – they are good builders of teams.5
However, it is easy to see how the Me-First philosophy can take root, unless constantly challenged by a more unselfish view of the purpose of life. After all we mostly live in large cities in which no one has any automatic position. To do anything worthwhile you have to establish your position, and this requires an element of self-promotion. But what matters is the purpose behind it. If your purpose is to be useful and create happiness, that’s fine. But if it is to come out on top, that’s not good – ruthless competition is one of the most powerful destroyers of happiness.
Me-First individualism has grown fastest in the USA, but it has increased everywhere. Scandinavian countries have been famous for teaching the pro-social values of respect and fellow-feeling to their citizens, but even in Norway there is evidence of change. One study by their main national newspaper counted the frequency of communal words (such as ‘shared’, ‘duty’, ‘equality’) and of individualistic words (such as ‘me’, ‘choice’, ‘rights’). Figure 4.2 tells the tale of growing individualism.
US students have become more materialistic (percentage saying each goal is essential or very important)
A Norwegian newspaper reflects increasing individualism and reduced communal values (numbers of words of each type per year)
In recent years the rise in competitiveness has been made much worse by the advent of social media. We discuss this in Chapter 13. As we show, social media has encouraged self-advertisement and made more young people feel inadequate, anxious, depressed and ‘left out’. In addition it has encouraged populism, which is an increasing challenge to a cohesive and loving society.
Hopeful trends
None of these trends will be easy to alter. But there are many hopeful trends too, both among citizens and among policy-makers. We have already documented many of them. Let me mention three other encouraging trends. The first is the spectacular fall in crime of all kinds in recent decades in most advanced countries.6 This new degree of gentleness is one of the least noticed and least well-understood changes of our time, but it is deeply significant.
My own guess is that it reflects the increased influence of women in our society: women commit fewer crimes than men do, and they tend to avoid men who are criminals.7 Moreover, most women care more about inner feelings than men do on average, while typically men have been more focused on externals.8 This shift of perspective is central to the happiness movement which is about the overarching importance of our feelings – our quality of life as we actually experience it.
A third trend is partly helpful and partly not so. It is the growing toleration of diversity. That has already transformed the happiness of minority groups, including people who are LGBT, disabled or (until recently) immigrant.9 But it can also involve another not so good attitude – lack of concern. In other words, ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine. I won’t bother you, but I won’t engage with you either.’ When I first came to London in the 1950s, people talked to each other on the buses. Now, when you sit next to someone, they look away.10 That is not so good. We want a society which is tolerant, but also friendly and compassionate. Making this change will play an important part in producing a happier society.
So the ground is fertile. Contrary to popular belief, satisfaction with life is not low by historical standards in the West, except in the USA, Italy and Greece (see Chapter 12). Populism is a venting of dissatisfaction which has been there for a long time, but has not been previously expressed. It is being expressed now because of the discredited credentials of the elites from 2008 onwards and the legitimation of rudeness by social media.
But the dissatisfaction is real and requires urgent reforms of social and economic policy. These should of course be based on the Happiness Principle. But are our leaders up for implementing the Happiness Principle?
Are governments listening?
Our first hero in the political sphere is Enrico Giovannini, an enterprising Italian who was once the Chief Statistician of the OECD. The OECD is the club of rich nations, and it was the OECD that started the standard measurement of GDP in the 1950s. But in 2004 Giovannini persuaded the OECD to open a public debate on the nature of progress – the issue often referred to as ‘Beyond GDP’. Since then the OECD has held another five major conferences to ‘push forward the boundaries of wellbeing measurement and policy’. In 2012 it recommended that its member countries should measure the subjective wellbeing of their adult population each year, and most of them now do so.11 In 2015 measurement of life-satisfaction was extended to fifteen-year-olds in the OECD survey known as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). In 2016, remarkably, the OECD first said that we should ‘put people’s wellbeing at the centre of governments’ efforts’.12 And in 2019 it held a special meeting of governments to consider how far each government plans to use wellbeing as the goal of its policies.13
The UN too has been active. In 2012 it established an annual International Day of Happiness (20 March), and the UN General Assembly called upon its members to give more attention to the happiness of their people.14 At the same time a leading development economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was an adviser to the UN Secretary General, proposed the idea of an annual World Happiness Report. This is now presented each year at the UN. In addition, the annual World Government Summit in Dubai now hosts the presentation of a more policy-oriented Global Happiness and Wellbeing Policy Report. But what are individual governments actually doing about all this?
In January 2019, Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, was addressing world leaders at Davos. She announced that her government had adopted wellbeing as its goal and would use it as the basis of her forthcoming budget for wellbeing. So New Zealand became the first Western country to formally target wellbeing.15 In the meantime many other countries, local governments and cities have been taking steps in the same direction, including the governments of France and Britain.16 In 2008 the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, set up a distinguished commission to report on the measurement of progress,17 and, following on from that, French law (like that of Sweden) now requires all major policy changes to be analysed for their impact on (among other things) wellbeing.
Britain has in many ways gone further than this. It was the first country to measure national subjective wellbeing as an official statistic, and its top civil servant for many years, Gus O’Donnell, pushed for subjective wellbeing as a goal of government policy. After leaving government he chaired a committee that produced the best available account of how that might be done.18 So in Britain many central government departments and many local governments now include ‘wellbeing’ divisions. And the ‘Green Book’,19 which describes how policy proposals should be appraised, has ‘social wellbeing’ as its objective and recommends the use of data on subjective wellbeing wherever willingness-to-pay cannot be used as a measure of benefit.
At the more local level, many governments of regions and cities in different countries have gone just about as far as New Zealand has. They include Jalisco (in Mexico), Andhra Pradesh (in India), Scotland, and the city of Bristol (in the UK).20
The movement for change is strong. Governments make the decisions, but they are of course responding to a growing alteration in the public mood. This change is also reflected in the increasing number of citizens’ events directed at the goal of happiness, above all the annual World Happiness Summit held in Miami.
Conclusions
So will the happiness revolution succeed? I believe it will.
- On the one side there is still a strong tide of excessive individualism. And this is now augmented by social media, which encourages yet more self-promotion.
- But on the other side there is an increasing gentleness in society – less crime, greater gender equality, and a greater toleration of diversity.
- Moreover, governments are listening. A few countries and regional governments have adopted happiness as their overarching goal. But, in many more, happiness is increasingly used as a key measure of success.
In struggles over culture, change can come quite quickly. The last forty years have seen extraordinary changes in public attitudes to gender equality; sex outside marriage; cigarette smoking; gay and lesbian relationships; and, most recently, issues such as sexual harassment, child abuse and domestic violence.21 Similarly, in the forty years after the French Revolution there were astonishingly rapid changes in attitudes to slavery, gambling, drinking, extra-marital sex, and duelling.22 So there is no reason why, in less than forty years from now, the culture of gentleness could not displace the dominant culture of excessive individualism. But how can each one of us help to make this happen?