MAIN IDEA:

This book is about the paradox of happiness, which the author defines as the maintenance of the same level of happiness in developed countries despite the doubling of income and the implementation of many quality-of-life improving tools, from air-conditioning to the Internet. The author defines happiness this way:” Happiness is feeling good, and misery is feeling bad. At every moment we feel somewhere between wonderful and half-dead, and that feeling can now be measured by asking people or by monitoring their brains. Once that is done, we can go on to explain a person’s underlying level of happiness—the quality of his life as he experiences it. Every life is complicated, but it is vital to separate out the factors that really count. Some factors come from outside us, from our society: some societies really are happier. Other factors work from inside us, from our inner life.”

After that, the author provides what he believes are the defining factors of happiness:”

• Our wants are not given, in the way that elementary economics assumes. In fact they depend heavily on what other people have, and on what we ourselves have got accustomed to. They are also affected by education, advertising and television. We are heavily driven by the desire to keep up with other people. This leads to a status race, which is self-defeating since if I do better, someone else must do worse. What can we do about this?

• People desperately want security—at work, in the family and in their neighbourhoods. They hate unemployment, family break-up and crime in the streets. But the individual cannot, entirely on his own, determine whether he loses his job, his spouse or his wallet. It depends in part on external forces beyond his control. So how can the community promote a way of life that is more secure?

• People want to trust other people. But in the United States and in Britain (though not in continental Europe), levels of trust have plummeted in recent decades. How is it possible to maintain trust when society is increasingly mobile and anonymous?”

At the end of the book, the author provides a to-do list for society to make people happy. Here is the concise version:”

• We should monitor the development of happiness in our countries as closely as we monitor the development of income.

• We should rethink our attitude on many standard issues. (taxes, performance-related pay, mobility)

• We should spend more on helping the poor, especially in the Third World.

• We should spend more on tackling the problem of mental illness.

• To improve family life, we should introduce more family-friendly practices.

• We should subsidise activities that promote community life.

• We should eliminate high unemployment.

• To fight the constant escalation of wants, we should prohibit commercial advertising to children.

• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need better education, including, for want of a better word, moral education. “

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book provides a lot of valuable information about statistical, sociological, and psychological research in all areas related to happiness. It is all interesting, but I think that the key attitude compressed into “We as a society should do X to make people happy” reminds me a little bit of the old communist slogan:” With an iron fist, we’ll force humanity into the happy future.”  I believe that such an approach is counterproductive for the simple reason that human life is a very dynamic process, and it is not possible to define what makes people happy at any given time. So, the role of society should be to create such arrangements that individuals are capable of obtaining all the resources they need to become happy, whether these resources are material, informational, or psychological. The role of science should be to produce information for personal use to help people understand what will make them happy and what to do to achieve it. In other words, accelerate the acquisition of life experience to minimize the difference between a 20-year-old belief of what will make him/her happy at 50 and 50-years-old being happy or not. Any other approach, when person A decides what should be done by person B for happiness and forces this action, works only to increase happiness from the exercise of power for person A at the expense of person B.