What it Means to be #1: Happiness and Social Policy

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”

-- His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan

Last week, Nicholas Kristof of the Times noted that between 1975 and 2006, “99 percent of the French population actually enjoyed more gains in that period than 99 percent of the American population.” In other words, if you exclude the top 1 percent, the average French citizen did better than the average American.

Nevertheless, on one of the more common metrics used to determine the prosperity and halth of a nation—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the U.S. actually came out on top during the same period, as the American economy significantly outperformed the French.

So who’s “#1”? Before you start chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” (too late?), let’s take a closer look at just what we’re trying to measure.

In recent years, researchers have prodded cities and states to step away from the traditional measures of prosperity and embrace tools to measure overall “happiness”. In December 2013, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report calling on governments to ask citizens a series of questions related to their happiness and to use the results to shape social policy priorities and prescriptions.

This type of survey—which began in the small nation of Bhutan in the early 1970s—has spread to other nations, like the U.K., France, and Canada, all the way down to the local level, as in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Indeed, several U.S. cities are now experimenting with happiness or wellbeing measures. Santa Monica, California, which defines “wellbeing” as, “[p]ersonal satisfaction with life, influenced by social connections, economic stability, personal safety, physical surroundings, fulfilling employment, civic engagement, and health,” recently won a Bloomberg Philanthropies award for its efforts to measure wellbeing and respond accordingly.

In New York, Megan Golden (NYU) and Liana Downey (Liana Downey & Associates) wrote that the de Blasio Administration should pilot a happiness survey to determine “whether some groups are struggling more than others, where problems are concentrated, and what conditions affect New Yorkers’ happiness the most.” This pilot would borrow from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which already surveys Americans every four years about health and life satisfaction, as well as “Measure of America”, a project of the Social Science Research Council.

Of course, measuring happiness is easier said than done. As with any broad survey, getting a representative sample is a challenge, particularly in a City like New York, where many are often wary to respond to formal government surveys (see: New York’s experience with the 2010 Census). Furthermore, since most people filling out the survey have different definitions of happiness, questions that seek to gauge the subjective mindset of any population may be inherently suspect.

An even more fundamental question exists, however. And that is whether happiness, however defined, should be the goal of social policy in the first place. As David Brooks wrote this week, “Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends you on a different course.”

No, Brooks is not advocating for a political system that promotes difficulty and suffering. But he’s also cautioning against viewing certain types of suffering as in need of eradication. To put it in concrete terms, suffering that flows from hunger, disease, violence, or neglect carries no short or long term benefit (much to the contrary), whereas the pangs that come with failure, the loss of a loved one, or can make us fuller people—changed souls, rather than shattered ones.

Ultimately, since that the unique number of paths to happiness is roughly as numerous as the number of people alive, the Framers probably got this one right—namely, that the government’s role is to ensure the foundational elements necessary for the pursuit of happiness (food, shelter, health care, employment), leaving to the individual citizen to decide how to chart his own course toward that seemingly universal goal.

Millennials and the Restoration of the American Dream

“[The American Dream] is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

-- James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, 1931

Earlier this week, Pew Research once again noted that Millennials (corresponding roughly to those born between the early 1980s and 2000) “are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents.” This subject has been of great consternation to many writers in recent years, as Millennials continue to grapple with being the generation who came of age during the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression (see here or here or here).

When the subject came up in my own workplace this week (a place full of Millennials lucky enough to be in gainful employment), it raised a number of issues:

·      How do we measure “standard of living”?

·      Depending on the definition, is it even a problem that our generation may have a lower standard than our parents?

·      Is the standard of living calculation inappropriately disassociated with indicators of happiness?

On this third point, I highly recommend taking a gander at the 2012 World Happiness Report, in which Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs stated:

In an impoverished society, the focused quest for material gain as conventionally measured typically makes a lot of sense…[because] [e]ven small gains in a household’s income can result in a child’s survival, the end of hunger pangs, improved nutrition, better learning opportunities, safe childbirth, and prospects for ongoing improvements and opportunities in schooling, job training, and gainful employment.

However, as Sachs notes, the same calculus is not true at the other end of the income spectrum—in developed nations like our own where the majority of Americans do not worry about the “basic necessities” of food, clothing, medicine, and shelter. In these societies, not only do increases in living standards not lead to the same rise in happiness, but they also lead to “disorders of development” like obesity, diabetes, addictions, and the decline in social trust/community institutions.

Perhaps more importantly, in a world in which wealth is often extracted—directly or indirectly—from the consumption of the planet’s natural resources, these gains often come at the expense of the world’s poor, both by siphoning off the wealth of developing nations and by increasing the risks of climate change, which hits the poor the hardest.

All of these concepts are topics for future posts, but today I want to focus specifically on how we measure “standard of living” and whether the measurement that has emerged in Post-War America—which is grounded in “disposable income”—has led us away from the things that truly matter to happiness.

In A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in. Postwar America, Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard Professor and Dean of the Radcliffe Institute (disclosure: I am her former research assistant), wrote that consumerism became such a powerful force in mid-20^th Century America that people began to equate “free choice as consumers with political freedom.”

Indeed, from the Kitchen Debate between President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, to President George W. Bush imploring Americans to continue to consume in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the vision of the American Dream laid out by James Truslow Adams in the midst of the Great Depression seems to have slipped further and further from our grasp.

As I noted in a piece for the Harvard Law Record in 2008:

The conspicuous consumption of the post-war consumer age has replaced a fulfilling vision of the American Dream with a vacuous conception of liberty and success. No longer is the rallying cry to make it in the New World in a new way-your way-but rather to make it in the New World via the tired, trodden path of swiping credit cards and compiling symbols of status.

That conception of the Dream deadens the soul of a Nation. It stands in contrast to our most venerated modern conception of the Dream—that issued by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial over 50 years ago. The Dream listed the following factors: that all men are created equal, that people of different backgrounds will sit together at the “table of brotherhood,” that freedom and justice will reign across our land, and that our children will not be “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That gets me to Millennials—that generation simultaneously chided as lazy and lauded as idealistic. If indeed we are not to match the standard of living of our parents, what are we to do? Here’s an idea: destroy, once and for all, the perversion of the American Dream that arose with the consumerism of the 20^th century and restore the Dream to its historic roots.

That doesn’t mean shirking from the challenge of poverty and injustice. To the contrary, it means addressing the scourge of poverty in America—even as it entails sacrifices by the middle and upper classes—so that all people have the opportunity to pursue happiness in accordance with the lives they have imagined for themselves.

We may not be the richest generation; but if we end up the happiest, the freest, the most tolerant, we will have accomplished something far greater for our world and ourselves.