HAPPINESS -lessons from a new science-

It's just a memorandum and some footnotes in reference to "HAPPINESS -lessons from a new science-". This work is written by Richard Layard and published in 2005 for the first issue. In fact, what makes me feel like reading this one is David Graeber's articles and a series of his work, especially for his masterpiece "Bullshit Jobs". Because it has something a lot to do with Labor Economics discipline or say labor ethics in Western countries, it attracted me into Labor Economics across the board. Since decd. David Graber was LSE's professor, I started to grope around the close pedagogue in LSE whose field is Labor Economics or something similar with it. 

・The basic greatest happiness principle

The best society, he said, is one where the citizens are happiest. So the best public policy is that which produces the greatest happiness. And when it comes to private behavior, the right moral action is that which produces the most happiness for the people it affects. This is the Greatest Happiness principle. It is fundamentally egalitarian, because everybody's happiness is to count equally. It is also fundamentally humane, because it says that what matters ultimately is what people feel. It is close in spirit to the opening passages of the American Declaration of Independence. (p.5)

  ・Two forces that affect the feeling of happiness with income

People care greatly about their relative income, and they would be willing to accept a significant fall in living standards if they could move up compared with other people.
People also compare their income with what they themselves have got used to. When they are asked how much income they need, richer people always say they need more than poorer people.
So whether you are happy with your income depends on how it compares with some norm. And that norm depends on two things: what other people get, and what you yourself are used to getting. In the first case your feeling are governed by social comparison, and in the second by habituation.
Because these two forces are so strong in human nature, it is quite difficult for economic growth to improve our happiness. (p.42)

・The hedonic treadmill

So living standards are to some extent like alcohol or drugs. Once you have a certain new experience, you need to keep on having more of it if you want to sustain your happiness. You are in fact on a kind of treadmill, a "hedonic" treadmill, where you have to keep running in order that your happiness stand still.
In psychology, this process is known as adaptation. If adaptation is "complete", only continual new stimuli can raise your well-being. Once your situation becomes stable again, you will revert to your "set-point" level of happiness. You will do this whether the initial change is for better or for worse. (p.48)

・The most important issue of work

Work is vital, if that is what you want. But it is also important that the work be fulfilling. Perhaps the most important issue is the extent to which you have control over what you do. There is a creative spark in each of us, and if it finds no outlet, we feel half-dead. This can be literally true: among British civil servants of any given grade, those who do the most routine work experience the most rapid clogging of the arteries. (p.68)

・New welfare measures barring from Old wrong Economics

But the real problems with economics are much more profound. They arise because economists have no interest in how happy people are and focus instead on their combined purchasing power, assuming their preferences are constant over time. Instead, we need a new economics that collaborates with the new psychology. There are at least five main features of human nature that must somehow be included in this new version of how our well-being is generated. 
・Inequality. Extra income matters more to poor people than to rich. 
・exernal effects. Other people affect us indirectly and not only through exchange.
・Values. Our norms and values change in response to external influences.
・Loss-aversion. we hate loss more than we value gain.
・Inconsistent behavior. We behave inconsistently in many ways.
(p.136)

・Pain in the neck for the rudimentary race for status as an animal

If monkeys enjoy status, so do human beings. We want status not only for what else it makes possible, but also for itself. ... the desire for status is basic to our human nature.
...
So the desire for status is utterly natural. but it creates a massive problem if we want to make people happier, for the total amount of status available is fixed. Putting it crudely, status is like the outcome of a race. There is number 1, number2, number and so on. If my score improves, someone else's deteriorates. My gain is his loss. In the jargon, we are engaged in a zero-sum game, since the sum of 1+2+3 and so on cannot be changed, however hard we try. As Gore Vidal once put it, "It is not enough to succeed;others must fail."
The problem is that we all put massive effort into changing what cannot in total be changed. Thus everything we do to advantage ourselves imposes a "disbenefit" on somebody else. It is a bit like what can happen in a football stadium. Someone stands up to improve his view. This obscures someone else's view: he stands up. Eventually, everybody is standing. They all have the same view as before, but they also have the extra effort involved in standing.
Many things bring status, and money is one of them. If money was simply wanted for the sake of status, the quest for money would be totally self-defeating. For the number of ranks in the income distribution is fixed, and one person's gain would be another's loss. Fortunately, as we saw in chapter 4, people also want income for its own sake, and not only for its value relative to other's. One study quoted earlier found that people care about absolute income twice as much as they care about relative income.
However, the struggle for relative income is totally self-defeating at the level of the society as a whole. If my income rises relative to yours, your income falls relative to mine by exactly the same amount. The whole process produces no net social gain, but may involve a massive sacrifice of private life and time with family and friends. it should be discouraged. (p.150~151)

・Negative effect of advertising

So values do matter. Advertising is clearly meant to change our values - how we like one product compared with another. but does the advertising experience make us happier? If advertising simply provided information, it would be hard to object. But a lot of advertising makes us feel we need something that we previously didn't need. The advertiser may have only wanted us to buy his brand rather than another. But the overall effect is to make people want more.
The most common advertising device is to show us that people of our sort have this thing - on the assumption that we will want to conform. The advert becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The most serious effect is on children, who put parents under intolerable pressure to buy the latest doll or the coolest make of footwear. The waste is extraordinary, and children get the idea that they need this vast array of spending just to be themselves. That is the reason why Sweden bans commercial advertising directed at children under twelve. Every country should learn from this example. We should also consider stopping tax allowances for all pictorial advertising by business, since it can have such a negative effect on the happiness of those it puts pressure on. (p.160-161)

・The fallacy of advertising 

It is sometimes said that capitalism depends on advertising to achieve full employment. According to this view, without advertisements less would be bought, and therefore there would be less work to be done. This would cause unemployment. But this is a fallacy. It is true that less work would be done, but at the same time people would also want to do less work because they would want to buy less. So there would be no change in the balance between the demand and supply of labour. Unemployment would not rise. So advertising cannot be justified as an anti-unemployment device. If advertising lures into an arms race of spending, we should have a serious debate about the appropriate response. (p.161)

・Contribution of community to the happiness

Close relationships do not operate in a vacuum. The context is your community - your friends and neighbors and the places where you live and shop and work. As you interact with this environment, do you feel that the world around you is friendly or threatening?
As we have seen, key aspects of social capital, like trust and membership in voluntary associations, contribute greatly to happiness. What in turn affects these? Culture and values are important, but so are mundane facts like the degree of geographical mobility. 
A high-turnover community is rarely friendly. Yet economists are generally in favor of geographical mobility since it moves people from places where they are less productive to ones where they are more productive. But geographical mobility increases farmily break-up and criminality. 
If people live near where they grew up, close to parents and old friends, they are probably less likely to break up: they have a network of social support, which is less available in more mobile communities. Similarly, if people are highly mobile, they feel less bonded to the people among whom they live, and crime is more common. A good predictor of low crime rates is how may friends people have within fifteen minutes' walk. Crime is lower when people trust each other, and people trust each other more if fewer people are moving house and the community is more homogenous. So violence tends to be high where residential mobility is high, and where there are concentrations of people who are new to the area. (p.179-180)

・Maximisers and Satisficers

Increasingly today, people feel that they must make the most of everything. In other words, rather than being hapy with what is good enough, they must have the best. This puts them under enornous strain, for there is always the risk of missing an oppotunity. Continous reoptimization (sometimes dignified bybthe name "flexibility") is the real enemy of happiness, as can be observed among young people who spend the day reorganizing their evening arragements each time a better opportunity arises.
One gets some idea of the strain of optimizing by comparing the happiness of "maximizers"(who seek the best) and "satisficers" (who are content with what is good enough). Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College and his collegues have devised good scales that enables us to sort people into these two categories, and we do indeed find that the maximisers are less happy than the safisficers. Maximisers may indeed get some better "objective" outcome through all their searching, but even so, they are less happy. (p.198)

・Why maximizers are less happy and two important conclusions for that

One reason is that they have more regrets. When they have made a decision and implemented it, they continue to analyze what would have happened if they had taken a different decision. Another reason is that they are more prone to make social comparisons. If they are given a task that is also given to a peer, their happiness at the end of the task is greatly affected by whether they did better or worse than their peer; this is not true of those who are simply satisficers.
These findings suggest two important conclusions. First, our increasing tendency to do the best for ourselves is doing us no good. In particular we spend too much time living in the future rather than the present. Some planning is essential, but too many people are mainly focused on tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, they will be planning for the day after. 
Yet life is not a dress rehearsal. So the Buddhist concept of mindfulness has a message for all of us. It says: cultivate the sense of awe and wonder; savour the things of today; and look about you with the same interest as if you were watching a movie or taking a photo. Engage with the world and with the people around you. In one sense, as Leo Tolstoy said the most important person in the world is the one in front of you now.
A second conclusion is that we have to control our tendency to compare ourselves with others. We should try to make the happiness of others our goal, and to enjoy the success of others. We should also have confidence in our own judgements rather than the judgements of others. In the end the only person's opinion of you that matters is your own.   

・The thought-provoking message from Sr. Jeremy Bentham

We cannot end better than with Jeremy Bentham. Shortly before his death he sent a birthday letter to a friend's young daughter, in which he wrote,
Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul.
I call that pretty good advice.  (p.235-236)

Possible exntensive reading will be on

・Barry Schwartz et al (2008), "A short form of the Maximization Scale: Factor structure, reliability and validity studies", Judgement and Decision Making, Vol.3, No.5, June 2008, pp.371-388

・Barry Schwartz et al (2002), "Maximizing Versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, December 2002, Vol.83, No.5, pp. 1178-1197