A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier
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A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907994548 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | London Publishing Partnership |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2016 |
| Series: | Perspectives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 190 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Better Politics
How Government Can Make Us Happier
By Danny Dorling, Ella Furness
London Publishing Partnership
Copyright © 2016 Danny DorlingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907994-54-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
To make a real difference we need to shift common sense, change the terms of debate and shape a new political terrain.
– Doreen Massey
The aim of this book is to inspire a better politics: one that will enable future generations to be happier, with goals of greater well-being and better health, rather than wealth maximization. Happiness does not mean being ecstatic: it is the avoidance of misery, the gaining of long-term life satisfaction, the feeling of fulfilment, of worth, of kindness, of usefulness and of love. We need new measures of what matters most to us.
The book is also about 'the collective good'. We cannot truly be happy if those around us are not happy. Not just our family and friends, but our fellow citizens, whose lives are entwined with ours and will affect us for good or ill at some point. This book looks at evidence and suggests policies that take account of that evidence. We live in an information-rich, 'scientific' world, but this is a recent phenomenon. Yet while we might not fully understand climate change or sub-atomic physics, we should now find it easier to understand what makes us happy; and we can also compare ourselves with other nations on key measures of health and well-being.
Politicians often say that they are addressing the issues that matter most to people. But they rely on opinion surveys in which the questions have been predetermined. What have people themselves said, unprompted, about what is most important to them or their family? How do their answers relate to how happy and healthy those same people are?
Being happy is not the be-all and end-all, but it's better to be happier if you can. Politicians often promise that if they are elected they will ensure that the electorate will be 'better off' than if the other lot are elected; but do politicians actually know what it is that makes people happy? Other academics have approached this question in many very different ways.
This book begins with statistical evidence from a scientific paper. Yet although almost all of the facts presented in these pages are referenced, it is not a research-based volume. Instead, this book is a collection of ideas – based mostly on the work of others, including much readily available evidence – on what policies could best safeguard us (better than current policies) from what the evidence indicates harms us the most.
Before going any further, why might you want to consider the arguments and evidence presented in this book? One reason is that, while it isn't exactly a new phenomenon, inequality in our society is getting worse – particularly when we look at the growing gap between the very wealthy and the rest, including those with least. This matters because it appears that growing inequality can make it harder to enact the policies that could most improve our happiness.
When it was first observed that despite rising average material wealth, people were not happier than their parents had been, researchers in economics – not in psychology, sociology or politics – began to ask why. Recently, many economists have pointed out that old economic growth models, those used by both the left and the right, were failing. The new models concern findings that could not have been made a generation ago, because then it was true that well-being was generally increased by having more material goods. A generation ago, what people needed above all else was a good enough home to live in and the means to be able to keep it warm. A generation or so before that, most people in the UK did not have spare clothes, or enough money to eat well most of the time. In our generation, many of us eat too much. Most people, although far from all, now have enough.
Recent research has shown that now, living in a country with higher levels of well-organized collective spending produces a happier population; and that when countries are compared, public policies such as social insurance and employment protection are among the most important factors in predicting well-being among citizens. This may come as a surprise if you think that being taxed as little as possible is what gives people the most economic freedom and leads to them enjoying 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' to the fullest. It is worth reflecting that Thomas Jefferson wrote those famous words into the American Constitution. Many believe that he took inspiration for this from John Locke, who had written, in his 'Essay concerning human understanding', that 'The highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.'
Economist Benjamin Radcliff summarized his research findings on this for an American audience:
The differences in your feeling of well-being living in a Scandinavian country (where welfare programs are large) versus the US are going to be larger than the individual factors in your life. The political differences trump all the individual things you're supposed to do to make yourself happier – to have fulfilling personal relationships, to have a job, to have more income. The political factors swamp all those individual factors. Countries with high levels of gross domestic product consumed by government have higher levels of personal satisfaction.
Radcliff is correct about the correlations when happiness is measured carefully, but of course people do not wake up each day and check how much their government spends and feel happier if taxation and public spending is higher. Living in better-organized (and often higher-taxing) countries makes leading our personal lives easier, allows us to get on with our families, and with other people more widely. (Although there are also societies where overall taxation is lower but where income inequality is lower and well-being is higher than in the UK.)
Until recently, economists' models have maximized what they call 'utility': the satisfaction achieved from the consumption of a good or service given individual preferences. However, a growing number of economists have, in the last twenty years, started looking at happiness instead. Before the 2008 crash, some leading economists began arguing that there were things that were much more important to life and well-being than money. For example, Ann Pettifor and Anastasia Nesvetailova foresaw the turmoil to come in 2008 and argued that there was a need for new understanding in economics. That new understanding should include a better appreciation of happiness.
Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey have recently shown that people in more consumerist societies are likely to overestimate how much enjoyment they will gain from the goods they consume, and they discount the harm working too many hours and commuting too much will cause them. As Stutzer and Frey put it, 'suboptimal choices result'. Even more recently, John Helliwell has shown that environmental sustainability depends on well-being:
If people really are happier working together for a worthy purpose, this exposes a multitude of win – win solutions to material problems, thereby building community while meeting material needs.
This new thinking has wide-reaching implications. It has emerged because we are so much better off, in material ways, than our parents were – and yet no happier.
As happiness economics is based on relating well-being to other life events, economists Gus O'Donnell and Andrew Oswald have recently explained that the new economic research has:
one strength that may not be completely recognized by all economists. People are not asked how much one thing makes them happy compared to another. Deeply complicated cause-and-effect survey questions are thereby largely eschewed, and that is an advantage.
You do not ask people what they think makes them happy, but instead observe how their levels of happiness change and try to associate that with other changes in their lives at that time.
This book is heavily influenced by happiness economics, but I am not an economist and so it also uses a wider range of sources from the social sciences, humanities and sciences, and includes many examples from current affairs. To present consistent evidence, results from a single survey of happiness are referred to, but it is important to recognize the much wider context to this work. Many recent studies point in similar directions. The sense that it is time we measured success differently is infectious. On 28 June 2012, the General Assembly of the United Nations agreed to pass resolution A/RES/66/281, which states that:
The General Assembly, ... Conscious that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal, ... Recognizing also the need for a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes sustainable development, poverty eradication, happiness and the well-being of all peoples, decides to proclaim 20 March the International Day of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson might have approved.
So what does promote happiness? To try to answer this question, in 2006 a colleague and I investigated some data about what is most important to people, and how that might relate to their health and happiness. More recent work by others suggests that what we found a decade ago continues to hold true. In Britain, a large household panel study has been conducted annually for the past twenty-five years. In four of those years (September 1992 to December 1995) an unusual question was added. It was unusual because to answer this question, you had to write in an answer. Here is the question. Try it yourself in relation to the most recent twelve months:
State in your own words what in the year has happened to you (or your family) which stood out as important.
It is a straightforward question. So please record your responses, but don't feel bad if you don't have four.
Over ten years later I remain shocked by the responses people gave. It is fair to say that this question was asked at the end of a very long interview-style survey. Perhaps many people were simply sick of answering questions. Maybe they thought that some of the answers they had already given covered everything that mattered. Nevertheless, a large and representative sample of the population answered, so it is worth considering carefully what they said.
In the UK, in those years (1992–1995), a majority of the up-to-four answers were left blank: 'Nothing else of importance happened to us'. Most people only noted down one or two things. There were as many people recording nothing at all as there were people who listed three or four events.
Nothing happens to most people most of the time; at least nothing that they would say is important to them. Out of the 143,86017 possible opportunities to give responses to that question in this survey over those years, 94,911 (66%) were either left blank or filled in as something equivalent to 'nothing'. The second most common response was to state that someone in your family other than you had ended or started a relationship (3,728 events, 3%). The third most common was to report that you had gone on holiday (3,635, 3% again), the fourth most common was that you had moved home (2,810, 2%), and the fifth most common was that something had happened to your health (2,678 responses, 2%). Many more than 2% of people move home in a given year, but for many who do it was just not an important enough event to list.
People are very forgetful. Men are more likely to be forgetful than women. The survey revealed that men who have just become fathers are far less likely to list their new baby as an important event than women who have just become mothers. One of the first things we discover is that life is not that eventful for many people much of the time, but also that the usual preoccupations of the media tend not to appear. When unprompted, hardly anyone answers 'immigration to Britain rose and this harmed me and my family' or 'I worried about government economic policy this year'. Respondents also do not mention terrorism, or at least they did not at the time of those surveys.
So, if you struggled to come up with four important things that happened to you or your family in the past twelve months, don't despair, but please do write in an answer on at least one of the four lines above if you can – and then I'll ask you one more question at the start of the next chapter.
As I'll explain below, it turns out that half of all the important things that happened to people in the past year were not associated with being significantly happier. For example, most health-related events were not, on average, good news for most people. You probably do not want any of the four most important things that happened to you in the last year to concern your health. Worry, anxiety and clinically diagnosed depression are now rising generation after generation among young people in the most unequal of affluent countries. This affects the children of the rich in our society just as much as those of affluent, average, modest or poor backgrounds.
A better politics is not simply a politics that maximizes individual happiness related to everyday events, including those important, personal events. We also gain happiness from clean air and green spaces in ways that surveys (such as the one used here) cannot pick up, even though other studies do. Governments also need to consider long-term issues such as climate change, species extinction, pollution and avoiding war, famine and plagues. But governments – the politicians that constitute them, the civil servants who work for them, and all of us who vote – also occasionally need to be reminded of what it is that actually preoccupies most people.
The UK prime minister at the time of writing, David Cameron, floated the idea of the government monitoring happiness in 2005, and introduced a happiness index in 2010.23 In 2015 the first baseline measures were published. It will be interesting to see how they have changed by 2020. A recent report sponsored by the UK government described 'the most compelling evidence' for a link between economic performance and higher well-being. This came from a study of a manufacturing plant in Finland, which found that a one-point increase in job satisfaction (on a six-point scale) resulted in a 9% increase in productivity.
My first and most important suggestion for a better politics is that governments should concern themselves with what matters most to people, according to the evidence. This means people have to be asked.
The next chapter explores what we can learn from surveys that do just that. The results are surprising. They hold valuable lessons for politicians, no matter what party they represent.
CHAPTER 2Basic needs
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
— Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
It was ten years ago, just before the global financial crisis, that my colleague Dimitris Ballas and I conducted our experiment using the answers people had written at the end of the survey described above. We tried to discover the secret to happiness. We coupled the answers with additional data on the same people's state of happiness. Events that in retrospect stood out as important to you or your family are good potential candidates for the things that significantly affected your state of happiness.
One reason to search for the secret to happiness was that many researchers had begun to worry that something was wrong. My colleague Dimitris is an economist by background, and had been trained to consider people as rational economic agents, all continually aiming to maximize their individual satisfaction or 'utility'. In the orthodox theory, wider society was of little importance. But what if many people individually striving to maximize their own utility cause harm, in aggregate, to the crowd? And what if one needs to be part of a happy crowd to maximize one's own happiness?
So now here's the second question.
Have you recent been feeling reasonably happy, all things considered?
Take your pick and please circle just one answer below: 1, 2 or 3.
1. No, I've generally felt less than reasonably happy.
2. I've felt the same as usual.
3. Actually, I've felt more than reasonably happy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Better Politics by Danny Dorling, Ella Furness. Copyright © 2016 Danny Dorling. Excerpted by permission of London Publishing Partnership.
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