Julian Baggini reviews a few recent books on Happiness Research at the Financial Times.  I think that most laypeople interested in the subject would benefit from reading the article, particularly how it uses the reviews together to debunk several odd claims that people make when dealing with the happiness or subjective well-being literature.  However, Baggini does not call out the author of one of the books, Carol Graham, on her claim that increasing wealth does not correlate (or maybe even result in) higher happiness.  In economics, many researchers have shown that higher income correlates with higher happiness or subjective well-being is demonstrated several times over (though some argue not). One of the problems seems to be that some researchers don't observe the happiness-income relationship because they fail to control for other potential correlates with happiness: work hours, time with friends, participatory social time qua social capital, and others. 

Furthermore, we know that, in general, a person's relative income level correlates more strongly with their level of happiness much more strongly than their absolute income level. So even if money makes you happier, being wealthier than others makes you even happier.  Think about it in the following way. consider two people Al and Bob.  If both Al and Bob get a pay increase, they both end up happier.  But, if Bob's pay increase is greater than Al's then Bob is even happier than Al is because his income is relatively higher (other things equal).  One of the other things to consider though is what economist call 'non-linearities' in happiness, i.e. if Al and Bob were both leaving beneath the poverty line and we unemployed, getting them both income that takes them above the poverty line makes them both substantially happier than a similar increase would at higher levels of income.  To simplify it a lot, happiness may be increasing in income, but at a decreasing rate, or it may even plateau.  Ideological debates enter here with people emphasising inequality vs. growth consistent with their philosophical preferences.

Notwithstanding this economic/political blip (or the failure to nod to the other side of the camp), I agree with several of the points that Baggini made.  His main conclusion - that we must not confound ourselves by emphasizing happiness only and dropping truth and liberty from our considerations of success - warrants further support and investigation and is a research program I am happy that many researchers will continue to investigate. 

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe recently wrote an article on Happiness and its relationship to money, 'Happiness: A Buyer's Guide'.  Although several points he makes are accurate there are several failings in the article.  I try to document them below.

First, he describes how paying for things for other people makes us happy (i.e. increases our reported, or subjective, well-being), but he does not extend the notion of purchasing things for other people to doing things for them with your time or effort.  What I mean here is what about when you don't pay money, but instead expend time and effort to do something for or with someone else while not spending any money at all? If you admit that prosocial acts are inherently beneficial and increase your subjective well-being, might not the same or similar acts when you don't spend money result in similar effects?

This brings us to the second point, might not paying for prosocial acts and events crowd out the voluntary or 'free' ways of doing the same thing? Yes, I might feel better signing a check to an aid organisation, but in doing so I might decide not to dedicate my time and energy to the same organisation.  There is not discussion about which of these two acts might, in fact, make me happier.  There is no discussion of acts at a zero price.

Finally, suppose that I believe that I can increase my happiness by spending money on relational activities, but I believe I need more money to achieve these goals. Believing this, I choose to work more.  In working more, however, I have less time to dedicate to friends and family, to those very things that make me happy because of their relational benefits.  The article fails to acknowledge that you need to maintain your current level of work or income and change your spending to relational (rather than straight consumption) acts to increase your subjective well-being, otherwise you might substitute away from the things that sustain you in order to get more money to spend on those things. 

Maybe it takes thinking like an economist to consider these problems i.e. substitution, zero price, crowding out,. But these ideas were not discussed in the article.  They should have been.

I enjoyed this short personal article by Huda Akil 'In Person: The Pursuit of Happiness' where she examines the personal experience of happiness and joy when playing in a sandpit with her granddaughter & she comments on how we know so little, theoretically, about happiness, joy, contentment.  The article isn't comprehensive, but still worthwhile. Akil comments on the understanding that we have of 'negative' emotions, mainly through research into depression, stress and pain - for which we understand the basic neural correlates.  But, she asks, why don't we have a similar understanding of 'positive' emotions? Where are the animal studies? the studies of hormones? of neural circuitry? This science, relating to positive psychology and affective neuroscience, is still in its infancy ('studies have been done' says the Passive Voice) and its researchers are doing their best to isolate factors that many affect these positive emotions.   And, most importantly, Akil says, 'Science will tell.'