The Secrets of Happiness
Richard Schoch Profile, 288pp, £15.99
ISBN 1861979096
A Brief History of Happiness
Nicholas White Blackwell Publishing, 208pp, £9.99
ISBN 1405115203
The Challenge of Affluence: self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950
Avner Offer Oxford University Press, 454pp, £30
ISBN 0198208537
Books about happiness are pouring off the presses, but we still haven't cracked the secret of well-being. Is our culture of instant gratification the problem? Is it the job of the state to make us feel better? Richard Reeves ponders some suggestions
"Ask yourself if you are happy," John Stuart Mill wrote, "and you cease to be so." If Mill was right - and he was - bibliophiles are in trouble. Books about happiness are pouring off the presses. Happiness is being poked and prodded from every disciplinary direction: political scientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers and historians are all having a go. Soon bookshops will have to open separate "Happiness" sections.
There are three factors driving this perfect publishing storm. First, decades of careful scholarly work, principally in economics and psychology, have been brought to much wider attention. This has, in turn, given philosophers an opportunity to revisit the long-standing debates about Aristotelian eudaemonia, Benthamite utilitarianism and free will. Last but not least, books about happiness tap into a growing sense of unease and discontentment with life. We are living in one of the richest countries in the history of the world, in which early death is an infrequent tragedy and disease has been largely defeated; our lives are extending to ages beyond the wildest hopes of most of our grandparents. Still, grumpiness, road rage, depression and ennui are all around. It is our unhappiness, real or imagined, that creates a market for any book with "happiness" in its title.
The market divides neatly. On the one hand are books that are essentially cut-and-paste popularisations of other people's work and thinking. These tend to be short, illustrated in an eye-catching way and written in a style designed to attract the fickle attention of op-ed writers. Richard Schoch's The Secrets of Happiness falls squarely into this first category.
Cleverness, wit and clarity are at a premium here. Schoch is breezy, confident and sweeping. "To be authentically happy," he suggests, "means to take possession of ourselves, to bring about the person we are in potential, to become more real . . . Through purposeful action, we become our future and find our contentment. We accomplish ourselves." This all sounds terribly nice and uplifting, even for those of us who feel quite "real" enough already. But it is not clear why Schoch's self-helpy definition is an improvement on anybody else's. He provides an adequate starter tutorial in the approaches of various schools - utilitarians, Epicureans, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Stoics and Jews - although "the teardrops that moistened the pages of his book", a reference to Mill's emergence from dejection on reading Marmontel's Mémoires, is a difficult moment for the reader.
Schoch's related polemical objectives are to reject an "enfeebled" notion of happiness as "mere enjoyment of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain and suffering" in favour of happiness as a "lofty achievement", and to rescue happiness from the grubby hands of social scientists. Schoch has fun - some of it legitimate - with the idea of a "happiness-based public policy" proposed by modern "neo-Benthamites" led by Richard Layard, whose book Happiness: lessons from a new science was published last year.
It is true that Layard's book is philosophically weak: he jumps from the now clichéd fact that the UK is richer but not happier to outlining a policy programme that includes a higher top rate of tax, but does not address the devastating criticisms of utilitarianism made by Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen in Utilitarianism and Beyond. Yet Schoch is irresponsibly careless in his critique: "The hedonic psychologists asked 'How happy are you?' when they should have asked 'What is happiness?'" If the question was phrased in this way, Schoch would have at least half a point. But in fact the question asked in the principal surveys used by social scientists is: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?" What is being measured here is life satisfaction, or subjective well-being, for which social scientists use happiness as a self-admittedly rough proxy. The question has been tested and retested in dozens of languages to ensure robustness. And it has been designed very carefully, to get a person's overall evaluation of their lives rather than simply a measure of momentary mood.
Schoch is not alone. The great weakness of almost all the books on happiness is their monocular vision. The philosophers ignore, fail to understand or sneeringly dismiss the regression lines of the social scientists. Even Nicholas White's A Brief History of Happiness, whose blue-sky cover camouflages a thoughtful intervention on the conceptual value of happiness, bypasses the recent empirical advances. Meanwhile the social scientists, supremely confident in their data, are ignorant of (or ignore) centuries of careful thought on the complexities and paradoxes of happiness, which no statistical significance can wash away. The only book that has managed to pull off a decent balancing act, engaging the question of well-being in the round, is Robert Lane's The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000). Few of the current crop of happiness writers appear to have read Lane, and their work is the poorer for it.
Fortunately, Avner Offer has published his book at last. The Challenge of Affluence has been at least a decade in the making. Offer has read not only Lane but most of what matters on the social science of well-being, choice and value, and has developed an original and subtle thesis. It is summarised in his first sentence: "Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being." Offer suggests that the increasingly rapid pace of innovation and widening opportunities of advanced market democracies mean that individuals tend to place irrationally high value on immediate satisfactions, displacing the effort and commitment required to secure long-term goals. "Well-being . . . requires a sustainable balance between the present and the future," he suggests. "This also requires a personal capacity for commitment. Call this capacity prudence."
Trading off short-term pleasures for longer-run ones is hard in a society bombarded with advertising, saturated with the notion of individual consumer choice and weakening institutional structures promoting restraint and self-control. As the Hollywood actress suggested, even instant gratification isn't fast enough for some people nowadays. Offer cites the fall over the past few decades of both savings rates and the age at which people become sexually active as examples of the imprudence of market societies. The "commitment strategies" required to balance immediate pleasures with the sacrifices necessary for lifelong well-being - the graft of relationships, child-rearing, study and saving - are harder to form in an era of constant novelty.
Offer's evidence for the decline of prudence alongside the rise in affluence is not entirely compelling, especially over a longer historical period. Were the people of the 1950s very much less prudent than those of the 1850s? It seems unlikely. But he correctly identifies short-termism as the principal enemy of sustainable well-being. Hyper-choice and rising material resources make commitment, self-control and moderation harder. Offer uses the rise in obesity as an example of the triumph of short-term gratification over long-term physical and mental well-being. Food also demonstrates how it is easier for the middle class to exert the necessary self-control, because their education, upbringing and status have better equipped them with "commitment strategies" that reinforce self-denial for the sake of self-development. Technology, in particular the ubiquity of the internet, has further reduced the distance and cost of pleasures: "knowledge of how to speed the availability of reward has outdistanced knowledge about how to delay it".
Personal relations, especially in the family, provide some of the richest ground for developing self-control. But educational institutions also have a part to play. Indeed, Offer suggests that one of the roles of the public sector generally is to provide institutional shelters within which commitment devices and strategies can be developed. At the same time, the evidence of our self-destructive short-termism provides the empirical grounds - if not the philosophical or political ones - for paternalist polices such as forced saving for retirement, bans or taxation of certain foods or adverts, and support for stay-at-home parents.
State institutions and regulations can and should act as stabilisers for the market, which is "a source of novelty, individual choice and compelling reward". The practical implementation of Offer's analysis is difficult, to say the least. He is surely right to suggest that "moderation" needs to be given more weight than "choice". But there aren't many votes in it - and no money. Offer planned a fourth section of his book, dealing with policy-relevant problems of social choice such as crime and punishment, housing, public goods and the role of government: sadly he ran out of steam. But Offer is the writer in this field who is most clearly on to something. So at the risk of impatience, let us hope it is less than a decade before we hear from him again.
Richard Reeves is writing a biography of John Stuart Mill
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