Researchers all over the world have been trying to measure happiness for decades. They have conducted surveys partly to determine what makes people happy and partly to gauge social progress. One of the things these surveys tell us is that, not surprisingly, people in rich countries are happier than people in poor countries. Obviously, money matters. But these surveys also reveal that money doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Once a society’s level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increases in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness. You find as many happy people in Poland as in Japan, for example, even though the average Japanese is almost ten times richer than the average Pole.
If we look at happiness within a nation at different times, we find the same story. In the last forty years, the per capita income of Americans has more than doubled. The percentage of homes with dishwashers has increased from 9 percent to 50 percent. The percentage of homes with air-conditioning has increased from 15 percent to 73 percent. But this does not mean we have more happy people. Even more striking, in Japan, per capita wealth has increased by a factor of five in the last forty years, again with no measurable increase in the level of individual happiness.
But if money doesn’t do it for people, what does? What seems to be the most important factor in promoting happiness is close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. Being connected to others seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich. But a word of caution is in order. We know with certainty that there is a relationship between being able to connect socially and being happy. It is less clear, however, which is the cause and which is the effect. Miserable people are surely less likely than happy people to have close friends, devoted family, and enduring marriages. So it is possible that happiness comes first and close relations come second. What seems likely to me is that the causality works both ways: happy people attract others to them, and being with others makes people happy.
What’s puzzling here is that close social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy, which presumably constitute important elements for happiness. For example, to be someone’s friend is to undertake weighty responsibilities that may limit your own freedom. So, what seems to contribute most to happiness binds us rather than liberates us. Obviously, it is naive to maintain that freedom of choice automatically leads to happiness.
Political scientist Robert Lane maintains that the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. He points out that we are experiencing a significant decrease in well-being as evidenced by the fact that the rate of clinical depression has more than tripled over the last two generations. According to Lane, we are achieving increased affluence and increased freedom at the sacrifice of social relations. We earn more and spend more, but we spend less time with others. And this adds to our burden of choice. As Lane writes: “What was once given by neighborhood and work now must be achieved; people have had to make their own friends…and actively cultivate their own family connections.” In other words, our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices.
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