Aristotle once wrote that “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
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I think most people would agree. After all, who wants to be miserable? So it’s strange that happiness is something we pay so little attention to.
When the OECD ranked the US #1 out of 36 countries in terms of household wealth, but only 12th in life satisfaction, the response was... nothing. No blue ribbon panels or congressional committees or even a furrowed brow.
Compare that to the sanctimonious handwringing that accompanies a slight dip in GDP or a weak jobs report or even a mildly troubling manufacturing index and it becomes clear that, while we say we pursue happiness, we expend little effort to create it, or even measure and monitor it. Is it any wonder than we’re ever more prosperous but no more happy?
A growing awareness of the problem, along with some smart technology, may be lead us to effective solutions.
A Personal Story
When I moved to Eastern Europe in the mid-nineties, the first thing I noticed was how poor everyone was. It wasn’t just incomes that were low, housing and food quality were horrible (I got food poisoning on a regular basis that first year), streets were dirty and stores lacked products.
Yet as I settled in, learned the local languages, travelled widely throughout the region and visited people in their homes, I began to realize that many of them were genuinely happy, even if their living conditions left much to be desired. What’s more, they were generous, readily sharing what little they had. It took awhile, but I began to realize why.
Much of what we need doesn’t require money (or at least not much of it). Those who don’t go to fancy nightclubs can visit friends at home. A doctor doesn’t need a Mercedes to serve her community, just skill and caring. Favors can be traded, goods bartered. Gifts, even modest ones (like the bottle of shampoo someone gave me one Christmas), can be given and received enthusiastically.
The Clothesline Paradox
Tech visionary Tim O’Reilly calls the phenomenon I experienced in Eastern Europe the Clothesline Paradox, based on an argument for alternative energy dating from the 70’s. The basic concept goes like this: If you put your clothes in the dryer, the activity gets counted as part of the economy, but if you hang it up on a clothesline, it just disappears.
O’Reilly sees the dilemma as a fundamental confusion between value creation and value capture. We find it easy to put a value on the activity of Goldman Sachs and
On an individual level, it is easy to see why a highly paid investment banker works a 90-hour week, but somewhat harder to quantify the pleasure and sense of accomplishment a hacker gets from contributing code to Linux, Apache or a host of other open-source platforms that have become crucial to the information economy.
Economists call situations like these externalities and try to account for them by calculating their economic contribution, but the concept is a clumsy one. When a kid creates a viral video and uploads it to YouTube, some of the money ends up at
When Profit Doesn't Suffice
Anybody who has ever run a business knows that accounting has its limitations. You try your best to make the numbers work, to allocate costs in a sensible way and to reward true performance, but you know that ultimately good management is about judgment, not calculation.
For example, as Irving Wladawsky-Berger describes in a recent blog post, when formulating
This is often known as the profit paradox. Just as societies who excessively focus on GDP can harm the general well being, managers who pursue only profits often earn less for their enterprise. Once we start pretending that what we can’t easily measure doesn’t exist, we begin to sow the seeds of our own destruction.
Former
The Quest For A "Happiness Indicator"
In order to fill the gaps left by GDP and other economic indicators, many organizations are beginning to try to formulate a broader approach through the concept of Gross National Happiness.
The effort, while far from uniform, is already fairly widespread. The UN has proposed a measure that incorporates 9 indicators, the OECD has developed an alternative approach that aggregates 11 metrics, the UK’s conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has promoted a well-being index and even the small city of Somerville, MA has a happiness project.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the tech community has joined the happiness effort. John Havens has launched the H(app)athon project which seeks to “hack” happiness by combining questionnaires with sensor data collected through smartphones over a two week period.
The app correlates its sensor data with the questionnaire responses to discover the behavior patterns that reflect happiness, such as whether you’re happier when you’re more active and whether you’re stressed at certain times of the day or week. The data will then be fed through an algorithm that will both give assessments and make recommendations.
Should We Optimize Happiness?
There is no doubt that happiness is becoming a movement and a welcome one at that. However, there is one thing that nags at me: By quantifying happiness, can we avoid losing sight of its true value?
What most surprised me when I arrived in the former Eastern Bloc was that many people were happy even under the failed Communist system. Not because they liked the system or that they would like to return to it, but because they had many of the things required for happiness, such as good friends, strong families and community ties.
So while happiness is certainly a worthy personal goal, it could be an unrealistic one for societies. Maybe what we really should be shooting for is dignity, which Immanuel Kant defined as the right for people to be treated as ends in themselves, rather than as means to an end.
In other words, our personal well-being stems from having both the means and the freedom to choose how we wish to seek fulfillment. The truest measure of happiness, after all, is the right to define it for ourselves.
