The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert Lane
The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies
by Robert Lane
http://www.commondreams.org/views/052800-105.htm
Published on Sunday, May 28, 2000 in the Miami Herald
If your sense of well-being fluctuates with the Dow, you might be comforted to know that money can’t buy you happiness anyway.
In one American study conducted in 1993, level of income was shown to have an inverse relation to happiness: The group whose income had declined was on the whole happier than the group whose income had increased. A soon-to-be-published review of the hundreds of studies on this subject corroborates the 1993 findings.
In advanced countries, the correlation between income and happiness is close to zero and sometimes negative (the richer, the unhappier!).
With a correlation between level of income and happiness somewhere between 0.12 and 0.18, the United States is near the bottom of the list of “materialist” nations; that is, factors other than income are overwhelmingly more important in explaining happiness. Moreover, as our material prosperity increases, the gap between income and satisfaction with life seems to be widening. Predictably, money has its most positive effect on the poor, but once a person has achieved a minimal standard of living, level of income has almost nothing to do with happiness.
Close relationships, rather than money, are the key to happiness. Indeed, the number of one’s personal friends is a much better indicator of overall satisfaction with life than is personal wealth. One stands a better chance of achieving a satisfying life by spending time with friends and family than by striving for higher income. Incidentally, in the United States, as people become richer the probability of divorce increases.
Our need for companionship is part of our biological endowment, for all primates respond with pleasure to demonstrations of affection and with pain to loss of companionship. Isolated monkeys will sacrifice food just for the glimpse of another monkey. By ignoring our biologically programmed need for each other, we risk physical and mental distress.
A recent cross-national study of mental depression found that in advanced countries there is a rising tide of major depression, an illness most marked among those under 40. Teenage suicides have increased in recent decades in almost all advanced countries. Moreover, in the United States since World War II, there has been an actual decline in the proportion of people who report themselves to be “very happy.”
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Please read the entire article at http://www.commondreams.org/views/052800-105.htm.
Robert E. Lane is a professor emeritus at Yale University. He is the author of The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies.
c. 2000 Los Angeles Times
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