Two articles on happiness
Here’s a brief one from the Boston Globe:
QUICK, READ THIS paragraph out loud as fast as you can! Feel better? You should, if a team of Princeton and Harvard psychologists is right. Motivated by the observation that euphoria is often accompanied by “racing thoughts” among manic individuals, the psychologists conducted a series of experiments – including one that had people narrate the famous “Job Switching” episode of “I Love Lucy,” at fast or slow playback speeds – to test whether being forced to think faster results in a more positive mood. Not only was thinking faster significantly associated with positive mood, but there was some evidence that thinking faster inflated self-esteem and made it harder for people to stop talking. Other research by the authors even found that thinking fast about ostensibly depressing things can improve mood too. The authors conclude that “experiences that can succeed in making us think fast may have desirable consequences for affect (and, perhaps, for energy and self-confidence). In a world where we often could use an extra boost to our mood, simple manipulations of thought speed may have valuable practical importance.”
I’ve sometimes advised people who are troubled by a racing mind to consciously slow down their thoughts in order to feel calmer (for example in order to help them get to sleep), but the reverse hadn’t occurred to me.
There’s another article today in the Globe in which two researchers claim to have reversed a long-standing finding that happiness and wealth are not correlated. They claim that in fact “rich people tend to be happier than poor people, and in roughly equal measure, rich countries tend to be happier than poor countries.”
FOR YEARS ECONOMISTS have puzzled over a beguiling paradox: Money is supposed to be a good thing, but beyond the income needed for a basically decent life, nations didn’t seem to get any happier as they got richer.
This deeply subversive discovery, which was embraced by an academic world already prone to such views, implied that affluent countries shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth because growth wouldn’t really make people better off.
Now a pair of up-and-coming young economists are saying the so-called Easterlin paradox (named for economist Richard Easterlin), doesn’t exist. Rich people and rich countries are happier in like measure. Money, in other words, really does buy happiness, which may account for why people almost invariably seek more of it.
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2 Responses to “Two articles on happiness”
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Published: Nov 23 2008
The Globe article seems phony to me. If increasing wealth does make us increasingly happy then we (in the developed world) are so incredibly rich compared with our ancestors it is a wonder they ever bothered to get out of bed at all. I am sure Shakespeare lived in pretty terrible material poverty compared with your average writer today but I don’t suppose he was any less happy. The clue is in the answer to the last question in the article. It is poverty that makes people unhappy. Not wealth that makes ‘em happy. This reminds me of the Flynn effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) in some peculiar way. It sets my alarm bells ringing. There is something circular going on in the testing and the justification for the testing. So often reality seems orthogonal to all this stuff. They are simply asking the wrong questions.
I’m very skeptical about the second article as well. Various other factors can be closely tied to poverty, such as repressive governments, lawlessness, etc. If people in Somalia is unhappy, can you say that’s because it’s a poor country or might it be because there’s no social stability? Or if someone in Iran is unhappy, might that not be more to do with them living under a repressive regime? The article doesn’t mention how they adjusted for such factors, which might well overwhelm the effect of wealth/poverty.