Growth and happiness
The connection between economic growth and happiness has been called into question many times. Surveys have been conducted that purport to show that people in the UK, and perhaps other rich nations, are no happier now than when GDP was half the level it now stands at. The argument goes that if we are no happier with economic growth, why should we be putting in the effort, risk using up resources, and perhaps polluting the planet, all to no good effect?
There are several caveats to this analysis. The first is that there are no objective measures of a person’s happiness. We cannot hold a hedometer to someone’s forehead and read off their measured happiness in hedons. We have to rely on subjective measures, and typically these are established through questionnaires. A person might be asked which of five categories of happiness they would consider themselves to be in, ranging from miserable as sin to ecstatic with delight.
We cannot judge what their standards are when they complete these surveys. To some extent, perhaps to a considerable extent, it depends on character as well as circumstances. Things that might make one person happy might make another miserable. Secondly, and importantly, the people who fill in the questionnaires now are not the same people who filled them in decades ago. Standards might have changed over time. People might have learned to expect more out of life than did their predecessors, or maybe less. The spread of 24-hour news coverage, mostly concentrating as it does on crimes, follies and misfortunes, might have engendered an air of gloom and foreboding that makes people unhappier than they were without it.
It is also true that many of the causes of unhappiness have changed. People who a century or more ago might have been unhappy because their grandparents starved to death in winter, or because their child died of diphtheria, are less likely to do so today because of the advances that growth has made possible. But these sources of unhappiness might have been replaced by others that concern personal appearance or relationships. Perhaps people will always find reasons to be unhappy, but growth has enabled us to eliminate many of the unnecessary causes of it by helping us to fund the advance of science and medicine.
Other surveys, also subjective, suggest that the level of happiness is less important to people than the direction of it. Adam Smith spoke of “the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,” and Thomas Jefferson wrote of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” not its attainment, but its pursuit. These surveys suggest that people are happier if they are progressing in life than they are if they live in a static society, even if it is a richer one. It seems to be the game that matters, not the quarry.
One thing growth does is to enable opportunity. It brings new prospects for advance and for progress. It not only enables us to remove more of the unnecessary sources of unhappiness, it also makes it more likely that people can hope to better their condition and happily set about improving their lot in life.