If you were to chart the objective indicators of social welfare since World War Two, you would see an across-the-board increase in such objective measures as per-capita income, “real” income, longevity, cars per driver, phone calls per capita, trips taken, highest degree earned, and even IQ scores. The graphs of subjective indicators like personal freedom, women’s freedom, and reduction of bias against minority groups would also show steady trends upward.
Obviously with more of everything, we should all be happier. Right? Unfortunately, as Gregg Easterbrook points out in his book The Progress Paradox, “The trend for happiness has been flat for 50 years. The trend line is negative for the number of people who consider themselves ‘very happy,’ with that percentage gradually declining since the 1940s. . . . Adjusting for population growth, 10 times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from unipolar depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did a century ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything — except happiness.”
To make the situation clearer, Easterbrook points to the work of Edward Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, whose work has led him to five startling conclusions:
Lacking money causes unhappiness, but having money does not cause happiness.
As a group, the old are happier than the young; for most people, happiness increases with age.
Millionaires as a group are no happier than people of average income.
The disabled and chronically ill report a slightly higher sense of well-being than the population at large, perhaps because they have a heightened appreciation of the value of their own lives.
The psychological norm for the United States is positive, but only by a tiny bit. On a test of life satisfaction that Diener designed, the average score was “slightly satisfied.”
Diener’s research also shows that as incomes rise, so does the sense of well-being — but only so far. Once the middle-class level is reached, money and happiness no longer appear to have anything to do with each other. It seems that the goals and milestones for satisfaction keep moving.
In the previous generation, owning a home, having a car, eating in a restaurant occasionally, and being...
