Measuring happiness

Over the years, the pursuit to quantify happiness has gathered fanatical single-mindedness comparable to an average human being's pursuit for happiness. The reasoning: if happiness trends are measured accurately, it could be as important as the calculation of GDP growth for a country while a government frames its policy.

But despite years of research and hundreds of research papers, the anomalies in understanding what makes one happy have not been understood and the cliches continue to remain.

More importantly, by trying to find a correlation between different happiness studies, surveys and indexes, the old adage that money can't buy happiness is proven wrong.

Money, alas, does make people happy.

Birthright

Happiness is a birthright?

A recent NBER paper titled ‘International Happiness' by Mr David Blanchflower and Mr Andrew Oswald chronicles and analyses how attempts have been made to measure happiness over the years.

They start by assuming that inside a human being there is some ‘happiness' and then go on to write it down as a mathematical equation:

Happiness = f(age, gender, income, education, marital status, diet, other personal characteristics, region characteristics, country characteristics)

By identifying the variables as either a positive or a negative co-efficient, the happiness in a person can be measured. But writing down an equation about happiness is one thing and measuring it quite another.

One problem is that moods matter. A normally perfectly happy man or woman can be feeling unhappy when answering the questionnaire. The reverse is also possible.

Also, are contentment and happiness the same thing? Could the former be a state of stable equilibrium and the latter an unstable one?

Then there is the old, old issue of inter-personal comparison of utility. How does your wife know that a fourth glass of whiskey will make her less happy than it makes you happy? Less importantly, how does anyone know that education is a preferred option to fishing?

Find it, measure it

Nevertheless, in the 21st century interest in measuring happiness has grown. Everyone wants to measure Gross Domestic Happiness along with the Gross Domestic Product, which is the standard measure of judging how well a country is doing.

The latest to join the search for the holy grail of a happiness index is the UK. Its Office of National Statistics has been asked to produce measures for gauging “general wellbeing”. France and Canada are also doing this.

But constructing an index is easier said than done. The method requires bringing together in one conceptually sound technique studies of mental well-being, physical well-being and psychology.

The flaws are shown up by assessing the various happiness surveys and data collected on happiness across various countries as the authors have done.

International surveys confirm what everyone has always known: Money, education, income and (oddly) marriage are considered as positive contributors to happiness.

But this means that happiness would is directly proportional to GDP growth of the country in which case Americans would be the happiest chaps on earth.

But the authors point out that this wasn't the case with the US. Surveys were carried out during the 1970s. Happiness did not seem to rising as fast as the GDP.

Left-out factor

The problem, they say, was not in the collection of data but because a basic human trait – jealousy -- was left out. People were satisfied but not happier than they were before because everyone's wealth was being distributed at the same pace.

But this would imply that inequality breeds happiness, which is not the case.

The other variable in the happiness equation is age. The U-shaped curve, based on the US happiness data where age is factored in, makes it tough to draw a correlation with age.

While the young and the old are happier people, middle-aged people are not happy despite having more money and more stability in the marital life.

The authors observe after going through various tables, surveys and data on happiness that happy people, according to the available data, are disproportionately the young and the old, rich, educated, married, in work, healthy, exercise-taker, with high fruit-and-vegetable diets and slim.

Reflecting this, happy countries are disproportionately rich, educated, democratic, trusting and low-unemployment.

The authors conclude by saying that a lot more work needs to be put into measuring happiness before any index or data are used or influences policy making.

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