Neil Thin: Social Wellbeing: the global happiness epidemic
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'Social wellbeing: the global happiness epidemic'. Public lecture in the 'Our Changing World' series, University of Edinburgh, 4th October 2016
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Neil Thin: Social Wellbeing: the global happiness epidemic
- 1. Social wellbeing: the global happiness epidemic
- 2. ‘Issues that impact human wellbeing’ … but also wellbeing itself? ‘Global challenges facing society’ … but also about global social opportunities?
- 3. Two long-term concerns: • How can we foster more appreciative social science, and more aspirational social planning? • What are social goods, and what do they have to do with happiness?
- 4. Why do we need happiness reminders?
- 5. ‘Happiness’ frequency in books 1800-2008 (Google Ngram) 1900 2000 1800
- 6. ‘Happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ in books 1900-2008 (Google Ngram) 1800
- 8. Assumption: OCW is on issues that matter Two main ways things matter: 1. Importance for wellbeing 2. We can/should do something about them Note also: things can ‘matter’ negatively or positively – we can be motivated by avoidance goals or by approach goals
- 9. 1 6 9 37 ‘Our Changing World’ lecture themes 1-53 wellbeing neutral useful goods threats to wellbeing
- 10. 1 6 9 37 ‘Our Changing World’ lecture themes 1-53 wellbeing neutral useful goods threats to wellbeing 37 lectures mainly about threats and harms – 15 environmental (mainly climate); 16 Medical; 6 9 lectures mainly about producing useful goods/services 6 neutral/ag nostic 1 lecture on health & wellbeing
- 11. Is there an elephant in the room?
- 12. Are you progressive? 1. Appreciation: have you cultivated the habit of appreciating progress? 2. Aspiration: what good will you do?
- 13. Global goals – remedial, instrumental, and aspirational Prevent, remove, or mitigate harms Produce useful goods and services Facilitate wonderful lives Frombadtogood From usefulness to happiness The OK line
- 14. Varieties of progress Facilitate wonderful lives Moral (eudaimonic) progress The OK line Remedial progress Ergonomic progress
- 15. The OK line Maslow’s hierarchy, positivity, and progress Self- transcendence Self- actualization Mental wellbeing Social wellbeing Resources and conditions preventing, remedying, coping Personal and societal aspirations
- 16. …but there is understandable resistance to appreciative learning and aspirational planning The OK line ‘negative utilitarianism’ Fix if broken Otherwise provide OK conditions
- 17. Millennium Development Goals 1990-2015 Badtogood Means… …ends The OK line Halve poverty and hunger Reduce child mortality Halt spread of HIV/AIDS & malaria Universal primary schooling End gender disparity in schooling Reduce maternal mortality Environmental sustainability Global partnership
- 18. Positive social qualities (4,5,7, 8,10,16,17): lifelong learning, peace, social inclusion, justice, co- operation, and decent work and sustainable production and consumption Resources (6,7,9,11): clean and safe infrastructure and resource flows Minimising human suffering (1,2,3,5,8,11): end poverty, hunger, avoidable illness Minimising planetary harms (12,13,14,15): stable climate, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, biodiversity UN Sustainable Development Goals
- 19. UN SDG ‘Health and wellbeing’ indicators 2016-2030 The OK line NCD premature mortality Maternal mortality Well-being??? Health services Traffic accidents tobacco vaccines AIDS, TB etc Substance abuse Hazardous chemicals Infant mortality
- 20. UN SDG ‘Peace, justice & strong institutions’ indicators 2016-2030 The OK line Organised crime and illegal arms flows violence Social well-being??? Rule of law Participatory decision making Transparent institutions corruption Non- discriminatory laws Global governance Trafficking & torture of children
- 21. Sociopathology and remedial, preventive, or mitigatory planning Aspirational social planning Psycho- pathology Positive psychology Societal level Individual level Pathologies and avoidance goals Positive qualities and aspirational goals The challenge
- 22. ‘really social goods’ To an economist, the fish are a ‘social’ i.e. nonprivate, noncommodified good Sociologically, the conviviality of the anglers is a really social good Psychologically, ‘social wellbeing’ means having good relationships
- 23. …so, aspirational social planners envisage more than: • Tackling social pathologies • Facilitating growth • Providing ‘social’ services • Facilitating individuals’ social capabilities
- 24. Aspirational social planning Approach goalsAvoidance goals ExistentialbenefitsPracticalbenefits
- 26. Common features of epidemics • Mass population infected • Social and cultural transmission (through actual or metaphorical contagion) • They’re scary Good epidemics are possible – we need appreciative epidemiology too
- 31. ‘that action is best which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ Francis Hutcheson (Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725) Prioritise! Quantify!
- 32. How could we evaluate the comparative importance of “greatest happiness” versus “greatest number?” The OK line 10 billion fairly happy people? 5 billion very happy people?
- 33. 1725 2016 Population 0.65 bn 7.5 bn Life expectancy 29 72 Happiness 5/10? 5.4/10? In 67 nations 1950-2010, time series show average national happiness increase +0.012 annually, on a 0–10 scale [effectively 2.5-8.4] ‘happiness must have improved by more than two points over the past two centuries’ (Ruut Veenhoven, 2016, ‘Did the promise of Enlightenment come true?’ Social Indicators Research
- 34. Four queries about prioritising and counting • Is it useful to measure happiness? • Can ‘happiness’ and ‘GDP’ scores be compared? • Does quantitative happiness research offer clear policy guidance? • Is the idea of maximising ‘Gross National Happiness’ valid?
- 35. Ethical quantification debates Francis Hutcheson: happiness is what counts Adam Smith: let’s count ‘the economy’ - i.e. material production of useful goods John Sinclair: let’s do ‘statistics’ to count ‘the quantum of happiness’
- 36. Statistics – info for statecraft, to assess the ‘quantum of happiness’ Statistics then became synonymous with observable facts. By mid-20th Century, ‘statistics’ and ‘data’ both meant ‘numbers’ John Sinclair of Thurso, inventor of ‘statistics’
- 37. Quantification debates [cont’d] Alfred Marshall (Principles of Economics, 1890): ‘the economy’ includes services Simon Kuznets (1934): quality matters - GNP is a policy tool, not a measure of welfare Diane Coyle (2014): GDP is still useful, it’s ‘the economy’ we must re-think
- 38. Happiness vs ‘economy’ comparisons
- 39. Happiness in national rhetoric, statistics, and policy discourse • High-profile politicians: Bhutan King; David Cameron; Thai King; • National strategies and constitutions: Bhutan; Bolivia; Ecuador; Dubai; UAE • National surveys – most countries worldwide, incl nearly all European countries • Sub-national/local strategies: Goa; Jalisco (Mex); Santa Monica (CA)
- 40. UK Office of National Statistics Satisfaction: how satisfied are you with your life? Self-esteem: are the things you do worthwhile? Good feelings: how happy did you feel yesterday? Bad feelings: how anxious did you feel yesterday?
- 41. ONS Sept 2016
- 42. World Happiness Report 2015
- 43. World Happiness Report 2016 • 0-10 scale, world average life evaluation is 5.4 • 4 points higher in the top 10 vs bottom 10 • Strong correlations with: GDP; life expectancy; social support; trust; freedom; generosity • Good/bad feelings correlate more weakly with these factors
- 45. ‘The happiest places on earth are not internal ones. They are not geographical ones. They are the places between us.’ (Christopher Peterson, 2013, Pursuing the Good Life, p. 226
Editor's Notes
- The lecture series is about the really big issues that matter to everyone in the world. The term ‘challenges’ sits fairly neutrally between ‘problems’ and ‘opportunities’. I want to start with the relatively modest proposition that nothing matters more than happiness, but that because this is elusive and vague, it has often been neglected as the key developent challenge. I also want to argue that in some of disciplines that study development, there seems to be little appetite for looking appreciatively at world progress towards happiness.
- e.g. in 1990s ‘social exclusion’ was becoming the favoured euphemism for poverty. But if social inclusion was the answer, what exactly were the social goods that people were to gain access to? What did they have to do with happiness?
- Two senses of ‘epidemic’ – things happening to people; and people talking about it. It may not be certain that there is a global epidemic of experienced happiness, but it is certain that there is an epidemic of conversations about happiness. Yet I want to show that although this feels recent, there was probably a lot more talk about happiness in the 19th century and before. It’s hard to know how to interpret this intriguing trajectory of the usage of ‘happiness’ in books over the past two years – a 200-year decline followed by a sharp upturn at the millennium. Perhaps there’s nothing very significant in it, e.g. maybe people just began referring to ‘wellbeing instead, at least’ in written texts (the same source shows a steep rise in the use of ‘wellbeing’ over the 20th century). Perhaps as book-publishing countries secularised, ‘happiness’ which had been popular in religious discourse fell into disuse. Maybe in everyday speech there was no such decline in reference to happiness. Still, it’s intriguing given that it is almost certain that over that period, the world saw an unprecedented rise in experienced happiness, in better health, longer lives, more safety, and more opportunity for individuals to effectively pursue their own vision of happiness.
- Regarding the question of whether world happiness is on the rise, well of couse this depends on irresolvable questions, such as how you define it, how you measure it, and whether people report it accurately. Rather than obsessing about what happiness is, it may be more instructive to explore the ways in which the idea of happiness makes a difference to our conversations and our plans.
- Nothing can be more important for wellbeing than happiness It’s increasingly clear – although often denied today as in the past – that we can influence happiness (our own, and that of other people)
- It seems, then, that as in so many areas of development discourse, the OCW lecture series has been worryingly reluctant to discuss wellbeing or happiness, the things that we ultimately care most about. Happiness, then, is ‘the elephant in the room’.
- It seems, then, that as in so many areas of development discourse, the OCW lecture series has been worryingly reluctant to discuss wellbeing or happiness, the things that we ultimately care most about. Happiness, then, is ‘the elephant in the room’.
- Remedial – protecting; Ergonomic – providing; Eudaimonic - promoting
- Maslow’s hierarchy depicts two very different kinds of contrast From a bad life to a good life From basic provisioning and material conditions to more sophisticated aspirations and ultimate values Note that social goods sit around the middle, whereas the two top layers are mainly about individual mental wellbeing Notice also that as you shift your attention ‘up’ the hierarchy you are also moving your gaze from ‘external’ conditions to ‘internal’ experiences Note, further, the absence of ‘self-transcendence’ from this model. This misses the fact that some of our most important senses of meaning or purpose in life are about escaping the confines of individualistic or even communalistic or even humanistic self-interest, and realising connection with self-transcendent goods. Refs: Koltko-Rivera, Mark E. (2006) ‘Rediscovering the later version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Self-transcendence and opportunities for theory, research, and unification.’ Review of General Psychology 10,4:302-317
- Normal social science and normal social planning are dominated by ‘negative utilitarianism’
- n.b several goals appear under more than one goal because their targets are diverse – e.g.promoting provision of resources and minimising pathologies.
- Two main meanings of ‘positive’: preferable, better – as in ‘positive emotions’ More emphatic, more important, more sustainable, more substantial, more active, or more ultimately valuable – as in ‘positive justice’ or ‘positive peace’
- Two main meanings of ‘positive’: preferable, better – as in ‘positive emotions’ More emphatic, more important, more sustainable, more substantial, more active, or more ultimately valuable – as in ‘positive justice’ or ‘positive peace’
- Problem: PP still only weakly engaged with social research and vice versa Goals: PPs pay more heed to social contexts; social researchers adopt appreciative approaches; social planners become more aspirational Using what kinds of criteria can we judge the ‘progressiveness’ or the ‘prosocial’ tendencies of: individuals; neighbourhoods; schools; businesses; cities; religious organizations; NGOs; countries? Can you express your ‘progressiveness’ in aspirational terms: declaring yourself to be pro-good rather than merely anti-bad? E.g. to be a good gender reformer, can you be in favour of positive-sum approaches, e.g. strengthening friendships and love between women and men, and helping men develop the life skills that have enabled women to lead such surprisingly long and happy lives, rather than adopting the ‘feminist’ zero-sum confrontational approaches?
- The fish in the pond are a collective good – what economists call a ‘social good’ unless the pond is privately owned. Once caught, the fish probably become private goods unless there’s some kind of sharing agreement. But there’s something else here that is a different kind of social good, a ‘really social good’. The men may not look convivial, but lets assume they are the kind of men who like to socialise side by side, without eye contact. Far from resenting the other anglers as competitors, they like the presence of other anglers. The fishing experience and the pond wouldn’t be the same without them. This conviviality, the recognition of a moral community, is a really social good. It makes no sense as a kind of property. It is ‘irreducibly social’ as Charles Taylor put it in his essay ‘irreducibly social goods’. Solidarity, or conviviality, or some kind of sense of mutual belonging in a moral community, seems to me to be a kind of capstone social good, without which other social goods aren’t possible. Aristotle for this reason recognized friendship as being absolutely essential for wellbeing. But his moral community isn’t one we’d approve of today, because he excluded women and slaves. Social progress, we might argue, moves in two directions at once: subjectively, we would all prefer to feel a sense of belonging in a convivial community. Objectively, as planners or theorists of the good society, we hope to see expansion in the scope of empathy and the reach of philanthropy, so that eventually everyone in the world feels that everyone else belongs in the same moral universe. Is the conviviality here just a contextual element that influences the anglers’ wellbeing? Or is it actually a self-transcendent part of their wellbeing? Let’s suppose that for some of these anglers the time spent here is a really important part of their lives, and that the sociality is a crucial factor (others may either not care much about the angling, or like the fish but not the people).
- Originally, in Thin 2002, I had much the same list of four categories: Social justice; solidarity; participation; and security. But I hadn’t worked out these two axes of difference between the kinds of objectives associated with these categories. Conviviality social capital; solidarity; friendliness; tolerance; cohesion; inclusion; integration; belonging; altruism; dignity; diversity; reconciliation; respect Participation vitality; civic engagement; cooperation; creativity; empowerment; Justice fairness; freedom; autonomy; democracy; choice; equality; equity; gender equality; rights; transparency Safety peace; resilience; security; trust
- Don’t be fooled by the WHO – there is no such thing as a ‘non-communicable disease’; similarly, happiness isn’t just something that happens to individuals [see e.g. Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler (2010) Connected: Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. New York: Little, Brown & Co
- Normal social science and normal social planning are dominated by ‘negative utilitarianism’
- Note two main theories of static happiness that Veenhoven is contesting: 1. ‘set point theory’’ 2. ‘social comparison theory’
- …i.e. in the accounts, ‘happiness’ is mainly a matter of sheep, turnips, and potatoes It isn’t true that sociologists have until recently been entirely disconnected from happiness and wellbeing research. Lots of sociologists played key roles in the dvt of happiness research, but they were all positivists – number-crunchers prepared to reduce happiness to numerical form. …as Charlotte Bronte famously argued, ‘happiness is not a potato’
- Caution! Both lines reify highly uncertain abstractions; Before-after comparisons aren’t comparing like with like; The two scales are incomparable – there is no ‘growing gap’ - So avoid knee-jerk reactions like: a) ‘the economy’ doesn’t matter for happiness; or b) ‘happiness reports are useless as indicators of progress because they don’t change’.
- Note that a clear and perhaps surprising pattern has emerged, contradicting many intuitions and earlier rural/urban comparisons, showing better scores for rural areas. - No obvious explanation yet, but it may have something to do with face-to-face communities where respondents don’t feel anonymous.
- Source: Helliwell, John, Haifang Huang and Shun Wang (2016) ‘The distribution of world happiness.’ In J.Helliwell, R.Layard, and J. Sachs [eds], World Happiness Report 2016, Update (Vol. I). New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, pp. 8-49 Further readings: Clark, A., Flèche, S., & Senik, C. (2014). The great happiness moderation: Well-being inequality during episodes of income growth. In A. Clark & C. Senik (Eds.), Happiness and economic growth: Lessons from developing countries (pp. 32-139). Oxford: Oxford University Press Goff, L., Helliwell, J., & Mayraz, G. (2016). The welfare costs of well-being inequality. NBER Working Paper 21900
- Source: Helliwell, John, Haifang Huang and Shun Wang (2016) ‘The distribution of world happiness.’ In J.Helliwell, R.Layard, and J. Sachs [eds], World Happiness Report 2016, Update (Vol. I). New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, pp. 8-49 Further readings: Clark, A., Flèche, S., & Senik, C. (2014). The great happiness moderation: Well-being inequality during episodes of income growth. In A. Clark & C. Senik (Eds.), Happiness and economic growth: Lessons from developing countries (pp. 32-139). Oxford: Oxford University Press Goff, L., Helliwell, J., & Mayraz, G. (2016). The welfare costs of well-being inequality. NBER Working Paper 21900
- The mis-labelled ‘Happy Planet’ rankings are an example of highly questionable attempts to produce rankings by combining very different kinds of indicator. Note that Bangladesh still ranks high, despite the very low self-reported life satisfaction, because its population is huge in relation to the material throughput of its economy. But is it really an indicator of ‘happiness’ to have a huge population who say they are less than happy?
- The gist of the lecture has been that the appreciation of trends in happiness should always be our paramount concern, and that planners and students of development tend to be forgetful about this. So you will forget about happiness from time to time. We started with the concept of avoidance goals, and we’ll close with one. Psychologists have shown that if you frame such as an avoidance goal, it’s more difficult to achieve. So if you want to forget about happiness, and I say: ‘Whatever you do, don’t think of a happy elephant”, you’re going to find it very hard to forget about happiness.