It’s taken Arthur C. Brooks but two years to rise from obscurity into the upper echelons of popular academia. His latest work, Gross National Happiness, received lots of attention before even hitting shelves.
How he did it is no mystery: He combined two of the field’s most potent recipes for success. One is politics — it’s no secret that the academy leans left, so when a John Lott, James Q. Wilson, or Charles Murray comes around, defending conservatism with careful and dispassionate social science, it makes headlines. (Brooks’s last book, Who Really Cares, demonstrated that conservatives donate to charity more than liberals do.) Ingredient two was the trend that the bestseller Freakonomics launched: The use of economic statistics to explain everyday life, packaged in language accessible to the general public. Brooks has mastered the genre’s clear, analytical, and data-driven writing style.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s equally convincing in person. At a Manhattan Institute luncheon last week, Brooks laid out the Gross National Happiness thesis: Happiness, measurable simply by asking citizens how happy they are, is crucial to a nation’s wellbeing. People are happiest when they are free and moral. Brooks never divulges any personal biases, often punctuating his answers to audience questions with, “That’s according to the data.”
And as a read through the book shows, the data are indeed on his side. He draws on decades of existing literature — happiness research is an old field, though the popular press only recently took notice — and contributes his own work when needed.
The biggest hurdle Brooks faces is that many researchers, especially on the Left, have come to a different conclusion about freedom, especially economic freedom. The numbers indicate that money does not buy happiness — once a country reaches subsistence level, its average income is no use in predicting its happiness. However, within a given society, the rich tend to be happier than the poor, suggesting that relative wealth is the important thing. The well-off are only happy because they can look down on the poor, and the poor are unhappy because they’re angry about inequality. In addition, the poor, having less money, presumably derive more happiness from each dollar. Therefore, as a society, we’d be happier redistributing income from the rich to the poor.
Brooks takes a closer look at the available information, though, and convincingly dismembers this idea. It’s true that unhappy people often complain about inequality, but it seems that their real problem is that they don’t believe in mobility: “Imagine two demographically identical people who have the same beliefs about mobility. The inequality they personally experience — the difference between their own incomes and average incomes in their communities — is uncorrelated with their happiness. But . . . when one person believes that his family has a chance of improving its standard of living while the other does not . . . [he] will be 12 percentage points more likely to be very happy than the nonbeliever.”
Therefore, using public policy to decrease inequality won’t make anyone happier, because it ignores the root problem. What’s more, even if inequality were the actual problem, there’s no evidence that redistributed income makes people happy, no matter how much they need the money — the pleasure we get from each dollar comes from earning it, and people who accept public assistance actually become less happy.
(In discussing the Left’s use of happiness research, Brooks does not address a more creative argument Mother Jones made awhile back: Since economic growth doesn’t make us happy, why don’t we stop growing for the environment’s sake?)
There are plenty of other interesting tidbits here. If you donate money to charity, for example, you really can buy happiness. The difference between “libertarian” and “libertine” is crucial — while free people are happier than unfree people, free people who choose to live morally are happiest of all. At least half of our “baseline happiness” is genetic. In the average person’s day, the most miserable part is the commute to work. Marriage increases happiness, but kids decrease it.
Brooks fails to prove his point only a few times. For example, in his discussion of freedom he claims that many post-9/11 security policies are bad for our happiness, so we should roll them back. Maybe; there is a tradeoff between safety and freedom/happiness, and it’s possible we’ve gone too far toward safety. But Brooks doesn’t demonstrate that any specific measure isn’t worth it, and he offers no broad system for making that tradeoff. It’s not even clear one would be possible — how many gross national happiness points does a terrorism death deduct? Free people are happy people, but only until they’re dead people.
Still, all considered, Gross National Happiness is an immensely important work. It summarizes a fascinating field of research, contributes fresh insights, and does so in brisk, incredibly readable language.
– NR associate editor Robert VerBruggen edits the Phi Beta Cons blog. He reviewed Who Really Cares here.