Gross National Happiness
An book review of Gross National Happiness by Arthur C. Brooks appeared in Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine a couple of months ago. Brooks is a professor at Syracuse University, and has done a lot of research into areas such as this. Wikipedia summarizes Professor Brooks’ findings this way:
Brooks’s findings were controversial. Conservatives, he writes, are twice as likely to call themselves “very happy” than liberals. Those with extreme political beliefs, right or left, tend to be happier than moderates–although their provocations lower happiness for the rest of society. Devout people of all religions are much happier than secularists. Parents are happier than the childless, even though their children often upset them. But child-rearing, Brooks writes, offers “meaning” to life, a sort of deep happiness that Aristotle called eudaimonia. Balancing freedom and order also brings optimal happiness, Brooks writes, because “too many moral choices leave us insecure and searching, unable to distinguish right from wrong, and thus miserable.”
The second section of the book is dedicated to the economic dimensions of happiness. Opportunity breeds happiness, Brooks writes, and “efforts to diminish economic inequality–without creating economic opportunity–will actually lower America’s gross national happiness, not raise it.” Opportunity allows for good jobs, and “job satisfaction actually increases life happiness.” Brooks argues that work makes people happy because they are creating value, a theme he explored in a textbook also released in 2008 on “social value creation.”[9]
To the extent that happiness can be “bought,” it is with charity: giving–of effort, time, and money–makes people much happier, says Brooks, and it correlates with many other characteristics of the happy. Brooks, identifying himself as a libertarian, writes that the government does a poor job of making us happy but that “the government can help us pursue happiness.”
In short, conservatives and churchgoers tend to be happier than liberals and secularists, and it doesn’t matter who’s in office. Year after year, happiness studies confirm this. This is important to remember as we watch the left in their outrage over the passage of Proposition 8, despite the fact that they did so well on Election Day. This is why my statement “liberals are angry people” actually has academic support. Even when we conservatives lose, we’re still happy. And when liberals win, they’re still angry.
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November 17, 2008 at 2:37 AM