The New Key Question: How Happy Are You?
WASHINGTON - Is it time to offer day care for ailing older parents to give their care-giving children a break? Time for much bigger incentives for carpooling? Time to extend maternity and paternity leave substantially? 
The answer’s yes to all three if you accept the findings of a new kind of public attitude polling that’s gaining influence with corporate leaders and in government policy circles worldwide.
It’s called well-being research or, by those who want to be seen as especially rigorous practitioners, behavioral economics. Personal trainers and life coaches who borrow from the same findings often call it happiness research.
Whatever the word, its pioneers intend that quantified self-assessments of satisfaction will someday be as powerful as the gross domestic product and other economic measures.
Indeed, well-being research came into vogue because of a powerful limitation in economic measures that was first noticed around 1980: While United States, Japan and Britain reported huge personal income growth over time, their citizens reported not the slightest uptick in personal happiness.
That triggered a new quest to find out what mattered more to people than money. More recently, a key aim has been to apply those insights to devising public policies that might make people happier.
Early next year, for example, the Gallup Organization will ask a sample of residents in 26 U.S. cities such questions as: Do you feel safe? Do you have confidence in your city’s leadership? Is your city tolerant of people who are different? Would you tell a friend to move here?
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the sponsor of the three-year $2.1 million survey, hopes that it’ll show cities and their leaders what they need work on to improve well-being and productivity, said Paula Lynn Ellis, the vice president for national and new initiatives at the Miami-based philanthropy.
“We want to see if communities in which people are emotionally attached and engaged prosper more than others,” Ellis said.
Luring and keeping talented workers will help, she added. “And that will likely depend, once basic service needs are met, on factors such as the city’s lifestyle, openness and trust.”
Ed Diener, a University of Illinois psychologist, thinks that nations should take the same approach, and not just for economic gain.
“With good information about what affects well-being, society will function better,” Diener predicted recently.
“It promises governance from the people up,” said John Helliwell, another leading well-being researcher and a Canadian economist who works with local governments.
Agreeing on how best to measure well-being remains a challenge, however. The Washington, D.C.-based Gallup Organization, the field’s biggest and most influential commercial practitioner, relies on simple questions that defy evasion. For example, “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?”
Another school of researchers, led by Nobel Prize-winning Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and colleague Alan Krueger, an economist, asks respondents to keep diaries describing their feelings about each day’s activities. (Top ranked: intimate relations. Worst bummer: commuting to work.)
Whatever the approach, respondents answer questions on a numeric scale_ 0 to 6, for example - so the results can be quantified. Computer-driven digestion of large numbers of responses yields lots of unexpected findings and ratifies others.
If people hate commuting, for example, but love socializing with co-workers, as Kahneman and Krueger found, promoting carpooling becomes an obvious policy option.
If the most creative young workers want to work in cities with visual pizzazz, as Gallup found, a little beautification can really pay off.
“You don’t have to do it overnight,” said Jim Clifton, Gallup’s chairman and CEO. “You make a few improvements until, when you ask people whether the city is looking better, they say yes,” Clifton continued. “The yes is everything.”
He advises, among others, Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s first and current prime ministers, respectively, on how the prosperous but famously sterile island nation can attract and retain highly talented workers.
To date, most of Gallup’s well-being research has been used to help commercial companies such as Toyota of North America and Wal-Mart better understand their customers and workers.
This fall, however, it introduced “The State of Global Well-Being” survey, a $20 million undertaking that required roughly 1,000 interviews in each of 132 countries. It’s aimed at global pulse-takers such as the United Nations, plus government and private international aid agencies as well as companies weighing foreign investments.
Helliwell, the Canadian well-being analyst, pursues a more local agenda: making city life happier. A key to that, he’s found, is trust in one’s neighbors, a quality that’s abundant in old, unglamorous cities with stable populations such as Scranton, Pa. or St. John’s, Newfoundland.
In more glamorous but impersonal cities, Helliwell promotes parks and dog-walking areas among the high-rises to help people meet. He likes libraries that are re-invented as computer cafes and are open late. He likes neighbors who rally spontaneously around a cause, such as driving out drug abusers, then stick together to identify and solve other community problems. He also likes town centers that really are town centers.
Often, “planners want to keep the downtown traffic moving and architects want beautiful buildings,” Helliwell said. “There’s no one who wants to make a public space into a civic living room.”
For the kind of governance decisions that he describes, well-being studies that define, say, a city’s most alienated neighborhoods, are likely to be just another argument - albeit a novel one - for more humane city planning.
Well-being research shines singular new light on other governance problems, such as deciding how much compensation people who live under airport noise deserve.
Take the case of Amsterdam’s fast-growing - and noisy - Schiphol Airport. The traditional theory is that the real estate markets near airports adjust downward to compensate for noise. That doesn’t hold for Schiphol, however, due to rent controls and a seven-year backlog of people waiting to buy homes in the Amsterdam area.
To determine how to compensate residents living under the airport’s cone of noise, Dutch well-being researchers asked them a host of questions about their personal contentment, which included a few about how vexing they found airport noise. The results were overlaid on detailed maps of airport noise that indicated the decibel levels down to the level of two- or three- house clusters.
After adjusting for homes with balconies, patios and backyards that increased likely exposure to airport noise, as well as for variations in noise insulation, researchers derived precise payment scales for Schiphol noise compensation.
European governments are leaders in well-being research, generally speaking. Government surveys of households in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Austria include sections on well-being.
In the United States, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, recently conferred with Diener, the University of Illinois psychologist, about adding well-being questions to health surveys.
Diener declined comment after conferring with the CDC, but before doing so he suggested that the Centers wanted to explore well-known links between optimism and speedier recovery from illness.
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
There should be research done on children growing up in apartments, with only city streets for their playground, and having to come up with their own forms of entertaining play, which ends up being such activities as throwing objects off overpasses and onto traffic below.
As for noise, I once lived in a house at the end of Main Street in a small town. There was a railroad track next to the sidewalk across the street where trains ran hourly, around the clock. The whistle blew for the four blocks through town before reaching the corner we lived on, and it blew at that crossing too. Within two weeks of living in that house, my family had stopped hearing the whistle, the train, and feeling the rumble through the floor as the big trains went by.
I’m sure living that way would be impossible for some. Had we been irritated by the constant noise, and held onto that irritation, chances are we’d have continued to hear it and be irritated. I’m sure the same goes with the constant airport traffic, although there, I think I’d be more afraid of a plane coming down on the house.
Of course just seeing the flight map they show on the telly once in awhile, with all the flights in the air at one time across the country is enough to make me want to run for cover.
I’m very happy. I hear a diesel powered generator droning away in the distance, with a faint background ringing in both ears day and night. When I put on a pair of earmuffs, It becomes much louder. That’s why I don’t wear earmuffs when shopping at Wal-Mart. I just walk around smiling and am happy as a pig cavorting in a mudhole.
“…should be research done on children growing up in apartments, with only city streets for their playground, and having to come up with their own forms of entertaining play, which ends up being such activities as throwing objects off overpasses and onto traffic below….”
When I moved to a city neighborhood, I was amazed at the degree of healthy play I saw kids doing. Few city neighborhoods I know of are as grim as you describe - Every city neighborhood in my rust-belt town has parks, playgrounds, and low-traffic streets or vacant lots for play. Most days my street looked like the old “little Rascals” movie shorts - but with Vietnamese kids playing along with the white and black kids.
And the kids could also play more and explore farther from home because parents didn’t seem to have that excess fear and paranoia that one seems to encounter in the suburbs. No one ever got hurt or in trouble as far as I knew.
In contrast, suburban streets seem to always be deserted -and play has turned into strictly a commercial activity - the mall “check-e-cheeses” or computer games.
“We want to see if communities in which people are emotionally attached and engaged prosper more than others,” Ellis said.
Afterall, if you are happy and not more prosperous than others, this would be not be something we would want to emulate in our money-is-everything consumer culture.
We played stick ball in the row housed streets of Philadelphia. We’d slice the rubber ball in half, so if one got put up on a roof, we’d still have another. We used a broom stick for a bat. Now that will give a kid a good eye for hitting the ball.
This is the first time I’ve written in, but I wish I could be heard about this…. How about our country being at war, and lack of responsiveness from our elected leaders? Knowing that U.S. weapons are killing and maiming other countries citizens, and that the violence is coming home in the form of PTSD. Activism fatigue. Surely this has been a major factor in decreasing in my quality of life. Anyone accounting for this?
KEM PATRICK, sounds like something from the “old days”; could be wrong, maybe they still play that way today.
But I am of retirement age and remember many, many adventures as a kid that have gone by the board. I often wonder how I/we survived childhood. I could go into detail, but one or two examples should be suffcient.
Making home made crossbows and playing tag with arrows sticks) tipped with nails (blunt end out of course). Playing “knights” on our bikes with trashcan lids and tent poles.
Didn’t have a lot, but seemed to be happy none the less. nuff said.
I don’t understand why stick ball could have been wrong. I believe many play wth IPOds, cell phones and drugs today.
PEACE 808, there is a good article about PTSD now on this CD screen. Just scroll down a ways and log on. ___ Welcome aboard.
PEACE808—I second the WELCOME ABOARD that KEM PATRICK expressed. This really is a good site with mostly productive, thought-provoking comments. We CD ers are quality stuff. (smile) hang on for the ride–it can get rocky but it’s always interesting.
PEACE 808: I think you and I are resonating on the same frequency on this piece. Here we have a nation engrossed in profligate resource over-use, a nation of growing obesity, Diabetes, depression, alcoholism, violence… a nation that has made WAR a banal daily occurence and some universities have the hubris to study happiness? I mean is this designing the deck on the Titanic, or what? This is pure Prosac sociology all the way. It’s like the nation has SERIOUS moral, spiritual, eocnomic, ecological, and political HOUSE cleaning to do before the very ISSUE of personal happiness means anything, or as Grace Slick said aptly, “shit to a tree.”
For Goddess’ sake! I mean it’s like passing out balloons during a genuine air raid! Let’s all cheer while the killing continues. (This is just one notch up from the psychologists who work on torture techniques, supposedly to ’save’ the empire!) What people are capable of rationalizing for a paycheck, or ersatz degree is the stuff of theater of the absurd.
Welcome Peace808,
If you’ve been “lurking” but not commenting then welcome to the most important debate in the world. If you’re new to CD entirely, then you’ve found the most honest site with the most enlightened, insightful posters there is (maybe in history.) A word of caution though: none of these pieces are sugarcoated and it is quite normal for you to experience a week-long strong bout of “CNN Syndrome” depression since your awareness of what really is going on in the world will be full throttle. It is at first hard to fathom the depths of political depravity that 90% of our so-called “elected” leaders are willing to stoop to, simply to appease their Fortune-500 masters…… And it will simply stun you, as you digest the great selection of numerous stories here, how great is the art of deception and trickery practiced by those in power and privilege over the human race.
But try not to just look away as most good germans do. In mere decades or less we may all be in a lot of trouble and the only hope we have is that more of our countrymen and world citizens will read sites like this one, and decide to intervene for the betterment of the human condition.
Welcome aboard, and don’t be afraid to make comments about anything. The comment section is a true 100% democracy, and I have learned more from these comment posters than I have from the articles.
Cheers!
Siouxrose,
Another soothing great piece of writing… So true. I just love your style. The irony you frame strikes a cord with me and is most revealing.
Thanks for the advice on self-publishing the other day.
pac
Sorry KEM PATRICK, was not indicating that “stick ball” was wrong. I loved playing it (and many other things)in the steet, but in my case it was long, long ago. Just wondering if you were describing something that was still being done these days or begone era.
Rather than having the people themselves use the research and reconcile it with their own experiences, and make their own decisions to serve their own better interests, the capitalists wish to take that upon themselves, in the role of Big Brother, to dispense “well being” to the people as another commodity of addiction/dependence, to preserve the capitalists’ hierarchies of power, control and plunder.
Oh my KILGORE, I’m sorry too, I have a serious vision problem when using the computer and am blind in one eye, I read it wrong, I missed the comma. I wondered why you thought stick ball was wrong.
PACPLAYER, your sentiments match mine to a tee.
While stick ball was not practical in the narrow Bloomfield-Pittsburgh streets. I can vouch that the kids still play touch football and street hockey in the street.
Happiness (???) is a bird sailing on the breeze…always just out of reach. Happiness was not even a concern of human life until the last 60 years. I think the type of happiness my fellow travelers struggle to attain is an illusion. 1200 years ago Padmasambava said…
Oh how needing of compassion are those bereft of the sacred teaching,
Who have ensnared themselves in the unfathomable ocean of suffering.
So that all those who are the focus of our compassion might attain enlightenment,
I (we) must rouse my body, speech, and mind to the practice of virtue.
Happiness comes and goes. It is the wrong question. I would much rather that Dick Cheney practiced virtue then pursued his strange idea of happiness. When all aspire to the practice of virtue, war will end, suffering will cease and happiness (the real kind) will break out across the planet. As I cannot control anybody else I must practice virtue and hope the example will spread.
Alius Res Semper Video
Hi PLANTMAN13,
Your words are very moving, and I welcome you to our ranks of shared ethereal connection, striving for the LIGHT, and compassion.
I’ve just posted a similar message, that you may want to read, on the thread entitled ‘The World Continues to Look Away. Don’t’ here
Namaste
I recently read Richard Florida’s “Rise of the Creative Class” which argues that cities or locales which deliberately cultivate diversity, tolerance and cultural amenities will prosper (by attracting professionals). Instead of wealth generating happiness, Florida is arguing that the reverse is true.
Also,Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches the most popular class at Harvard, has written “Happier” which cites research into the topic. Haven’t read it yet, though; we’re on the library’s waiting list.
In their well-being analysis, they should see how much difference it makes if people don’t have to worry about whether or not a necessary surgery will make them bankrupt. They should see how much difference it makes whether or not they have enough to eat and a roof over thier heads. They should see if it makes a difference whether or not people are paid a living wage. They should see whether it makes a difference whether or not they have job security in the form of somthing other than an “at will” contract. They should see whether or not it makes a difference that they have pensions.
Of course, they are mostly doing research on this issue in Europe where they figured out solutions on a lot of that a long time ago. They can afford to worry about extending maternity and paternity leave (they actually have leave to extend) and making prettier buildings. Here in the States, we barely have a concept of such things. Would that we did.
As to how children play nowadays, it is mostly entertainment with electronic gadgets rather than true imaginative play. TV, video games, i-pods, etc. Every now and then you’ll see youngsters fencing with sticks, but usually they’d have a hard time even doing that without a plastic sword, made in China, which makes electric clinking noises when you swing it. Besides which, most parents are too paranoid to let their kids outside for any length of time.
Wishfulthinker: Let them watch us. Let’s see if we can get thousands more people for them to watch. Keep them busy.
Welcome, peace808!
I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, and loved my childhood. The city has two large parks where one can go and forget you are even in a fairly large city. Although it was a highly polluted city in the 60’s due to the steel mills, we still had a great time playing baseball between the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel. Back then, nobody stopped us from playing baseball or football on the large areas of grass there. In the winter, it was also a place to enjoy the snow by sled riding down the hills. There was also has a great library, art museum, and museum of natural history where we would hang out on cold winter days or boring summer days. And then there were the railroad tracks where we would hop trains and go for a ride to North Park for some swimming in the lake there.
For sports, Forbes Field was a ten minute walk from my home and I still remember watching Roberto Clemente and all the other great players of the Pirates in the early 70’s; with our nemesis being Pete Rose and the Cincinnati Reds.
I had a wonderful childhood and I believe it has a lot to do with the kind of person I am today. I am generally happy, always optimistic, and, due to my surroundings, was well exposed to everything from the academic (Carnegie Museum and the University of Pittsburgh were also places we would go and we learned a lot at their libraries as well) to the outdoors and all the animals in the parks. And during the summer, we would have weekly movies outside on Flagstaff Hill and the occasional outdoor concert.
What a time it was to be young. Those memories will always be there for me, thankfully. Because of my experiences as a child and the type of city I grew up in, it proves the importance of how a city is planned and the correlation with happiness. To me it will be proven over and over that one’s surroundings, especially when young, have an enormous effect on ones “happiness factor”
Sorry for such a sentimental post, put the article suddenly brought all of these memories back for me. I could go on and on about it, as I’m sure many others could about their childhood and the connections with your surroundings and happiness.
It’s too bad that today there is so much fear and police telling kids what they can do and where they can go. Everything is so controlled these days that I’m sure a child growing up today where I grew up, wouldn’t have a chance to do all the things we could do 40 years ago. Sometimes I wish we could turn back the clock. Grade School, High School, it was all a wonderful time for me. It’s gift is the happy person I am today.
Correction: Carnegie Mellon University.
Happiness comes from within and no amount of consumer goods will make you any more or less happy.
Having travelled much of the world, came across people who lived in cinder block or corrugated steel and board constructions with dirt floors and no running water who seemed genuinely happy. They were quite glad to see you and would share what they had with no expectation of anything in return. Unlike the West they were unaware of their “right” to happiness, so they did not obsess over it and just got on with their lives.
Thanks for that, kilgore. You are quite right and it’s something one often forgets in this world. It reminds me of the phrase from the Tao: “One can know the world without going outside. One can see the Way of heaven without looking out the window. The further one goes the less one knows.” I grew up poor, but happy. The main sources of unhappiness for most poor folks come from the wealthy ones looking down their noses at them for being poor. Thanks again, kilgore. It’s a good reminder.
Yes, so true KILGORE TROUT.
It is one of the greatest blessing of travel, to see really happy people — who have so very little — but so much to give.
Namaste
I have often said that North Americans should be “made” to travel. Like a draft but for the peace corp or some such. Even in the military (if you are an introspective person)you will learn something of the outside world.
It is much more difficult to acquiesce to your government’s invasion and destruction of other countries if you have visited them and realize the people there are much the same as you.
Happiness is the desire to give.
unhappiness is the desire to receive.
madison avenue, and the advertising industry has brainwashed several generations, quarantining them into a domain known to the tibetans as “Th realm of the hungry ghosts”.
Excellent posts CHICANERY and PLANTMAN.
PACPLYER: I truly do appreciate the affirmation. You are medicine for my spirit!
Happiness is love. That is when we care more for others, than we do for ourselves.
Recipe for happiness:
Keep your needs simple.
Your desires few.
Your expectations very low.
Appreciate this day as it arrives.
Be here in this moment.
Fixxit
I’m sorry to say, that most norte American(o)s are swimming in the very shallowest end of the infinite pool of abundant giving, and even so they likely think that it’s a desert of scarcity out there (of of course that the poor deserve their fate: here)
Namaste
This is the link that works, minus one little “-”:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/23/5395/?jal_edit_comments#comment-143142
Namaste
Growing up in the Bronx, I was a three-sewer hitter in stickball, and we played the game with intense passion.
Only other stickball players can possibly know what I am talking about, on my block of all Jews and Italians we organized a game everyday until we graduated to playing softball at the vacant lot down the street.
Happiness is much more elusive these days now that the innocence of stickball days are fading into a distant memory.
Today I live in the peaceful rural community of Sussex County NJ, the exact opposite of the crowed congested streets of the Bronx where I grew up.
To me happiness is difficult to define. If by happy we mean being in a perpetual state of just won the lottery happy, then no I do not reach this state of nirvana very frequently.
But if by happiness we mean a state of peaceful contentment, then yes I think I may have found a smidgen of this psychological state of mind on my 5 acre property where I derive much blissful joy from feeding the local deer and birds everyday.
Hi S. BISON Loved your post there. Except once I had one of those Jersey deer, leap right through the passenger side windshield of my bus in Princeton one afternoon. Luckily no one was injured ___ except the deer.
One of the kids from our school who played stick ball, usually put the half ball up on a roof, he could have been playing baseball for the Yankees when he turned 17. He decided on basketball instead. Wilt ‘The Big Dipper’ Chamberlain, was a well liked, and very gifted kid and he was happy kid too. He never did like the ‘Wilt The Stilt’ name though.
Happiness is a bit like sex, it’s in the mind.