May 12, 2008
BOOKS
Wall Street Journal Bookshelf
How to Be of Good Cheer
By DAVE SHIFLETT
May 12, 2008; Page A13
Gross National Happiness
By Arthur C. Brooks
(Basic Books, 277 pages, $26.95)
The advice will sound familiar: Get a job, get married, go to church and don't listen to
wild-eyed utopians. In such a way, it is said, you will find your portion of happiness. To
this list of imperatives Arthur C. Brooks would add one other: Avoid this summer's
Democratic National Convention.
In "Gross National Happiness," Mr. Brooks has assembled an array of statistics to measure
the mood of America's citizens and to discover the reasons they feel as they do. Most often
he cites polls that ask for self-described happiness levels, matching up the answers with
various beliefs, habits, life choices or experiences.
And what exactly is happiness? Who knows? The term might
refer joy or contentment or moral self-approval or material wellbeing or appetitive pleasure – or some combination of them all.
Mr. Brooks is aware of the problem. He says that Potter Stewart,
the Supreme Court justice, could have been describing happiness
when he said, of pornography, "I know it when I see it."
At the end of the day, Mr. Brooks notes, "political conservatives
take the happiness prize hands down." Those who identify
themselves as conservative or very conservative, he says, are
twice as likely to say that they're very happy as those who identify
themselves as liberal or very liberal. What explains the rightists'
relative bliss? It seems that a conservative political disposition
exists alongside other happy habits of being.
Mr. Brooks points especially to Holy Matrimony, with an emphasis on the Holy. Citing
2004 data, he writes that conservatives are twice as likely to go to church or temple once a
week than liberals and that "two-thirds of conservatives are married versus only a third of
liberals." Married conservatives, he says, are "more than three times likely to say they're
very happy than single liberals to say they are very happy."
And though conservative religious people are often regarded as sexless puritans, they turn
out to have 80% more kids than secular liberals, and their children tend to be religious,
meaning that they'll probably further populate the Earth with more religious, right-leaning
monogamists. This kind of news tends to cause secularists to feel very unhappy and
increasingly outnumbered.
Marriage, Mr. Brooks reasonably observes, is not to be confused with total happiness,
especially after those so-called bundles of joy begin arriving. "Children do not make for
happier marriages," Mr. Brooks explains, thanks in part to certain burdens they bring with
them, such as sleep deprivation, cleaning duty, financial worry and, for some families, the
delight of getting to know a parole officer on a first-name basis. Senior couples that had no
children, he adds, are no less happy than those who did. Yet the achievement of raising
children makes kids part of a "happiness package." Curiously, or perhaps not, women are
seven percentage points more likely than men to be "very happy after losing a spouse to
death" and "9 points likelier to be very happy if never married."
And what about Mr. Brooks himself? Is he one of those sunny, hymn-singing types who
are so hard to take at neighborhood picnics? He tells us that he is a Roman Catholic,
though not of the ultramontane variety; he generally considers himself to be an "ebullient
grouch." He says that he doesn't know whether faith produces happiness or happiness
makes people want to practice their faith. The categories are "mutually reinforcing." He
does firmly believe that the Founders were right to insist that the "pursuit of happiness"
was central to the American creed; thus government policies should not hamper the
pursuit.
He challenges those partial to tales about long-suffering Wal-Mart workers and surly
burger flippers to rethink their victimology creed. The woe is not nearly as widespread as
rumored: 89% of Americans who work more than 10 hours a week are very satisfied or
somewhat satisfied with their jobs while only 11% are not very satisfied or not at all
satisfied. Most surprisingly, Mr. Brooks writes, there "is no difference at all in job
satisfaction between those with below-average and above-average incomes."
What really makes Americans hate their jobs is a perception that advancement is
impossible. And while Mr. Brooks agrees that the nation's income gap is growing, the
national happiness level is steady. Just under one-third of American adults say that they are
"very happy"; up to 15% are not too happy; and everyone else is somewhere in the middle.
Those numbers have been roughly true since the early 1970s. More government spending
doesn't seem to raise happiness levels, though direct government assistance may diminish
it. Charitable giving, Mr. Brooks adds, generally lifts the spirits; Americans do a lot of it.
"Gross National Happiness" ends with a list of policy suggestions: Government should aim
for economic opportunity, not income equality; it should not penalize marriage with tax
policies; and it should resist excessive security measures (think of the screening process at
airports), which inhibit freedom and increase unhappiness.
In an observation of particular relevance at the moment, Mr. Brooks says that political
"extremists" – who comprise 10% to 20% of the population – may be among the happiest
people in America, because they "believe with perfect certainty in the correctness of their
political dogmas." Yet their ferocity brings the rest of us down, so he suggests that political
parties stop pandering to them. Good idea, though it sounds a little utopian.
Mr. Shiflett is a writer in Midlothian, Va.