On Monday evening I heard Ed Diener (aka Smiley Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois) present at the 4th European Conference on Positive Psychology in Croatia on the subject of Well-being on Planet Earth. Leaving aside the fact that Diener works for the Gallup Organisation, he presented some curious findings about the predictors of life satisfaction and positive and negative emotion, and the relevance for policy use.

Life Satisfaction vs Emotion

Diener’s ‘happiness formula’ is one of the most well-known in Positive Psychology:

Subjective Well-being (i.e. happiness) = Satisfaction with life + Positive Emotion – Negative Emotion.

This means that happiness is not a simple measure of how good you feel (emotion) but also includes a cognitive element of what you think about your life (satisfaction with life). Still with me? Great!

This explains why countries like Denmark can feature at the top of some happiness scales, but not others.

For example, when asked “on a scale of 0-10 how satisfied are you with your life?” Denmark comes top of the league table. But when you look at which countries are high in positive emotion, New Zealand, Honduras and Panama come at the top.

But happiness is even more complex than that – the presence of positive emotion is not the same thing as the absence of negative emotion (in the same way that health is not the mere absence of illness).

So countries which are high in positive emotion are not the same as those which are low in negative emotion (e.g. Denmark, Sweden and Australia).

Diener’s research with Gallup has also found that the top two predictors of satisfaction with life and positive emotion are not the same:

Predictors of satisfaction with life:
1. Money (as measured by GDP per capita)
2. Optimism
3. Whether I can count on other people

Predictors of positive emotion:
1. Whether I learned something yesterday
2. Freedom to choose
3. Whether I can count on other people

Relevance for Policy Use

According to the Gallup data, 94% of Danes score more then 8/10 for happiness, whereas 97% of Togolese score less than 3/10. Not surprisingly (because this is where Gallup’s interests lie), Diener used these extraordinary findings to argue that we should pay more attention to country-level well-being, since the way in which individual countries are run must be what makes the difference to these overall happiness scores. His suggestion is that societies would do well to use well-being measures in their creation of country-wide policies, as well as the more traditional economic and social measures.

It’s difficult not to disagree with him when you look at the data*; however, the question then arises as to whether it’s the government’s role to make people happy. My own perspective is the government does have a role to play in creating the right environment, although I think we could do a great deal more to improve people’s lives by spending the resources on treating mental illness effectively.

* Sadly the data Diener presented isn’t in the public arena since it belongs to the Gallup Organisation.

Can Gross National Happiness ever be an accepted substitute for GDP?

The Kingdom of Bhutan, a predominantly Buddhist country of approximately 750,000 inhabitants in the Eastern Himalayas, has been measuring Gross National Happiness since the late ’80s. The King, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, was concerned about the sorts of issues affecting countries which focussed only on increasing economic prosperity, and as a result, he declared that GNH (Gross National Happiness) not GDP, was the priority for his people. “The ultimate purpose of government”, he said, “is to promote the happiness of its people”. This, of course, was more than a decade before Martin Seligman launched the Positive Psychology movement.

Now, says writer, analyst and UN Editor Rasna Warah, GNH vs GDP has become an issue in the upcoming Kenyan elections (December 27th). In this article on the All Africa Global Media website, Warah explores the background to GNH, and why it matters. It’s the case that back in 2006 presidential candidate Dr Raila Odinga, cast doubt on the accuracy of Kenyan economic growth figures being quoted by other candidates, and proposed that a GNH survey be carried out instead. In an interview with Nation Magazine, Odinga is quoted as saying: “People are happy when they put food on the table, feed and educate their children.” However I haven’t been able to find any mention of Gross National Happiness on Odinga’s election website. Could it be the case that when the chips are down (and when votes are needed) what people really want to see is good old-fashioned economic growth?

Image: New Scientist

This Radio 4 programme today is a great introduction to the pros and cons of measuring happiness, and whether it’s possible, desirable or indeed useful to do so, with Professor of Economics, Paul Omerod, one of the principals of Volterra Consulting, Lord Richard Layard, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor Paul Dolan, Chair in Economics at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London.

I think this is a great starting point if you’re unfamiliar with the finer points of happiness research and measurement.

Whose perspective do you agree with?

Source: D.G. Myers, Happiness, 2004

You’ll be interested to know that in July, the independent think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) published the European Happy Planet Index of carbon efficiency and well-being in the EU.

It reveals that Europe is less carbon-efficient at delivering well-being (measured in terms of the happy, long lives of its citizens) than it was over 40 years ago. This might come as a surprise to some people – after all, as a whole we are wealthier than ever.

The good news is that some European countries are doing pretty well in terms of high levels of well-being (a combination of how satisfied people feel with their lives overall, and their life expectancy at birth). Those in the North such as Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland, as well as Switzerland, report the highest levels of subjective life satisfaction. Interestingly, Iceland and Sweden also have some of the lowest per capita carbon footprints, despite being amongst the richest nations. As a result, Iceland tops the European Happy Planet Index, followed by Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.

And the bad news? Some economically-advanced countries feature pretty poorly in the Index. Take the UK for example – it comes 15th out of 30 in rank order for both life satisfaction and life expectancy. It also has the 4th largest per capita carbon footprint in Europe, behind Luxembourg, Estonia and Finland. As a result the UK ranks 21st out of 30 overall in the European HPI, only slightly ahead of ‘transition’ countries such as Bulgaria and Lithuania.

Countries like Germany, Finland and France don’t fare much better either, coming 15th, 16th and 18th in the Index respectively.

So what can we conclude from this? Quite simply, as I’m sure you already know deep-down, consumption is not the main route to well-being. If this were true, the poorer countries would always feature at the bottom of NEF’s league tables, but they don’t.

What the report also shows us, however, is that it is not impossible to be prosperous, happy and green. Perhaps we should be looking towards countries like Iceland and Sweden for some answers?

A simple 2×2 model for understanding Happiness

In his recent book ‘Happier‘, Harvard University lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar presents a wonderful model of happiness which he has christened The Hamburger Model. What I really like (apart from the 2×2 format which all MBAs love…) is the simplicity of it. It goes something like this:

Junk Food Burger: tasty but unhealthy. When people are asked to describe what a happy life means to them they quite often think of a life filled only with pleasure and devoid of any pain. This is the life of the hedonist, someone who lives only for the moment, giving little thought to future consequences. Young children are like this, until they learn to forego immediate gratification for some longer-term reward. But what would happen if your life were only ever about indulgence? In a continuous succession of pleasurable experiences, how would you distinguish one from another? Put simply, if you ate your favourite food every day, how long would it take before you got thoroughly sick of it?

Vegetarian Burger: healthy but not tasty – the kind you eat because you know it’s good for you, not because you really want to. In this quadrant of the Hamburger Model, you forgo current pleasure entirely in order to derive some future benefit, living your life according to the ‘No Pain, No Gain’ principle. The problem with this is that you can start to believe that happiness is something you can only achieve in the future. And when you reach that future, what then? Often, you’re still searching…Life has become a rat race.

Worst Burger: both tasteless and unhealthy. Before you ask, “well why would you eat it then?”, some people become resigned to the belief that their life is pretty pointless – they give up on the present and the future and spend their time ruminating on what went wrong or what could have been. Seligman’s research on a phenomenon called ‘Learned Helplessness‘ shows how easy it is for us to learn that we have no control over our own lives and that whatever we do is futile. Ben-Shahar describes this desperate place as ‘Nihilism’. Fortunately what has been learned can be unlearned.

Ideal Burger: both tasty and healthy. The Happiness quadrant is where you enjoy a good balance of pleasure, fulfillment and purpose in your life. Sounds simple doesn’t it? There are two crucial points here. Firstly – take a moment to consider your own personal definition of happiness. If you’re thinking you’d like to experience pure unremitting bliss for the rest of your days, beware. Leading psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud has suggested that we really should be aiming for no more than “mild contentment”. Anything more and you’re likely to set yourself up to fail. So you might have to revisit your expectations. Secondly, does your definition of happiness incorporate activity as well as feeling? If not, think about it again – only you can make you happy, so in order to be happy, to create meaning and purpose in your life, you have to do something.

So what are you going to do differently?