In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ poor Mexico and in affluent France may have similar mean avowed-happiness scores, but rich people in France are happier than poor people in France, as rich people in Mexico are happier than poor people in Mexico. In every country, Easterlin found, people with high income tended to report higher levels of happiness than people with low income.

      The same relationship held true longitudinally within countries. The United States is a good example. As Easterlin pointed out, from the late 1940s to 1970, average real income in the United States increased by about 60 percent while reported levels of happiness in the United States were about the same in the late 1940s as they were in

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      TABLE 1

Year	Percentage Responding “Very Happy”	Median Family Income (1987 Dollars)
1948	44%	$15,300
1956	54%	$20,400
1963	47%	$23,600
1970	43%	$29,400
1977	42%	$30,600
1981	46%	$28,500

      Sources: The Gallup Report, no. 189 (June 1981): 40; Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1982–83 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), table 714; Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), table G 179–88.

      1970, but in each survey richer people had higher happiness scores than poorer people. The same phenomenon continued through the 1970s. Table 1 gives the percentages of people who identified themselves as “very happy” in Gallup polls taken from 1948 to 1981, alongside the median family income in those years (expressed in constant 1987 dollars).

      Perversely, the percentage of people reporting themselves as happy dropped steadily from 1956 through 1977, as real income soared—then increased from the 1977 to the 1981 measures, as real income dropped. But at any given time within that period, rich people reported themselves as being happier than poor people. Table 2 shows the gradient, using Gallup’s 1981 income categories.

      The effect of income is not as great as some might have predicted. That more than a third of people with incomes under $5,000 reported themselves to be “very happy” is intriguing, and it would be fascinating to find what happens to the relationship at higher income levels (Does it keep rising through $50,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?). But that a relationship exists is clear.

      Putting the longitudinal and cross-sectional data together, one emerges with a paradoxical situation. You may think of it this way:

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      TABLE 2

Family Income (1981 Dollars)	Percentage Responding “Very Happy”
$25,000 & over	56%
$20,000–24,999	48%
$15,000–19,999	48%
$10,000–14,999	38%
$5,000–9,999	40%
Under $5,000	35%

      Source: The Gallup Report, no. 189 (June 1981): 38.

      Imagine a man with a real income of X dollars in 1950 and his son with precisely the same real income in 1970. On average, the son can be expected to be less happy with his income than the father was with his. To be as happy as the father, the son must make more money. Furthermore, there are no signs that the process will be any different for the son’s son. Easterlin’s gloomy conclusion was that “to an outside observer, economic growth appears to be producing an ever more affluent society, but to those involved in the process, affluence will always remain a distant, urgently sought, but never attained goal.”⁴ Two other researchers came up with a memorable phrase to describe the situation. We are caught, they said, on “a hedonic treadmill.”⁵

      This is all very well as a matter of aggregate statistics, but there is also the wisdom of Sophie Tucker to consider: “I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and believe me, honey, rich is better.” Perhaps the hedonic treadmill writ small works out to something like this: It is true that when you think back to the happy and unhappy times of your life, they do not necessarily match up with the amount of money you had at the time. Still, other things being equal, at this very moment in your life, you prefer your current income over any lesser amount and probably have a hankering for more.

      The hedonic treadmill is not as depressing as it may seem at first glance. It is not irrational. We get caught on it for any number of understandable reasons, some of which are summarized in the note

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      below.^* And it is not even necessarily a frailty that we need to fight. Sophie Tucker was at least partly right. It may be true that people by and large are always going to seek more money and will always find as they succeed that money in and of itself is of limited value in increasing their happiness. People may still, quite reasonably, want to increase their income. If they can’t buy happiness, they can make some other good use of the money.

      The empirical findings about the relationship between money and happiness thus tell us little that is surprising or even particularly

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      dismaying about human beings. They do, however, raise a fascinating question: What are the implications of the hedonic treadmill for good public policy?

      THE ULTIMATE IRRELEVANCE OF THE HEDONIC TREADMILL TO GOOD POLICY

      The issue is how government enables people to pursue happiness. For the enabling condition called “material resources,” the question therefore is: How may we characterize the state of affairs when everyone in a society has sufficient material resources to be able to pursue happiness? When will we be able to say, “The government of the United States has met its obligation to provide for the material needs of its citizens, and may now devote its attention to other matters”?

      One internally consistent answer is “Never.” The fact is that people with more money tend to be happier than people with less money at any given slice in time, no matter how much money the poorer people have. The appropriate conclusion, judging from these data, is that money does make a difference and that the only way to deal with the hedonic treadmill is to treat it as a fact of life and go on using the government to redistribute money from rich to poor, no matter how much money the “poor” have.

      The logic is internally consistent. The only problem is that the conclusion СКАЧАТЬ