Gross National Happiness

Textbook economics tells us that more money is always better than less, because it expands our choice set. Wealth and income are the arbiters of success in our society, which explains why feminists complain that women have less of these than men.

Money does have some effect on reported happiness. People living in poverty or lacking a job are less happy than those who have made it to that vague category known as the middle class. Relative income may affect perceptions more strongly than absolute income; age exerts significant influence, suggest­ing that either physiological changes or modified expectations play an import­ant role.⁵6 Yet big increases in income beyond a relatively modest threshold have little effect compared to relationships that are largely produced and maintained by the unpaid work of caring for friends and family.

The further comparisons of men's and women's welfare diverge from standard economic measures, the better women fare. Norms of femininity may shield women from competitive stress, encourage collaboration with others, and discourage criminal behavior. Women live longer than men, on average, and tend to report that they are happier.⁵⁷ If adoption of masculine norms and values can increase women's earnings, it can also reduce their sense of subjective well-being. Surveys show that women's reported happi­ness relative to men has been declining over time, even as they have been making economic gains.⁵⁸

From an individual perspective, then, greed does not seem that good.

Happiness research offers interesting results. But it sometimes suffers from the same solipsism as research on income. Can we presume that happiness is our most important goal? If it were, we could easily resort to opiates like heroin that send sensations of pleasurable well-being off scale. As the foundation texts of human civilization suggest, our goals could and should be more profound. Our revealed preferences suggest that in fact they are: We devote enormous resources to efforts to better understand and express ourselves through religion, poetry, art, therapy, sports, and music.

The belief that money buys us what we most want encourages behavior that contributes to the accumulation of economic and political power, which in turn, reinforces the power of the belief.⁶¹ Adam Smith suggested as much when he wrote that men's imagination of the pleasures of wealth and greatness, rather than their actual experience of it, ‘‘rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.''⁶² Likewise, Thomas Robert Malthus argued that self-love motivated the ‘‘noblest exertions of human genius'' (see discussion in Chapter 8). Both men valued the wealth of their nation as an end unto itself, the triumph of energetic civilization over hedonistic barbarism. Neither one considered the possibility that the pursuit of short-term self-interest might undermine the long-term sustainability of our natural environment.

From an evolutionary standpoint, maximizing happiness doesn't make much sense.

The issue of competition versus cooperation does not boil down to gender differences. Men and women within both dominant and subjugated groups are typically allied. Still, the long history of gender inequality, gradually altered by convergence between men's and women's economic power, offers crucial insights into the evolution of social inequality writ large. Economic organization shapes our perceptions of who we are and what we can do. The causality works the other way as well: we can design social institutions that reward care and cooperation.