The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (The Yale ISPS series) (Yale Institute for Social & Policy Studies) [Paperback]

This book is probably the most complete Western book about happiness. Robert Lane recommends that to the goal of happiness should be added the goals of justice and personal development. He uses "happiness" with the meaning of "satisfaction with life", or with "Subjective Well Being" (SWB). The difference being that happiness is a fleeting emotion and satisfaction with life a more profound view.

He accuses economists of wanting to maximise one dimension only like "the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people" (Jeremy Bentham), or maximise increases in GDP per person. The belief of many people in prosperous countries is that Increasing GDP per person will lead to increases in happiness. Prof Lane refers to this belief as the "Economistic Fallacy" which he considers a major threat to the future of the USA. He proves conclusively that in the USA and other prosperous countries, increases in GDP per person do not lead to increases in happiness. He points out that governments focus too exclusively on increasing GDP. Governments should in all their policies ask themselves if their policies contribute to the three goals of happiness, justice and personal development.

The title of the book can create the mistaken impression that Professor Lane is against a free market and democracy. His main point is that the market and democracy on their own do not lead automatically to increased happiness and that the three goals should also be considered by governments when attempting to make the free market and democracy function satisfactorily. He points out that happiness is dependent on what he refers to a "companionship" (that is friends) and a good family life. At no point does he suggest that the free market and democracy can be replaced by better systems.

He refers to the need to make trade offs between wealth on the one hand and, companionship and family life on the other. "Trade offs" is a concept economists like. My preference is to figure out how these three interdependent concepts can reinforce each other. That is, not seeing it as a zero sum game but as a win-win situation. This is not to deny that fathers and mothers that work so much that they spend hardly any time with their children do not have the right balance.

Similar ideas to those of Prof. Lane have been presented in other interesting books by economists in "Happiness and Economics"- "How the economy and institutions affect human well-being" by Frey and Stutzer and in "Development as Freedom" by Amartya Sen (see my reviews). There is also a vast Buddhist literature about happiness as a vital aspect of the science of the mind. See for example "The Universe in a Single Atom" by the Dalai Lama (see my review).

The importance of the book by Prof Lane is that he is a prominent political scientist, as shown by the fact that he was President of the American Political Science Organisation and also President of the International Society of Political Psychology. His book refers to and evaluates a very large number of scientific studies in the two fields of political science and political psychology and the book is also in that respect invaluable.

Have you noticed that in spite of great increases in wealth and improvements in technology in the last few decades, people don't seem to be any happier today than they used to be? Lane tackles this question head on, and finds some interesting answers. This book modestly blows most of today's conventional economics right out of the water.

Conventional economic wisdom is that increased GDP will solve all problems and make everyone's life better. Lane shows this isn't so. For the very poor, increased per capita GDP does indeed make people happier. Once the necessities of life are satisfied, higher GDP has little or no effect on how content people are with their lives. When you consider the lengths to which governments go to increase their GDP by a few percentage points, you begin to understand how important this finding is.

In the developed countries, Lane shows that people's overall satisfaction with their lives has been declining steadily in recent years. Lane finds that a decline in companionship and family life and an increase in television viewing are important factors in this. People are often not very good judges of what life choices will really make their lives better and happier. It is easy to fall into a trap of trying to get more money, while sacrificing the time it takes to maintain relationships with friends and family.

Some great quotes from the book:

". . . relieving poverty without creating dependency has proved difficult where it has been seriously tried."

"Consequently, it is possible to want to spend more than one earns--a sure prescription for misery, as Micawber once explained to David Copperfield."

". . . that magnificent apparatus of economic analysis might be turned to the purpose of improving well-being."

Lane does miss some things. I suspect that in the U.S. at least, part of the reason for the decline in happiness relates to the fact that people move around so much, which makes keeping up regular contact with relatives and friends difficult. The tendency for more people to attend college, and to go to colleges hundreds of miles away from their families, contributes to this rootless trend. I tend to think that Americans work more hours, and are encouraged to carry more debt, than is really good for society. I also suspect that the spread-out design of American cities, and the resulting huge time costs of commuting, play a role. For more on this, see Kunstler's book "The Geography of Nowhere."

As to the book itself, the writing is rather stodgy and academic. Lane hammers on the details of what studies show about life satisfaction and happiness, what the flaws of the various studies are, how the questions were asked, which results are the most robust. Lane is not trying to write an exciting book, he's trying to prove his points beyond doubt. I think he succeeds in that.

Lane sometimes seems to be asking more questions than he answers. There are enough possible topics for further research presented here to keep an army of graduate students busy. Unlike most economists and political scientists working today, though, I think Lane is asking the right questions. What kind of future do we really want? One in which everyone works 70-hour weeks, makes lots of money, and lives miserable and alone in a huge house? Or maybe we can come up with something better? Given the ecological pressures caused by the current lifestyles in the developed countries, rethinking this may be a matter of the survival of our civilization.

I agree with the previous reviewer that this book doesn't have all the answers, and that Lane often spends too much time pressing the same points. That said, Lane supports his conclusions well, and presents his central message clearly. For someone without much philosophy background (i.e. me), Lane's discussion of the trinity of ultimate goods was valuable and instructive. To recently graduated students: this is book is a great reason to use your alumni library privleges.