BOOK REVIEW: Making happiness a government goal

THE POLITICS OF HAPPINESS: WHAT GOVERNMENT CAN LEARN FROM THE NEW RESEARCH ON WELL-BEING

By Derek Bok

Princeton University Press, $24.95, 262 pages

Reviewed by Martin Sieff

Jesus promised his followers unending happiness in this life and the next. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men (the definition was later informally expanded to include women) were entitled to the right to pursue happiness. He stopped short of guaranteeing they would succeed in finding it.

Now Derek Bok, for two decades president of Harvard, one of the most experienced and impressive public policy minds in the past generation of American higher education, writes that the supply of happiness should be as much a government goal as the provision of health care.

Mr. Bok’s rich, challenging, remarkable new book is remarkably solid. For it is based not on the empty aphorisms so beloved by lazy and second-rate pseudo-philosophers. There is a surprisingly massive quantity of serious statistical and sociological research that has been done on the subject of happiness in both prosperous and developing societies, and Mr. Bok draws liberally and impressively upon it. His conclusions are remarkable and well worth heeding.

No one can truly be happy, obviously, if they are in terror of their lives or worried about where their next meal will come from or lack the money to keep the roof over their heads. But Mr. Bok finds that in societies where the basic necessities of economic and physical security have been satisfied, happiness is surprisingly prevalent, even ubiquitous and surprisingly, not dependent on further economic growth.

Happiness levels, he finds, rise dramatically as societies climb out of poverty and physical misery to sustainable levels and then to modest prosperity. But beyond that point, rises in per capita gross domestic product (GDP), even when widely distributed, do surprisingly little to raise people’s perception of their own happiness. Indeed, if economic progress is seen as too rapid, too disorienting and too threatening to established economic conditions and ways of life, it may have a profoundly negative effect.

Once the basic living needs and physical security of most people have been met, Mr. Bok discerns from his research three main causes of unhappiness. They are, quite simply, chronic pain, mental illness and sleep deprivation.

These findings are, when one thinks about them, extremely radical in spiritual terms. But Mr. Bok makes a very impressive case in documenting them. It is obvious, when one thinks about it, that enduring chronic pain is devastating to happiness, no matter what the spiritual resources of the individual, and very few are capable of surmounting the torments of cancer and other comparable ravages. Whatever one’s faith and spiritual resources, it is impossible to consider any victims of cholera, typhus or yellow fever as being happy in their suffering.

Mental illness is another obvious area where the victims of the affliction cannot possibly be regarded as happy, however impressive or admirable their belief systems. American and Western national health systems, Mr. Bok documents, are surprisingly weak when it comes to identifying and treating mental illness.

Doctors and medical professionals in the United States also, are given almost no adequate training on the subject of dealing with sleep disorders. Multiple millions of sufferers from serious sleep deprivation regularly go untreated. Yet the cost to their contributions to the national economy, to their own happiness and to the happiness and stability of their families and other loved ones remains extraordinarily high. Mr. Bok very sensibly suggests a major reassessment of health policy to target sleep disorders and mental illness.

Mr. Bok’s impressive career record confirms that he is no pie-in-the-sky utopian dreamer. He does not aim, as Immanuel Kant did, to create a global system to perfect human nature or unfailingly guarantee human happiness. He does not share the insanity of Karl Marx that he has found the perfect blueprint for human society.

Instead, in the best American ameliorist and positivist traditions, he identifies major prevalent problems and afflictions that have been hiding openly in plain sight and recommends straightforward, practical and clearly achievable policies to treat them. Along the way, he brings his readers on a groundbreaking, vista-opening intellectual odyssey.

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