Like a chipped tooth that you can’t leave alone, William Davies’ The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being provokes, rankles, and works its way into your thinking. No dry academic text, it’s lively, well-written, and a sprawling, expansive book. The arguments in The Happiness Industry have been kicking around in my head since I read it – and I don’t think that I will ever use the term “happy” or look at a smiley face quite the same way again.
Numerous emotions, expectations and states of being can comfortably co-exist under a capacious definition of happiness. It is a large and useful tent. To tackle it – and how we think about well-being in general – Davies employs many disciplines, from philosophy to most of the social sciences, and a lot of history and policy. He does so thoughtfully and with care. It’s a vitally important issue, particularly as so many organizations, from governments to businesses and many in between, are keen on promoting “happiness.” Happiness is big business.
To walk us through this thicket, Davies starts with Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. Bentham’s philosophy rests on faith in the power of happiness as both an aim of behavior and a good in itself. If we accept this, then “happiness” can be thought of in scientific terms and the follow-up question becomes one of measurement. Is it analyzed through surveys? Physical responses? A lesser known nineteenth century figure that Davies brings forward, Gustav Fechner, proposed that math and analysis of change can help answer the question. Davies locates this thread within the fabric of the emerging social sciences, especially psychology. Since then, extraordinary resources have been dedicated to measuring happiness and trying to figure out just what exactly we have counted. If we know what makes people “happy” than we are in a better position to direct their behavior.
Our collective an ongoing attention to the individual levers of happiness – what to sell, what to purchase – has obscured a longer-term and more serious issue, Davies argues: structural failures within capitalism itself. He believes that the capitalist engine, powered by the pursuit of happiness, is sputtering. Our collective faith in neoliberal markets works for the driven and ambitious, as well as the fortunate. For the majority of people, however, things are far from ideal. People are working longer, harder, wrestling with more stresses, and are enjoying themselves less. Changes in the economy and how people work have exacerbated those challenges. Disengaged people are increasingly dissatisfied with work. Many of us simply don’t like it and don’t think that it’s worth it (though we all like having the money). While the exceptional are doing exceptionally well, everyone cannot be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Many don’t want them as a role model.
A retired general once commented to me that it tough for most people to think of themselves and to behave as individual profit/loss centers. He is right, even though the economy, culture and society assume that we are these PL units. Many people simply aren’t driven that way – a fact that behavior economists have been writing about for decades.
What does one do with employees, consumers, citizens – current or future – who simply aren’t motivated strivers?
Companies are responding by beefing up HR departments, hiring Chief Happiness Officers, and focusing on employee engagement. This is a trend that has been around for decades that is receiving ever greater attention. Managers, however, can only do so much to squeeze out more productivity or to make their reports engaged, happy workers. People, in general, are losing enthusiasm for working longer and harder. And if they are working longer and harder, they need more supports. It is an issue of mental health and physical health. People fifty years ago did not think about “stress” as a factor in their lives to be managed. Davies sees the rise of gyms, spas, therapies, medications, and the larger self-help industry as essential crutches for the over-worked individual. This is the “happiness industry” – a massive collective nominally aimed at making people happy but really about making people productive workers and predictable consumers.
If this is the case – and I’m not completely sold on Davies’ claim – then one inevitably asks hard questions about what rests with the individual, what rests with larger social economic forces, and the interplay between. Are we pursuing “happiness” and if so, what do we think that it is? To lead meaningful and rewarding lives, we probably should be asking those questions regularly – without regard to The Happiness Industry. Most of us know that our personal happiness cannot be reduced to a brain scan, a purchase, a pill, or time on holiday. Happiness is not the same as feeling good, or feeling worthwhile, or feeling meaningful. How we feel and understand ourselves comes from the complicated interplay of who we are, what we do, and who we do it with. That’s impossible to put on a survey question.
Davies is a critical and suspicious thinker, and The Happiness Industry raises more questions than it answers. That is all to the good – whether it makes us happy or not.
David Potash
The way I see it, college success as measured by IPEDS is just another name for happiness. At what point do we stop trying to fool with people and force them into signing up for a pathway to a degree when all they want to do is to take a course?