There is a lot to like about Action for Happiness. It is bold and good humoured, with a solid grounding in the latest psychological research and an ambitious, provocative message. Moreover, with Lord Layard, former No. 10 insider Geoff Mulgan and Blair biographer Anthony Seldon at the helm, it should have no difficulty attracting attention within political circles. The launch on Tuesday was a buzzy, positive (what else?) affair, which left all of us who attended with something of a warm glow.
At nef, we’ve long shared the ambition of Layard and his colleagues to see a fundamental shift in politics towards taking seriously people’s experience of their lives. Changing the discourse is an important part of that transition, and we hope that Action for Happiness succeeds in its aim to inspire a social movement that demands politicians to focus on happiness as a key goal. But, without wishing to be churlish, we also see a couple of pitfalls.
Firstly, although the advice represented by Action for Happiness acronym GREAT DREAM contains a lot of good sense (we would say that, of course, since GREAT is an adapted version of our own Five Ways to Well-being), it is targeted squarely at individuals. This overlooks the fact that people’s opportunities for happiness are always influenced – and often seriously constrained – by their circumstances.
One of the reasons we have generally tended to talk about well-being rather than happiness is that it implies a broader understanding of what makes life go well. Our model of well-being emphasises that good feelings – being “happy”, for instance – come about for a reason; they result from functioning well in the world, which itself depends on the interaction between a person’s own physiological and psychological resources and their social, economic and physical environment.
Given a national context of high inequality, low social mobility, growing unemployment and so on, many people in the UK have ample reason to be unhappy. Sure, we might be able to give them some tools and techniques to feel better. But wouldn’t it be preferable if we eliminated the causes of unhappiness in the first place? This, for us, is the real point of taking a well-being approach to policy-making. It’s not about making people happy, but understanding and promoting the conditions in which they have the best chance of finding happiness for themselves.
Secondly, it was dismaying to hear a couple of speakers trot-out variants of the “happy poor” fable. You know the kind of thing: “I was in [insert name of developing country] and I met [some people living in grinding poverty] and they were just so happy with their lot in life, they smiled and danced and sang the whole day through…”.
This romanticisation of poverty is objectionable in a number of ways. But even judged as an empirical claim it is – to be clear – flatly contradicted by the evidence. Take any international survey of happiness you care to name and you will find that people in countries with a high prevalence of poverty report much lower happiness than do those in wealthier countries. Indeed, the fact that this relationship is so robust is one of the reasons we can be confident that empirical measures of happiness are telling us something meaningful.
There is, it is true, an ongoing academic debate about the exact nature of the link between economic growth and well-being over time as countries get richer. But this an argument about diminishing returns of happiness to wealth in developed nations. No-one who has studied the data concludes anything other than that poverty is very bad indeed for well-being. To suggest otherwise is crass, not to mention counterproductive to the wider objective of getting well-being taken seriously as a goal for Western societies like ours. I’m sure it wasn’t the intention of anyone at Action for Happiness to promote a hair-shirt view, but it’s an area where careful message management is important.
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