Gloom of the boom

We've heard it before: the Republic is the seventh happiest state in the world, just below six other European countries and a few notches ahead of the United States.

"One way of putting it is that Ireland has always been happier than it was rich, while the US was richer than it was happy," says Robert E. Lane, professor emeritus of political science at Yale university.

But is there a catch? The data for the 1997 review of reported levels of happiness was collected before the era of near-full employment, tax cuts, fancy restaurants, foreign holidays and 00registered cars that Ireland is enjoying now. You could speculate that if the same study were undertaken tomorrow, delight over the buoyant economy - the much hyped feel-good factor - would mean that Ireland would zoom even higher up the list which is topped by Iceland.

Maybe, maybe not. If Lane is right, the new living standards won't make us any happier. And the new 90-minute commutes, 14-hour work days, spine-stiffening mortgages and rising inequalities of income could eventually mean the opposite; a dip on the happiness scale. Boom and gloom. Surely not?

After a certain level, rising incomes fail to deliver equivalent rises in well-being, Lane (82) says in his book, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, published this year by Yale University Press. Lane will be speaking on Friday at a conference in Ennis, "Redefining Roles and Relationships", organised by Father Harry Bohan of the Co Clare-based Rural Resource Development (RRD).

Instead of becoming happier after achieving pay rises, new houses and bigger cars, people find that after the initial satisfaction rush, they feel pretty much the same - they just want more. Psychologists have called this the "hedonic treadmill". A more familiar version goes: "the more you have, the more you want".

"At the bottom, the poor and near poor will benefit from economic growth because for them economic growth, whether collective or individual, does buy happiness," says Lane in a comment that may explain why the Irish boom will make many people happier - for a time.

The mistake and the psychological danger, for Lane, is when materialism starts to crowd out other values. This tends to happen because there are real benefits in a certain amount of material well-being, and because people are lamentably poor judges of how to make themselves happy.

George Orwell and others scoffed at the idea of looking for happiness; yet the pursuit is as old as the start of spare time. From Plato to Prozac is the title of one of the thousands of current books devoted in some form to quality-of-life matters.

And the pursuit is gathering pace, at least in those parts of the world where people are not contending with famine, perpetual poverty or war. A new international Journal of Happiness, launched this year with articles from Lane and others, brings together findings from specialities such as neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology and the social sciences on this slippery and tantalising subject.

Editor Ruut Veenhoven at Erasmus University in Rotterdam has assembled a World Database of Happiness on the web, a list of thousands of scientific studies from around the world.

Once the territory of philosophers, writers and the religious, happiness and the lack of it is now also the province of geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists and the pharmaceutical industry.

Out of all that complexity, Lane extracts a simple-sounding message. Individualist, well-off societies may be most conducive to happiness, but there are diminishing returns if people lose sight of their need for the companionship of friends, family and community, he says. Humans are "hard-wired" for companionship, he believes. Without it, people fail to thrive.

"By ignoring our biologically-programmed need for each other, we risk physical and mental distress," says Lane. "Close relationships, rather than money, are the keys to happiness. Indeed, the number of one's personal friends is a much better indication of overall satisfaction with life than is personal wealth."

In the advanced economies, the over-influence of an economics-driven view of humanity, and an accompanying over-emphasis on materialism in daily life, can lead to people failing to get their priorities straight. Depression, stress and relationship-failure are the result when materialism takes over. Materialists, says Lane, are less happy than those who value other aspects of life, such as friends, marriage, creativity and community.

In the US, where materialism is a dominant part of the culture, studies are starting to document a decline in the number of people who regard themselves as happy, he says.

Lane advocates a "new humanism" inside an adjusted social order that would include "diminished priority for economic efficiency and growth": possibly a tall order given the way the world is organised. Yet his ideas are finding currency among some economists, (who happen to be his friends), he says.

Freed from material want, people would be free to explore deeper pursuits; what John Maynard Keynes called "the arts of life". The new humanism (for which Lane sees evidence in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands) is also characterised by "rejection of both religious authority and absolute moral values; tolerance for ethnic minorities and for deviance from sexual and other norms, and an emphasis on better human relations and warm communal ties".

Lane warns the Republic against swapping a traditionally companionship-rich culture for a more American lifestyle. History may be on Ireland's side. "Perhaps there is an historical stock of collectivism, I mean familiasm, interdependence, which modifies the effects of economic modernisation on wellbeing. The US had a low stock in the late 1700s and so suffered more from the erosion of collectivism than Ireland would suffer."

What of the debates here about whether this country should follow the different social and economic models of the US or Europe?

"In the later 1990s Scandinavia and the Netherlands showed that one could have both a humane welfare state and relatively low unemployment. At this stage of history, the Scandinavian route is more attractive.

"But there is another principle at stake that would favour an approach more similar to the American one. People are psychologically better off - they have more dignity and self-esteem - if they are working than on welfare, I think, even if their working income is lower than their welfare income. Thus, if the American system of reliance on work rather than welfare were linked to a guaranteed job and training for everyone, there would be psychological gains for all."

Lane's ideas will be part of broader discussions on the changes taking place in Irish society at the third annual Ennis conference run by RRD which opens tonight. "The conferences provide a time and a place for people to reflect on the key issues which affect our lives," says Father Harry Bohan.

`Coping with prosperity can be more difficult than coping with poverty. Work and amusement are now central. The new economic and technological realities are very powerful and seductive. But unless we reflect on the changing situation and begin to manage it in a deliberate and conscious way, we won't be able to restore the balance with other aspects of life, such as family and community relationships, and spirituality," he says.

Other contributors will include psychologist Maureen Gaffney; the historian Gearoid O Tuathaigh, writer Sean McDonagh, economist David Williams, communications lecturer Colum Kenny and Kathleen Lynch of the Equality Studies Centre at UCD.

"Redefining Roles and Relationships" opens tonight and runs until Friday at the West County Hotel, Ennis. For more information, tel: 061-364144 or e-mail: rrd@eircom.net