Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Several patterns jump out. The most immediate is the absence of a cross-national Easterlin paradox: the cloud of arrows is stretched along a diagonal, which indicates that the richer the country, the happier its people. Bear in mind that the income scale is logarithmic; on a standard linear scale, the same cloud would rise steeply from the left end and bend over toward the right. This means that a given number of extra dollars boosts the happiness of people in a poor country more than the happiness of people in a rich country, and that the richer a country is, the more additional money its people need to become happier still. (It’s one of the reasons that the Easterlin paradox appeared in the first place: with the noisier data of the era, it was hard to spot the relatively small rise in happiness at the high end of the income scale.) But with either scale, the line never flattens out, as it would if people needed only some minimum amount of income to see to their basic needs and anything extra made them no happier. As far as happiness is concerned, Wallis Simpson was half-right when she said, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.”

Most strikingly, the slopes of the arrows are similar to each other, and identical to the slope for the swarm of arrows as a whole (the dashed gray line lurking behind the swarm). That means that a raise for an individual relative to that person’s compatriots adds as much to his or her happiness as the same increase for their country across the board. This casts doubt on the idea that people are happy or unhappy only in comparison to the Joneses. Absolute income, not relative income, is what matters most for happiness (a conclusion that’s consistent with the finding discussed in chapter 9 on the irrelevance of inequality to happiness).²¹ These are among a number of findings that weaken the old belief that happiness adapts to ambient conditions like the eye, returns to a set point, or remains stationary as people vainly stride on a hedonic treadmill. Though people often do rebound from setbacks and pocket their good fortune, their happiness takes a sustained hit from trials like unemployment or disability, and a sustained boost from gifts like a good marriage or immigrating to a happier country.²² And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.²³

Since we know that countries get richer over time (chapter 8), we can think of figure 18-1 as a freeze-frame in a movie showing humanity getting happier over time. This increase in happiness is yet another indicator of human progress, and among the most important of all. Of course this snapshot is not an actual longitudinal chronicle in which people all over the world are polled for centuries and we plot their happiness over time; such data do not exist. But Stevenson and Wolfers scoured the literature for what longitudinal studies there were, and found that in eight out of nine European countries, happiness increased between 1973 and 2009 in tandem with the country’s rise in GDP per capita.²⁴ A confirmation for the world as a whole comes from the World Values Survey, which found that in forty-five out of fifty-two countries, happiness increased between 1981 and 2007.²⁵ The trends over time close the books on the Easterlin paradox: we now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time).

Happiness, of course, depends on much more than income. This is true not just among individuals, who differ in their life histories and their innate temperaments, but among nations, as we see from the scatter of dots around the gray line in the graph. Nations are happier when their people are in better health (holding income constant), and, as I mentioned, they are happier when their citizens feel they are free to choose what to do with their lives.²⁶ Culture and geography also matter: true to stereotype, Latin American countries are happier than they should be given their income, and the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe are less happy.²⁷ The World Happiness Report 2016 found three other traits that go with national happiness: social support (whether people say they have friends or relatives they can count on in times of trouble), generosity (whether they donate money to charity), and corruption (whether they perceive the businesses in their country as corrupt).²⁸ We cannot conclude, though, that these traits cause greater happiness. One reason is that happy people see the world through rose-tinted glasses, and may give generous assessments of the good things both in their lives and in their societies. The other is that happiness is, as social scientists say, endogenous: being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.