Income And Happiness

Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced marker democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign governments of people's own choosing. The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphasia, increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institution, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better, a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends.We are not the first generation to be suspicious of each other and certainly not be the first to distrust institutions, but we may be the first to monitor these disturbances with such care-and idly watch them accumulate. The current unhappiness and malaise are not marked by revolutionary sentiments, for the ethos of modern market democracies is characterized by strong beliefs in the legitimacy, if not the practices, of its institution. But in subterranean ways the modern era may be languishing while another is struggling to be born.If income is not the most import direct source of happiness or of life satisfaction, what are the important sources? The first answer is simple and obvious: we get happiness primarily from people; it is their affection or dislike, their good of bad opinion of us, their acceptance or rejection that most influence our moods. Income is mostly sought in the service of these forms of social esteem, as Adam Smith reported long ago. To make this view plausible, there are evolutionary principles, theological arguments, and social science studies to support the priority of what I shall call companionship.