AFTERnow

In affluent societies, many serious health and social problems which afflicted us in the past have been resolved. Yet our levels of happiness, which have been measured by economists and psychologists since the 1950s, are not rising and may even be declining (Layard, 2005; Lane, 2000). 

In the United States, people are no happier, although living standards have more than doubled in that time. In the UK happiness has been static since 1975, and appears no higher than in the 1950s. This is so despite massive increases in real income across all groups in society. The same story holds true for Japan. Continental European countries have mostly seen a slight upward trend in happiness (except for Belgium) but overall the change in happiness is small, relative to the huge real increase in our incomes.  

Psychologist Daniel Nettle (2005) suggests that expectations of happiness in our society may be unrealistically high, although he acknowledges that this can be ‘hard to swallow’ in a culture obsessed with personal feelings. But for many economists this lack of increase in average happiness is a disturbing paradox in need of explanation. To over-simplify, it throws in doubt some key assumptions about the causal relationship between our objective welfare (the broad conditions in which we live) and our subjective well-being (how happy we are and how good we feel about our lives) (Easterbrook 2003). 

Expressed in this way, a concern with happiness is not a trivial issue but a key component of our overall well-being and our individual and social quality of life (Eckersley 2004). This short paper therefore focusses on the relationship between our static or declining levels of happiness as individuals and how this relates to modernity. Other connections between the nature of modern society and our psychological and subjective well-being are explored further elsewhere.