On my admittedly cursory reading of this debate, the most controversial issue is whether, among rich people, increasing income leads or does not lead to increases in happiness. Longitudinal happiness studies (but not cross-sectional ones) suggest that increasing income has little effect on happiness among the rich.

So, happiness studies support the conservative, cautious belief of no (or little) effect of income on happiness. It seems to me that those who question how happiness is measured in these studies do so in order to bolster their own inference that income actually does have a significant effect on happiness. It is those who question happiness studies that seek to support an inference, not their opponents. The onus of proof lies with the former.

(Note that, despite the problems associated with the measurement of happiness, happiness studies do continually find significant relationships between happiness and more sociological, less economic variables, like marital status.)

I don’t know why you insist that people compare themselves with other people when quantifying the intensity of their psychic experiences. If I ask you how funny, embarrassing or scary some experience was, on a ten point scale, you don’t say to yourself ‘Let me think how funny a typical person would find that joke? I’ll call that 5. Unfortunately I have a more sophisticated sense of humour, so for me unfortunately it was only a 3′.

It’s in the nature of subjective experiences that they can’t be verified or measured againts a standard yardstick. But it’s also in the nature of being human (except for autistics) that we try to quantify each other’s experiences, and to some degree succeed.

The idea is that we have our own internal scales, and as long as the end points are meaningfully defined, one person can identify points along the scale for the benefit of others. I mentioned pain data at the end of the post. These also involve a ten-point scale, and typically the subject is told that zero means no pain and ten means the worst pain you can imagine. In the HILDA survey, the overall satisfaction question is: ‘All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? Again, pick a number between 0 and 10 to indicate how satisfied you are.’ Respondents are shown a card indicating that 0 means totally dissatisfied and 10 means totally satisfied.

Of course we can never know exactly how another person’s scale corresponds to ours — in the case of pain, some people may be able to imagine a worse upper limit of pain than others, and we can never be sure whether a given individual has in mind a linear or an exponential scale. But if you accept that people every day succeed in communicating the grades of their pain, sadness, embarrassment or whatever, then it’s not a huge leap to assign some numbers to the gradations. If someone rates their life satisfaction at 7, it’s pretty clear that this means: significantly closer to very happy than very unhappy, but still with a lot of room for improvement. That’s a lot more information than Belgium.

Of course the data should be treated with care, and I’m sure it’s the case that answers are sensitive to all kinds of factors, like the context of the survey, the wording of the question, and the other questions in the survey. But this just means there is an art to conducting good surveys, and practicioners have a duty to implement best practice.

Just Me

The symptoms of many diseases, including cancers and muscular-skeletal disorders, can treated in ways that make the patient more comfortable without affecting mortality or morbidity, so I don’t see why this throws the subjective measurement into doubt. I’d be interested to know where pain fits into the equation. The studies you refer to would only be puzzling if the subjects report that their wellbeing has improved while also reporting unchanged pain levels.

Yes, there’s always boot scootin’. And lawn bowls. Closely followed by Phil Nitschke’s peaceful pill … exit stage left happily singing Sinatra’s “My Way” very badly … regrets I’ve had a few … but then again too few to mention …

Utter nightmare. So subjective and methodologically difficult that it is largely impossible to determine objectively to any useful degree.

It is quite possible to change the self-perception and verbal behaviour of a large percentage of people so they report being ‘happy’, or at least at lot less unhappy, but without any concomitant statistically significant change in objective measures such as disease morbidity or mortality, medical resource consumption, work and income status, personal relationship status, etc. I have seen mainstream medical therapeutic studies that claim entirely on the basis of patient self-report to have cured serious physical symptoms, yet primary objective measures (such as blood parameters, activity levels, workforce participation rates, etc) either didn’t improve, or got worse. All it proves is that people’s self-perception and verbal behaviour is often highly manipulable and has no necessary immediate relationship to the reality they live (at least in the short term, in the long term reality catches up with all of us).

Some things are just never going to be amenable to solid objective assessment, and I suspect ‘happiness’ is one of them.

There’s always line dancing, Ken.

The only thing that is clear to me is that the answer is inherently relative to some set of people. Otherwise, as an answer to “how happy are you?”, “7″ makes no more sense than “Belgium”.

Exactly. But how can you tell which of these two responses you’re getting?

I’m no longer full of the optimism and sense of boundless possibility of youth, but then I’m also no longer driven to compete or prove my masculinity or even in many respects to worry very much what most people think of me. I have a more realistic sense of my own abilities, limitations, needs and desires, but conversely my abilities are less than they once were, at least physically. I will never play rugby for Australia or be a concert pianist or run a sub-two hour marathon.

But can I tote up all these pluses and minuses and evaluate my overall happiness level comparative to 30 years ago? Of course I can’t, and I reckon anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or deluding themselves. Moreover, as the above discussion implicitly suggests, most of the factors that impact personal happiness arise from stages of one’s life cycle and have little to do with material wealth per se.

Oh, and that post wasn’t a rant. It was a thought exercise.