that there is a positive correlation between wealth and subjective well-being. To put it in simple English, money brings happiness. The same method can be used to examine whether people living in democracies are happier than people living in dictatorships, and whether married people are happier than singles, divorcees or widowers.
This provides a grounding for historians, who can examine wealth, political freedom and divorce rates in the past. If people are happier in democracies and married people are happier than divorcees, a historian has a basis for arguing that the democratisation process of the last few decades contributed to the happiness of humankind, whereas the growing rates of divorce indicate an opposite trend.
This way of thinking is not flawless, but before pointing out some of the holes, it is worth considering the findings.
One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance. For people stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder, more money means greater happiness. If you are an American single mother earning $12,000 a year cleaning houses and you suddenly win $500,000 in the lottery, you will probably experience a significant and long-term surge in your subjective well-being. You’ll be able to feed and clothe your children without sinking further into debt. However, if you’re a top executive earning $250,000 a year and you win $1 million in the lottery, or your company board suddenly decides to double your salary, your surge is likely to last only a few weeks. According to the empirical findings, it’s almost certainly not going to make a big difference to the way you feel over the long run. You’ll buy a snazzier car, move into a palatial home, get used to drinking Chateau Pétrus instead of California Cabernet, but it’ll soon all seem routine and unexceptional.
Another interesting finding is that illness decreases happiness in the short term, but is a source of long-term distress only if a person’s condition is constantly deteriorating or if the disease involves ongoing and debilitating pain. People who are diagnosed with chronic illness such as diabetes are usually depressed for a while, but if the illness does not get worse they adjust to their new condition and rate their happiness as highly as healthy people do. Imagine that Lucy and Luke are middle-class twins, who agree to take part in a subjective well-being study. On the way back from the psychology laboratory, Lucy’s car is hit by a bus, leaving Lucy with a number of broken bones and a permanently lame leg. Just as the rescue crew is cutting her out of the wreckage, the phone rings and Luke shouts that he has won the lottery’s $10,000,000 jackpot. Two years later she’ll be limping and he’ll be a lot richer, but when the psychologist comes around for a follow-up study, they are both likely to give the same answers they did on the morning of that fateful day.
Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of. Marriage is particularly important. Repeated studies have found that there is a very close correlation between good marriages and high subjective well-being, and between bad marriages and misery. This holds true irrespective of economic or even physical conditions. An impecunious invalid surrounded by a loving spouse, a devoted family and a warm community may well feel better than an alienated billionaire, provided that the invalid’s poverty is not too severe and that his illness is not degenerative or painful.
This raises the possibility that the immense improvement in material conditions over the last two centuries was offset by the collapse of the family and the community. If so, the average person might well be no happier today than in 1800. Even the freedom we value so highly may be working against us. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbours, but they can choose to leave us. With the individual wielding unprecedented power to decide her own path in life, we find it ever harder to make commitments. We thus live in an increasingly lonely world of unravelling communities and families.
But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends