A new book about what makes people happy. Budweiser mysteriously missing from list. ******* How to Be of Good Cheer By DAVE SHIFLETT May 12, 2008 Gross National Happiness By Arthur C. Brooks (Basic Books, 277 pages, $26.95) The advice will sound familiar: Get a job, get married, go to church and don't listen to wild-eyed utopians. In such a way, it is said, you will find your portion of happiness. To this list of imperatives Arthur C. Brooks would add one other: Avoid this summer's Democratic National Convention. In "Gross National Happiness," Mr. Brooks has assembled an array of statistics to measure the mood of America's citizens and to discover the reasons they feel as they do. Most often he cites polls that ask for self-described happiness levels, matching up the answers with various beliefs, habits, life choices or experiences. And what exactly is happiness? Who knows? The term might refer joy or contentment or moral self-approval or material well-being or appetitive pleasure – or some combination of them all. Mr. Brooks is aware of the problem. He says that Potter Stewart, the Supreme Court justice, could have been describing happiness when he said, of pornography, "I know it when I see it." At the end of the day, Mr. Brooks notes, "political conservatives take the happiness prize hands down." Those who identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, he says, are twice as likely to say that they're very happy as those who identify themselves as liberal or very liberal. What explains the rightists' relative bliss? It seems that a conservative political disposition exists alongside other happy habits of being. Mr. Brooks points especially to Holy Matrimony, with an emphasis on the Holy. Citing 2004 data, he writes that conservatives are twice as likely to go to church or temple once a week than liberals and that "two-thirds of conservatives are married versus only a third of liberals." Married conservatives, he says, are "more than three times likely to say they're very happy than single liberals to say they are very happy." And though conservative religious people are often regarded as sexless puritans, they turn out to have 80% more kids than secular liberals, and their children tend to be religious, meaning that they'll probably further populate the Earth with more religious, right-leaning monogamists. This kind of news tends to cause secularists to feel very unhappy and increasingly outnumbered. Marriage, Mr. Brooks reasonably observes, is not to be confused with total happiness, especially after those so-called bundles of joy begin arriving. "Children do not make for happier marriages," Mr. Brooks explains, thanks in part to certain burdens they bring with them, such as sleep deprivation, cleaning duty, financial worry and, for some families, the delight of getting to know a parole officer on a first-name basis. Senior couples that had no children, he adds, are no less happy than those who did. Yet the achievement of raising children makes kids part of a "happiness package." Curiously, or perhaps not, women are seven percentage points more likely than men to be "very happy after losing a spouse to death" and "9 points likelier to be very happy if never married." And what about Mr. Brooks himself? Is he one of those sunny, hymn-singing types who are so hard to take at neighborhood picnics? He tells us that he is a Roman Catholic, though not of the ultramontane variety; he generally considers himself to be an "ebullient grouch." He says that he doesn't know whether faith produces happiness or happiness makes people want to practice their faith. The categories are "mutually reinforcing." He does firmly believe that the Founders were right to insist that the "pursuit of happiness" was central to the American creed; thus government policies should not hamper the pursuit. He challenges those partial to tales about long-suffering Wal-Mart workers and surly burger flippers to rethink their victimology creed. The woe is not nearly as widespread as rumored: 89% of Americans who work more than 10 hours a week are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs while only 11% are not very satisfied or not at all satisfied. Most surprisingly, Mr. Brooks writes, there "is no difference at all in job satisfaction between those with below-average and above-average incomes." What really makes Americans hate their jobs is a perception that advancement is impossible. And while Mr. Brooks agrees that the nation's income gap is growing, the national happiness level is steady. Just under one-third of American adults say that they are "very happy"; up to 15% are not too happy; and everyone else is somewhere in the middle. Those numbers have been roughly true since the early 1970s. More government spending doesn't seem to raise happiness levels, though direct government assistance may diminish it. Charitable giving, Mr. Brooks adds, generally lifts the spirits; Americans do a lot of it. "Gross National Happiness" ends with a list of policy suggestions: Government should aim for economic opportunity, not income equality; it should not penalize marriage with tax policies; and it should resist excessive security measures (think of the screening process at airports), which inhibit freedom and increase unhappiness. In an observation of particular relevance at the moment, Mr. Brooks says that political "extremists" – who comprise 10% to 20% of the population – may be among the happiest people in America, because they "believe with perfect certainty in the correctness of their political dogmas." Yet their ferocity brings the rest of us down, so he suggests that political parties stop pandering to them. Good idea, though it sounds a little utopian. Mr. Shiflett is a writer in Midlothian, Va.
