The controversial ingredients of happiness

Monday’s Wall Street Journal had a book review of Gross National Happiness by Arthur C. Brooks. Over the past three years I have thought much about what exactly makes one happy. From my personal experience, I can tell the source of much of my happiness has to do with finding a meaningful community, making a connection to members of such a community, and also disconnecting from some of the things that the more secular elements of my life claim to be important.

 

“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.”

 

One of the more controversial claims in the book is that people with certain political affiliations are happier than others.

 

“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.”

 

I agree with this. About a month ago I was entertaining myself by using the North Carolina State Board of Elections web site to lookup the voter registration records of some of my business school professors. In North Carolina, one can register as either Republican, Democrat, or as unaffiliated. With the exception of the ones who were registered as unaffiliated, I correctly guessed the political party affiliation of each and every professor that I took a guess on.

 

It’s difficult to describe the qualitative metrics that I used to estimate the political preferences of the professors. But I do remember that one professor struck me as a strong Republican because of his ability to tell self-deprecating jokes about himself. Everything else about his mannerisms conveyed that he was very happy about his life, his profession, and where he was in life. In contrast, I correctly guessed that another professor was a Democrat based on his classroom demeanor which conveyed that he did not want to be there.

 

The author wrote something else which is also quite applicable.

 

“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."”

 

Perhaps this explains why I am so happy.