Madeleine Bunting is at it again.
The hunt for happiness is
an ancient human preoccupation, so there is nothing new in all this,
but it is being reframed in order to challenge our prevailing political
assumptions. The argument starts from the fact that Britain may have
got very much richer in the past 40 years but it has not got happier.
In fact, by measures such as depression, crime, obesity and alcoholism,
we have got very much unhappier. So isn’t the preoccupation with rising
GDP misplaced? Shouldn’t politics be focused around more than just
economic growth? Shouldn’t politics be as concerned with measures of
human happiness?
The problem with politics being concerned with measures of human happiness is that politicians will therefore try to both define such happiness and force us towards it. I really don’t want either Tony Benn or Stephen Milligan trying to do that for me thank you very much.
It’s also true that recent research shows that growing economy is a happier one. The 1 or 2% growth in living standards enables us to be a little less bitter about our location in the heirarchy (in much the same way that 1-2% inflation eases the pain of changes in relative prices).
Most of it is piecemeal
and still relatively small-scale, but the old liberal concept that the
emotional life of citizens is no business of the state is crumbling. It
raises the prospect of a future politics where emotional wellbeing
could be as important a remit of state public health policy as our
physical wellbeing. In 10 years’ time, alongside "five fruit and veg a
day", our kids could be chanting comparable mantras for daily emotional
wellbeing: do some exercise, do someone a good turn, count your
blessings, laugh, savour beauty.
I think she actually means this. That there should be another army of Commissars and Gauleiters paid for out of the public funds to get us savouring beauty. Presumably fat wads of cash would not be on the permitted list to be admired.
We might also be
discussing how to regulate emotional pollution in much the way we now
discuss environmental pollution. Top of the list would be advertising,
which is bad for our emotional health. It induces dissatisfaction with
its invidious comparisons with an affluent elite.
Right, so let’s ban advertising so that no new company or product can ever break into the market. Good one dearie.
Television is not much
better for us with its disproportionate volume of violence and fraught
relationships. It makes people unhappy, less creative and cuts them off
from emotionally healthy activities such as sport or seeing friends.
Meanwhile, there would be a strong rationale to increase subsidies for
festivals, parks, theatres, community groups, amateur dramatics,
choirs, sports clubs and lots of other lovely things.
AmDram. Great, they could do Macbeth, Hamlet, these sorts of things. So much less violent and gloomy than Coronation Street, eh?
To some, these kinds of
interventions represent a nightmare scenario of a nanny state, an
unacceptable interference in personal freedom. If people want to pursue
their own unhappiness, then the state has no right to stop them.
Critics conjure up the nightmare prospect of Brave New World and its
soma-imbibing placid citizens.
You said it.
But the problem is, as
Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons From a New
Science, that the decline of both religious belief (which is a strong
predictor of happiness) and the social solidarity movements of the 20th
century has left a vacuum of understanding about what constitutes a
good life and how to be happy.
Luvvie, have you actually read his research? Looked at the conclusion? The tax rates he advocates? 60% marginal tax rates on all income over 12 k a year. It’s also unsaid but implied that gross happiness could be increased by removing all taxation on that first 12 k. And here’s the important point. That 60% rate is both direct and indirect taxation.
Currently some 30-40 billion a year is raised (NI, income tax and VAT) from those below 12 k incomes. Then pretty much everyone is paying 60% or above. 22% income tax, two sets of NI (amounting to over 20%) and VAT at 17.5%. Then higher rate payers at 40%, 17.5% VAT and one set of NI to much more than 60%. On top of that there are all the excise taxes and duties, petrol, fags, booze, all of which add to a tax burden greatly higher than the 60% marginal rates suggested by the Noble Lord Professor Layard as being that which will optimise the amount of happiness in the economy.
By your very own argument we are currently overtaxed to the value of, ooooh, say 100 billion a year? No wonder we’re friggin’ depressed.
Layard cites an
international study of schoolchildren in which the 11-15 age group were
asked whether they agreed that "most students in my class are kind and
helpful". England came last of eight developed countries, below Russia.
Progress of a sort I suppose. They’ve moved on from admiring Stalin’s Russia to Putin’s.
The huge ambition of the
small but growing happiness lobby is that the state resumes a role in
promoting the good life, not just to chivvy us along in the global rat
race, anxious and insecure.
I can think of very little in this life more likely to make me anxious and insecure than being chivvied along by the likes of Richard Layard (who was one of those who taught me economics, something I did rather enjoy) or Our Mad Maddy to what they define as the good life.
I’d rather have live ferrets sewn into my trousers quite frankly.
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