Al Gore, facing political defeat in an election that appears to have been stolen, certainly knows what unhappiness is. George W. Bush and his mother clearly know the contrary feeling. "Gosh," Barbara Bush told CBS television, "It was great to be the mother of the president for 30 minutes." Unlike the rest of her tough-blooded brood, she is known as a modest woman. Perhaps that was sufficient for her. After all every sensible person knows that moments of peak happiness don't last for much longer than half an hour anyway.
Yet high moments aside, do we know what happiness is? Is the world becoming a happier place? Are we happier than our parent's or grandparent's generation? What could give us a little more happiness?
I recall 25 years ago an article on the subject published by Geraldine Norman, the art saleroom correspondent of the London Times. I haven't seen it bettered. She had just been to Africa for her honeymoon and being a rather bookish sort of a girl took with her a Penguin introduction to psychology and books on statistical game theory, anthropology, economics and comparative religion. After all this heavy reading, no doubt interspersed with long walks up the paths that stretch aside the Victoria Falls and, I suppose, some canoodling with her new husband, she came up with six factors that appeared to be universal needs for a happy life:
1) Understanding of your environment and how to control it;
2) Social support from family and friends;
3) Species drive satisfaction, specifically sex and parental drive;
4) Satisfying of drives contributing to physical well-being -- eating, sleep, exercise, etc;
5) Satisfaction of aesthetic and sensory drives;
6) Satisfaction of the exploratory drive -- creativity, discovery and, one should add for the likes of Messrs Bush and Gore, the pursuit of political power.
She then weighted these, dividing one hundred points between them, giving the most points to physical well being. "Better red than dead", she wrote at the time of the Vietnam War. Next she looked at individual countries and, on deciding how much they had of each virtue, multiplied the total. In this somewhat arbitrary but engaging way she decided that Botswana, then a ridiculously poor country, scored higher than Britain.
Since then there have been numerous attempts to quantify happiness or, at least, progress. My favorite for the last decade has been the Human Development Index, brought up to date every year by the UN Development Program. Essentially it tries to measure the rate of progress for countries, not by looking at national income but by substituting the yardstick of quality of life. Thus momentum in improving life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy and the status of women become the key criteria. Not surprisingly, Canada, Japan and the Scandinavian countries end up trumping the US.
Now comes a thoughtful analysis in the current issue of the British journal Prospect by an American writer, Robert Wright. Provocatively, he compares happiness in the Third World with that of the rich world. "Indonesian workers want to raise their income by moving from farm fields to Nike factories. Nike customers want, well, they want a shoe that has not just a generic `Air Sole' (old hat) but a `Tuned Air Unit' in the heel and `Zoom Air' in the forefoot.
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