Quick points:
- Norway, Switzerland and the rest of the Nordic countries lead. That's
why the deeply desolate Trump has to badmouth them.
- China, despite huge economic gains, does no better than 25 years ago.
- The USA is a story of reduced happiness. In 2007 the USA ranked 3rd
among the OECD countries; in 2016 it came 19th. The reasons are
declining social support and increased corruption and it is these same
factors that explain why the Nordic countries do so much better.
- Croatia is among the 3 unhappiest countries in Europe.
http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/
Restoring American happiness.
The central paradox of the modern American economy, is this: income per
person has increased roughly three times since 1960, but measured
happiness has not risen. The situation has gotten worse in recent years:
per capita GDP is still rising, but happiness is now actually falling.
The United States can and should raise happiness by addressing
America’s multi-faceted social crisis — rising inequality, corruption,
isolation, and distrust — rather than focusing exclusively or
even mainly on economic growth, especially since the concrete proposals
along these lines would exacerbate rather than ameliorate the
deepening social crisis.
To understand America’s falling happiness, we ... explain the sources of
subjective wellbeing using six underlying variables: log
income per capita (lgdp), healthy life expectancy (hle), social support
(ssup), freedom to make life choices (freedom), generosity of donations
(donation), and perceived corruption of government and business
(corruption).
While two of the explanatory variables moved in the direction of greater
U.S. happiness (lgdp, hle), the four social variables (ssup, freedom,
donation, corruption) all deteriorated — US showed less social support,
less sense of personal freedom, lower donations, and more perceived
corruption of government and business.
America’s crisis is, in short, a social crisis, not an economic crisis.
Almost all of the policy discourse in Washington DC centers on naïve
attempts to raise the economic growth rate, as if a higher growth rate
would somehow heal the deepening divisions and angst in American
society. This kind of growth-only agenda is doubly wrong-headed.
First, most of the pseudo-elixirs for growth — especially the Republican
Party’s beloved nostrum of endless tax cuts and voodoo economics—will
only exacerbate America’s social inequalities and feed the distrust that
is already tearing society apart.
Second, a forthright attack on the real sources of social crisis would
have a much larger and more rapid beneficial effect on U.S. happiness.
Consider the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway,
and Sweden), all of which score far higher than the U.S. in happiness
... even though the U.S. has a higher GDP per capita. The explanation is
that the Nordic countries far outpace the U.S. on personal freedom,
social support, and lower corruption, thereby accounting for the higher
levels of Nordic happiness.
It is of course well-known that social capital in the United States has
been in decline for several decades now. In recent years, the evidence
of social crises has become overwhelming, across every aspect of social
life. A small group at the top of the income distribution has continued
to make striking gains in wealth and income, while the rest of
society has faced economic stagnation or decline, worsening public
health indicators including rising rates of drug addiction and suicide,
and declining social trust.
To spell this out: Generalized trust among Americans has been falling
for decades. Trust in government has plummeted to the lowest level in
modern history, consistent with the rise in the perception of
corruption. Income inequality has reached astronomical levels, with the
top 1 percent of American households taking home almost all of the gains
in economic growth in recent decades, while the share of the bottom 50%
plummets. The top 1 percent of households now claims around 23 percent
of income, roughly equal to the share of the bottom 70 percent.
At the same time, the extent of pro-social behavior among Americans
seems to be on the decline ... A recent study showed that the extent of
helping behavior by U.S. residents declined sharply between 2001 and
2011, but this was not true for Canadian residents.
Another very stark indicator of social collapse is the startling finding
that mortality rates are rising for middle-aged white, non-Hispanic men
and women. This trend stands in sharp contrast
to the experience of Western Europe and Canada, where mortality rates
continue to fall. What makes the United States case so disturbing and
revealing is that it is clearly a social crisis as much as a health crisis.
There are several factors at work in this interconnected destruction of
social capital, and their relative importance has not been determined
with any precision or consensus. I would point to five.
The first is the rise of mega-dollars in U.S. politics. A typical
federal election cycle now involves at least $7 billion in campaign
financing, and billions of dollars more in corporate lobbying outlays
that are indirect forms of campaign financing. Because of profoundly
damaging Supreme Court decisions ... billionaires and large corporations
are able to make enormous and essentially untraceable campaign
contributions to candidates. There is a strong and correct
feeling among Americans that the government does not serve their
interest, but rather the interest of powerful lobbies, wealthy
Americans, and of course, the politicians themselves. Political
scientists such as Martin Gilens have shown that only rich Americans
have real input into political decision making.
The second, and closely related, factor is the soaring income and wealth
inequality. Since the 1980s, America has been in a new gilded age, with
tax cuts for the rich, special privileges for the wealthy to hide income
in offshore tax havens, the destruction of union power, financial
deregulation, and other steps to shift national income to the very top
of the income distribution. It has worked better and longer than could
have been imagined. Of course, the big money in politics keeps the
political direction towards further tax cuts and benefits for the
super-rich.
The third factor is the decline in social trust related to the post-1965
surge in immigration to the United States, especially the rise of the
Hispanic population. Putnam reported that communities with higher ethnic
diversity also have lower measures of social trust. This finding seems
true for the United States, but not consistently so for other countries
(such as Canada). Some sociologists suggest that the U.S. high ethnic
diversity is also characterized by considerable economic and ethnic
segregation, so that the potential for inter-group contact to diminish
distrust is not as operative in the United States as in other countries:
“American exceptionalism may be linked to relatively high levels of
heterogeneity combined with the pronounced segregation of cities in the
United States compared with other Western countries … and the
persistence of ethnic inqualities”.
The fourth factor relates to the aftermath of 9/11. America’s reaction
to these unprecedented terrorist attacks was to stoke fear rather than
appeal to social solidarity. The U.S. government launched an open-ended
global war on terror, appealing to the darkest side of human nature
by invoking a stark “us versus them” dualism, and terrifying American
citizens through the government’s projections of fear. Since then, the
United States has been involved in non-stop war and Americans are
subject to daily indignities of searches, frisking, body pat downs,
orders barked at airports, and terrorist alerts. In the meantime, the
U.S. government has repeatedly misled its own citizens about the scope
of its activities, whom it is spying on, and where it is fighting.
The fifth and final factor that I would raise is the severe
deterioration of America’s educational system. On the demand side, the
market premium for a college degree has continued to rise in the United
States, reflecting the fact that new technologies demand better
technical skills. Yet on the supply side, the share of young Americans
completing a bachelor’s degree or higher is essentially stagnant at
around 36 percent. College tuition has soared and student aid has
been pared back dramatically. The result is a $1 trillion mountain of
student debt and a generation of young people with half-finished
bachelor’s degrees facing a precarious future.
This matters because the failure of America to educate its young people
is a major force behind the rise in income inequality (condemning those
with less than a bachelors degree to stagnant or falling incomes) and,
it appears, to the fall of social capital as well. The US political
divide is increasingly a divide between those with a college degree and
those without. This is reflected in the recent presidential election.
In sum, the United States offers a vivid portrait of a country that is
looking for happiness “in all the wrong places”. The dominant political
discourse is all about raising the rate of economic growth. And the
prescriptions for faster growth — mainly deregulation and tax cuts — are
likely to exacerbate, not reduce social tensions. Almost surely, further
tax cuts will increase inequality, social tensions, and the
social and economic divide between those with a college degree and those
without.
America’s happiness agenda should center on rebuilding social capital.
This will require a keen focus on the five main factors that have
contributed to falling social trust and confidence in government.
The first priority should be campaign finance reform, especially to undo
the terrible damage caused by the Citizens United decision.
The second should be a set of policies aiming at reducing income and
wealth inequality. This would include an expanded social safety net,
wealth taxes, and greater public financing of health and education.
The third should be to improve the social relations between the
native-born and immigrant populations. Canada has demonstrated a
considerable success with multiculturalism; the United States has not
tried very hard.
The fourth is to acknowledge and move past the fear created by 9/11 and
its memory. The US remains traumatized to this day; Trump’s ban on
travel ... is a continuing manifestation of the exaggerated and
irrational fears that grip the nation.
The fifth priority, I believe, should be on improved educational
quality, access, and attainment. America has lost the edge in educating
its citizens for the 21st century; that fact alone ensures a social
crisis that will continue to threaten well-being until the commitment to
quality education for all is once again a central tenet of American society.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/sdsn-whr2017/HR17-Ch7_lr.pdf