Happiness & Public Policy

I’ve got a new piece at The American on how money saves us from unhappiness in old age. A slice:

Easterlin, a pioneer of the study of happiness in the field of economics, set out to chart the trajectory of happiness over an ordinary person’s life-span. He discovered that, on average, happiness rises slowly from our early twenties, peaks at about forty-five, and then declines as slowly as it rose. But the smooth arc of happiness over the life-cycle obscures dramatic action in average satisfaction within the main domains of life—family, work, health, and finances—that together compose the overall trend.

Easterlin, drawing on the massive General Social Survey, reports that health satisfaction heads steadily south from eighteen on, while family satisfaction peaks at about fifty then tails off determinedly. Job satisfaction hits a crescendo at about sixty and slopes off with retirement. Only financial satisfaction, like Matlock reruns, gets better with old age. Financial satisfaction, Easterlin finds, dips until the mid-thirties, levels off, then heads skyward, soaring ever higher each remaining year of life. If not for sharply rising financial satisfaction, the mild downward slide from midlife would be a sharp drop into a well of gray-haired despair. Money does make us happy in at least this one way: as a firewall against an otherwise soul-sapping senescence.

But Easterlin—a vocal critic of the money-happiness link—does not interpret his findings quite this way. Why not?

Why not find out?

This is silly: 

Contrary to the common notion that paying taxes can be a painful experience, researchers at the University of Oregon say the practice actually may trigger feelings of satisfaction and happiness.

“Paying taxes can make citizens happy,” Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology, said in a release accompanying the study in the Friday issue of Science.

How was this determined?

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, the researchers observed the brain activity of 19 women who were given a balance of $100 each. The researchers created the effect of taxation by making mandatory withdrawals from their account. The withdrawn money was actually sent to a food bank’s account.

Participants also made additional choices about whether to give away more money or keep it for themselves.

The study found that two reward-related areas of the brain — the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens — lit up during the taxation test. These areas are typically activated when a person experiences feelings of satisfaction, as they do after having eaten a meal.

“The fact that mandatory transfers to a charity elicit activity in reward-related areas suggests that even mandatory taxation can produce satisfaction for taxpayers,” the study said.

When the participants voluntarily gave the charity more money, the activation area was larger — a finding that, according to the researchers, sheds light on why people make donations.

Complaints…

(1) The $100 wasn’t theirs to start with—was not the fruit of the their labor, etc. Giving people a little money and then taking some of it away again is, well, giving people some money … but less than maybe they thought they were going to get at first. How is that like a tax?

(2) The money was sent to a food bank to feed the hungry. That’s nice! But the idea that this simulates what taxes generally fund strains credulity. Why not tell people instead that the money is going to buy bombs that will incidentally kill civilians in humanitarian wars? Or that it is going to a subsidy for a farmer with an income four times the subject’s? That would be rather more realistic.

(3) Even if our taxes flow exclusively to food banks and adopt-a-puppy programs and we do get some lift out of this, is it greater than the lift we would have gotten from the money otherwise? They show that giving money away voluntarily does even more for folks. So how does giving money away measure up to eating a piece of chocolate cake, basking on a beach on the Italian coast, opening the box with your new iPhone in it? Until we know, we know nothing much.

Robin Hanson on bunk neuroscience narratives, here.

I’ve only just begun, but I think I’m ready to recommend The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

Hecht has a fine pluralistic sensibility and a knack for getting distance from otherwise invisible cultural assumptions by relating them to historical precedent. She’s already convinced me that contemporary body obsessions aren’t superior to corseting. Of course, I liked this bit:

It is a modern myth that money cannot make you happy. We all say that it can’t, but, given one wish, a lot of us would go for cash. We certainly opt for money over many other pleasures in structuring our real lives. Part of the reason is that what you can buy with money today you used to be able to get for free—social contact and play that can fit neatly into your life. Shopping, television, shows, and sports are not deep, but neither were the common social contact and play that kept people happy in the past.

Good stuff.

Arthur Brooks (via Mankiw) in the WSJ writes:

For most Americans, work is a rock-solid source of life happiness. Happy people work more hours each week than unhappy people, and work more in their free time as well. Even more tellingly, people with more hours per day to relax outside their jobs are not any happier than those who have less non-work time. In short, the idea that our heavy workloads are lowering our happiness is twaddle.

Obviously, there is a point beyond which work is excessive and lowers life quality. But within reasonable bounds, if happiness is our goal, the American formula of hard work appears to function pretty well.

This may be one reason why Americans tend to score better than Europeans on most happiness surveys. For example, according to the 2002 International Social Survey Programme across 35 countries, 56% of Americans are “completely happy” or “very happy” with their lives, versus 44% of Danes (often cited in surveys as the happiest Europeans), 35% of the French and 31% of Germans. Those sweet five-week vacations and 35-hour workweeks don’t seem to be stimulating all that much félicité. A good old-fashioned 50-hour week might be a better option.

I think the wealthier societies become, the more work is likely to be a source of satisfaction, since the more likely it is that people will have the opportunity to work at jobs they find individually satisfying. This is even more likely to be the case when labor markets are relatively unregulated, making it easier for people to test the waters of lots of different kinds of careers, or to make big mid-career changes, without too much fear of of getting (semi-)permanently locked out of the market.

Whether or not work makes you happy depends on what kind of work it is; whether or not leisure time makes you happy depends on how you use it; whether or not money makes you happy depends on how you spend it. Work, leisure, and money are all good for happiness. What we need to understand is how different kinds of people can best match up with different patterns of working, relaxing, and spending.

Matthew Pianalto has written a useful review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness. It looks to me like Shumaker is one of those guys who insists on making happiness coextensive with their conception of a good life, and then argues that we’re can’t be happy, even though we think we are, since our lives don’t measure up to his substantive theory of the good.

Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home” (287).

This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers. This bit is interesting:

In Schumaker’s reconstruction of the development of modern civilization, happiness emerges as a powerful ideal as people settle down into permanent communities which, surprisingly, leads to distancing of happiness from everyday life. Schumaker suggests that the development of agriculture, which allowed cities of specialized laborers to emerge (leaving farmers in the countryside to provide food), gave rise to the concept of work, as something that one must begrudgingly labor at during the day so that one can be happy (or just eat) at night. Work, for most people most of the time, is not fun, and so the concept of work distances those who must work from the happiness that they are working toward.

Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued this is one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.

[Follwup: Speaking of nomads, by packing their entire moral philosophy into their conception of happiness, thinkers like Shumaker are left having to deal with findings like this as embarassments:

The effect of modernization on the well-being of Bedouin women (n = 150) was investigated. Results show that the more modern the objective circumstances of the women’s lives, and/or the more modern the husbands’ attitudes (as perceived by their wives), the greater their subjective well-being(SWB). The women’s own attitudes affected their SWB only via interaction with their husbands’ attitudes and/or life circumstances. If the husbands’ attitudes were modern, their wives’ attitudes were not significantly related to SWB. However, if the husbands’ attitudes were traditional, then the more modern the wives’ attitudes, the lower their SWB. These findings repeated themselves, to a lesser degree, with life circumstances. The results fit the latest theoretical developments on SWB, and reflect the changes taking place within Bedouin society.

Are Bedouin women suffering from false consciousness? Is this merely subjective form of happiness too superficial to care about? Do they really know what’s good for them? Do they know that modern practices are “unsustainable”?]      

The truly delicious bits of this new NBER working paper by Di Tella, Haisken-De New, and MacCulloch on adaptation to income and status is the stuff on political leanings:

We study “habituation” to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7,812 people living in Germany from 1984 to 2000. Specifically, we estimate a “happiness equation” defined over several lags of income and status and compare the long run effects. We can (cannot) reject the hypothesis of no adaptation to income (status) during the four years following an income (status) change. In the short-run (current year) a one standard deviation increase in status and 52% of one standard deviation in income are associated with similar increases in happiness. In the long-run (five year average) a one standard deviation increase in status has a similar effect to an increase of 285% of a standard deviation in income. We also present different estimates of habituation across sub-groups. For example, we find that those on the right (left) of the political spectrum adapt to status (income) but not to income (status).

That is (in case you’re confused), folks on the left get used to money, but not status and the reverse for folks on the right. This is funny, since I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on inequality, mostly by political philosophers on the left, and they are positively obsessed specifically with the status effects of material inequality. It’s pretty amusing if this is just a reflection of a particular personality type. More generally, the fact that the happiness-effects of various things seem to be mediated by ideological leanings seems to basically ruin the prospect of using happiness research as a neutral, scientific way of assessing policy. It may just end up sort-of-usefully reminding us that one group may like a certain policy and another group may not simply because it makes one group feel better and another group feel worse. It doesn’t settle the dispute: it explains why we’re having it. Also, ideological mediation is one more nail in the coffin for the introspective method of normative philosophy. If the effects of this or that on people’s sense of well-being is mediated by their ideological cast, then chances are, our intuitions about real and hypothetical cases are probably already deeply infected with our ideological notions–or with the personality traits that lead us to find those notions attractive–and arguments based on these intuitions simply beg all the interesting questions in a subtle way.

Harvard’s Ed Glaeser essay in this month’s Cato Unbound is fresh this morning. He says lots of interesting things, but I thought I’d pick out this bit, which concerns my pet issues:

A belief in the value of liberty flows strongly through mainstream neoclassical economics. Economists frequently speak about an aim of maximizing utility levels, and this is often mistranslated as maximizing happiness. Maximizing freedom would be a better translation. The only way that economists know that utility has increased is if a person has more options to choose from, and that sounds like freedom to me. It is this attachment to liberty that makes neoclassical economists fond of political liberty and making people richer, because more wealth means more choices.

There is a recent wave of scholarship suggesting that the government can help individuals be happy by reducing their choices. While happiness may be a very nice thing, it is neither the obvious central desiderata for private or public decision-making. On a private level, I make decisions all that time that I expect to lower my level of happiness, because I have other objectives. On a public level, I can’t imagine why we would want to privilege this emotion over all other goals. A much better objective for the state is to aim at giving people the biggest range of choices possible, and then let people decide what is best for them.

Excellent. I sometimes call Glaeser’s argument, and arguments like it, ”the economist’s folk theorem for the morality of growth.” You end up with things like the “Easterlin Paradox,” if you get confused about the meaning of “utility” and think bigger choice sets are supposed to entail greater happiness. But Glaeser isn’t the least bit confused. I find his version of the economist’s folk theorem enormously compelling.

The solipsism of childlessness may be deplorable, but it’s not unhappy:

Although they won’t receive flowers or candy on Mother’s Day, women who have not had children seem to be just as happy in their 50s as those who did go down the family path.

In fact the loneliest, least contented and most vulnerable women were found to be mothers who were single, divorced or widowed in middle age, according to new research. Being healthy and having a partner gave a bigger boost to women’s happiness and well-being than being mothers, with education, work and relationships with family and friends also important factors.

“Among this group of women in their 50s the childless women are very similar to the moms in terms of their psychological well-being,” said Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Florida and the lead author of the study.

Over at National Review Online, I examine how French economic policy is giving French folk short shrift happiness-wise in light of the upcoming election.

If you’re tired of reading about happiness, maybe you’d like to hear me talk about it. Here’s my appearance on Counterpoint for ABC National Radio (that’s Australia) with presenter Michael Duffy, and my latest Cato podcast with Anastasia Uglova.

If you’re not tired of reading about happiness, here are my contributions to the current Cato Unbound discussion.

The Quest for a Scientific Politics of Happiness

Happiness as an Input to Political Deliberation

Why We Think We’re Unhappy and What Not to Do About It

Good News about Depression and Suicide

The Artificiality of Happiness

These are a bit more polished than my average blog posts. You should, of course, read the whole discussion, which I’ve personally found very stimulating.

Sorry to have gone missing since the release of my paper. I’ve been working on a number of shorter pieces, and on the new issue of Cato Unbound, on happiness. The discussion so far has been terrific. If you haven’t been following, here’s what we’ve had so far:

Lead Essay

• The Pursuit of Happiness in Perspective by Darrin M. McMahon

Reaction Essays

• Why Societies Should Pursue Happiness by Barry Schwartz
• The Data Tell a Different Story by Ruut Veenhoven
• The Quest for a Scientific Politics of Happiness by Will Wilkinson

The Conversation

• Virtue, Pleasure, and Paternalism in Happiness Policy by Darrin M. McMahon
• Reasoned Evaluation or Blind Faith? How Should States Determine Policy? by Barry Schwartz
• Happiness as an Input to Political Deliberation by Will Wilkinson
• Why We Think We’re Unhappy and What Not to Do About It by Will Wilkinson
• “Going to Hell” Is a Relative Matter by Barry Schwartz
• Policy Trade-offs, Justice, and Happiness by Darrin M. McMahon
• The Place of Happiness in Pluralism by Ruut Veenhoven
• What Public Policy Can Add to Happiness by Ruut Veenhoven
• Justice and Happiness and Growth, not Justice or Happiness or Growth by Barry Schwartz
• Good News about Depression and Suicide by Will Wilkinson

Check it out. The conversation will last through tomorrow.

That’s “reliable” in the technical measurement sense of “repeatability” or “consistency.” Alan Krueger and David Schkade are on the case with a new NBER paper, “The Reliability of Subjective Well-Being Measures.”

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the test-retest reliability of a standard self-reported life satisfaction measure and of affect measures collected from a diary method. The sample consists of 229 women who were interviewed on Thursdays, two weeks apart, in Spring 2005. The correlation of net affect (i.e., duration-weighted positive feelings less negative feelings) measured two weeks apart is 0.64, which is slightly higher than the correlation of life satisfaction (r=0.59). Correlations between income, net affect and life satisfaction are presented, and adjusted for attenuation bias due to measurement error. Life satisfaction is found to correlate much more strongly with income than does net affect. Components of affect that are more person-specific are found to have a higher test-retest reliability than components of affect that are more specific to the particular situation. While reliability figures for subjective well-being measures are lower than those typically found for education, income and many other microeconomic variables, they are probably sufficiently high to support much of the research that is currently being undertaken on subjective well-being, particularly in studies where group means are compared (e.g., across activities or demographic groups).

The passage in bold is not exactly a ringing endorsement, and definitely a call for caution, the implication being that the reliability of SWB measures are insufficient for some current research. I look forward to digging in deeper.

[Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the tip.]

That’s the name of my long-awaited (by me, at least) Cato Policy Analysis, published today. Here’s the abstract:

“Happiness research” studies the correlates of subjective well-being, generally through survey methods. A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic market economy corrodes happiness, whereas Western European and Scandinavian-style social democracies promote it. This paper argues that happiness research in fact poses no threat to the relatively libertarian ideals embodied in the U.S. socioeconomic system. Happiness research is seriously hampered by confusion and disagreement about the definition of its subject as well as the limitations inherent in current measurement techniques. In its present state happiness research cannot be relied on as an authoritative source for empirical information about happiness, which, in any case, is not a simple empirical phenomenon but a cultural and historical moving target. Yet, even if we accept the data of happiness research at face value, few of the alleged redistributive policy implications actually follow from the evidence. The data show that neither higher rates of government redistribution nor lower levels of income inequality make us happier, whereas high levels of economic freedom and high average incomes are among the strongest correlates of subjective well-being. Even if we table the damning charges of questionable science and bad moral philosophy, the American model still comes off a glowing success in terms of happiness.

It is not a short paper, nor is it written at a USA Today level of difficulty. So reserve a cool hour for some serious intellectual contemplation. It’s worth it, I hope.

In the post below I say I’m skeptical of numbers showing an explosion in rates of depression. Here, in part, is why… From yesterday’s New York Times.

About one in four people who appear to be depressed are in fact struggling with the normal mental fallout from a recent emotional blow, like a ruptured marriage, the loss of a job or the collapse of an investment, a new study suggests. To avoid unnecessary diagnoses and stigma, the standard definition of depression should be redrawn to specifically exclude such cases, the authors argue.

The study, appearing today in The Archives of General Psychiatry, is based on survey data from more than 8,000 Americans; it did not analyze the number of people who had been misdiagnosed.

Psychiatrists and other doctors who take careful medical histories do so precisely to rule out such life blows, as well as the effects of physical illnesses, before making a diagnosis of depression.

But the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual does not specifically exclude people experiencing deep but normal feelings of sadness, unless they are bereaved by the death of a loved one. And an increasing number of school districts and health clinics use simple depression checklists, which do not take context into account, the authors said.

“Larger and larger numbers of people are reporting symptoms on these checklists, and there’s no way to know whether we’re finding normal sadness responses or real depression,” said Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University and the study’s lead author.

This is big. As I’ve pointed out before, the depression stats and the happiness stats seem to be in conflict. There has been a stable or shrinking percentage of the population in the bottom happiness category despite alleged huge increases in the incidence of depression. This creates a problem for researchers who lean hard on both sets of data, like Diener and Seligman do in their paper “Beyond Money.” Here’s the dialectic as I see it…

If the depression data is right, the happiness data must be broken for failing to detect any increase in the proportion of the population feeling unwell. You would then have to give up on using the happiness data as evidence that many people are not getting happier, since you’ve already established the unreliability of self-reportinng to track important changes in psychological well-being. Now, you could argue that depression and unhappiness are different and statistically unrelated things. But then you need to convince us which one is more important for well-being. If the depression numbers are right, and depression is a huge deal, but has no relationship to unhappiness, then perhaps self-reported happiness and unhappiness are not very relevant to well-being. But then you don’t get to skip back and forth from one set of data to the other, whenever it is convenient to your argument.

You could argue that the happiness data are right, in which case, you’ll have a problem with the depression data. Again, you could distinguish between unhappiness and depression, and argue that they could vary independently. But, again, you’ll have to take a stand on what matters for well-being. Or argue that they are both important, but incommensurable. Alternatively, you could argue that both sets of data have their problems. This is my view. In this case, for the reasons Wakefield and Horwitz lay out, I am more skeptical of the depression data than the happiness data, which I think is likely to be most accurate at picking up changes at the bottom, since bad feelings are more psychologically salient and available than good ones, and therefore more likely to be accurately reported.

My hunch: much depression is misdiagnosed for failing to distinguish between functional sadness and disordered malaise, as above. And much is more or less intentionally misdiagnosed in order to give non-depressed people legal, insurance-covered access to SSRI’s, as Wakefield and Horwitz describe elsewhere. Importantly, SSRI’s really do make people feel better. Since there are far fewer truly depressed people than we think there are, but prescriptions for SSRIs based on bad depression diagnoses continue to rise, increasing rates of diagnosed depression may actually correlate with an improvement in the average tone of experience. O Brave New World!

From The Economist [thanks FK!]:

Cytokines actually act on sensory nerves that run to the brain from organs such as the heart and the lungs. That action stimulates a brain structure called the dorsal raphe nucleus. It was this nucleus that Dr Lowry focused on. He found a group of cells within it that connect directly to the limbic system, the brain’s emotion-generating area. These cells release serotonin into the limbic system in response to sensory-nerve stimulation.

[…]

This result is intriguing for two reasons. First, it offers the possibility of treating clinical depression with what is, in effect, a vaccination. Indeed, M. vaccae is considered a bit of a wonder-bug in this context. Besides cancer, and now depression, it is being looked at as a way of treating Crohn’s disease (an inflammation of the gut) and rheumatoid arthritis.

Second, it opens a new line of inquiry into why depression is becoming more common. Two other conditions that have increased in frequency recently are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. One explanation for the rise of these two conditions is the hygiene hypothesis. This suggests a lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs is leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.

In the case of depression, a similar explanation may pertain. If an ultra-hygienic environment is not stimulating the interaction between immune system and brain, some people may react badly to the consequent lack of serotonin. No one suggests this is the whole explanation for depression, but it may turn out to be part of it.

I’m skeptical of numbers that show massively increasing depression, but it would be amazing if a good part of what increase there has been is due to our being unnaturally clean, rather than, say, the breakdown of social cohesion in commercial society.

This is weird:

Exposure to a type of bacteria found in soil boosts happiness levels and could help restore healthy immune functions in people who are depressed and prone to infection, says a study.

British scientists led by Chris Lowry at Bristol University treated lung cancer patients with the bacteria, named ‘bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae’, and found improvement in their quality of life, reported the online edition of BBC News.

However, they said more work is needed to determine if the bacteria has anti-depressant properties through activation of serotonin neurons - a chemical in the brain that helps maintain a ‘happy feeling’, and seems to help keep our moods under control by helping with sleep, calming anxiety and relieving depression.

Seems low-effort enough. Let’s get dirty!

From a new Time article on Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s new grad program at CGU:

Drawing on his research on happiness, Csikszentmihalyi has three general pieces of advice:

* Be attuned to what gives you genuine satisfaction. Although many people assume that popular activities like watching TV are enjoyable, their own reports generally indicate that they feel more engaged, energetic, satisfied and happy when doing other things.

* Study yourself. To better understand their own happiness, Csikszentmihalyi says, people should systematically record their activities and feelings every few hours for a week or two. In recording your observations, try to focus on how you actually feel, rather than what you think you ought to be feeling or what you expect to feel. Afterwards, note the high points, particularly, and the low ones. Then try to adjust how you spend time according to your findings.

* Take control. Repairing unhappy conditions requires active effort. People often assume external conditions will change for the better or let chance determine their response. That’s a mistake. “Get control,” Csikszentmihalyi says. When things aren’t right, “you have to put in the same effort you would if your business were in trouble. Just as markets move, life changes too.”

Again: “unhappy conditions require active effort.” What if you happen to be writing a novel and just don’t have the time? Unhappiness isn’t that bad, really, if you’ve got something better to be working on.

Lynda Hurst had a thoughtful piece on happiness in Sunday’s Toronto Star. My favorite bit:

Since 1972, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying to replace the GDP with the GNH, Gross National Happiness. Material well-being is only one component of well-being, it explained. “That doesn’t ensure that you’re at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other.”

Sounds good. But as public policy, has it created peace and harmony?

In 1990, Bhutan expelled 100,000 people because they weren’t ethnically indigenous, a move that would have cut deeply into the traditional GDP. But Bhutan insists the happiness levels of its people haven’t been affected. The remaining people, that is.

Should other governments be emulating Bhutan (minus the mass expulsions)?

Sweet.

Read the whole thing, all the way to the end, or you’ll miss the part where I’m quoted.

[Update: Now with link to article!]

From Trizle. I find this blog’s mixture of middle-manager biz-speak and overexcited, indiscriminate, completely inauthentic mash-up of various forms of slang completely idiotic, yet nevertheless entertaining.