Money does not bring contentment. So how do you forge a politics where happiness is the priority?
Polly Toynbee Friday April 9, 2004 The Guardian
Another miserable bank holiday. Gradgrind Britain, with the fewest national holidays, is the only EU country not to make employers pay out for bank holidays. Some 3 million will not be paid if they take the day off; most of them will be low-paid women. It's a small meanness, but it signifies much. As Britain fights to retain its unique opt-out from the 48-hour Working Time Directive, the CBI campaigns hard to keep it. It is, it says, "vital to preserve workforce flexibility".
Flexibility is a poisoned word, more often an employer's right to resist working rights than an employee's right to work flexible hours. Nearly 4 million workers "agree" to work over 48 hours, and are often forced to sign a waiver. It was no-sign, no-job at the agency where I worked when researching my book on low pay. That meant working in a care home, 12-hour shifts, Saturday and Sunday every other weekend, with no flexibility, although most staff were mothers.
But that's what "keeps the UK competitive", say employers. Indeed it is, and the EU should forbid it as unfair competition with more civilised countries who refuse to sweat their workforces. Is that the way Britain wants to live? Poll after poll says it's not. A four-day week is most people's dream. That aspiration is not on the political radar, yet politicians worry that people feel politics is irrelevant to their lives.
Mori has produced a new social survey - Life Satisfaction and Trust in Other People - exploring what makes people happiest. It confirms the overwhelming evidence from economists that income is not an important determinant for life satisfaction for most people. The poll shows that a doubled GDP over 30 years has made Britain not a jot happier. LSE Professor Richard Layard is one of the new economists turning to hedonics, after finding that growth alone does not progress happiness. In his lectures he showed that once people earn above £10,000, money doesn't matter much. Mori confirms that it is how people feel about the pecking-order that affects their happiness. Overestimating how much happiness more money will buy, people climb on a hedonic treadmill going nowhere.
Mori, like the rest, finds education is a key determinant of happiness. A degree brings far more life satisfaction than the paltry financial rewards the government promised in the tuition fees debate. It should have said: "A degree makes you happier." So does being happily married/partnered. So does living in a place you don't want to move out of and feeling safe in your surroundings. Joining groups, participating, volunteering, going to the theatre and retiring all score high on the hedonic scale. Trust in others comes with all this.
Mori says its research should give the government a reason to dampen down "the pressures of consumerism and work and promote education that gives a more rounded view of happiness". But, the report says: "Governments that attempt to argue for less emphasis on economic factors are likely to be seen as attempting to manage expectations downwards, or to lack ambition."
A year ago the prime minister's Strategy Unit produced similar findings in Life Satisfaction: The State of Knowledge and Implications for Government. It was an astonishing document and it should have started to shift political priorities. Did it? Its Strategy Unit author David Halpern says: "It's being mulled over. It's a new lens to look through." As other surveys point the same way, these ideas spread. The first green shoot of this thinking may come in how public services are delivered. Mori finds targets for public services raise expectations "that will always expand beyond delivery and help create a state of continual dissatisfaction". So how do you make people more satisfied?
Labour looks to the Canadians, who have abandoned all measurements except one. Every public service there was told to raise public satisfaction by 10% - and they did. They focused on what people appreciate most: politeness, promptness, never being passed from one official to another. Waiting times for appointments mattered less than being treated fast and well. Pure pursuit of happiness in the NHS might risk offering cordon bleu meals and a smiling doctor, but lethal results. But the Danes - the happiest nation - score low on longevity, so does that matter? Hedonics might say it doesn't.
Shifting public service targets to "satisfaction" is relatively easy. The hard task is changing beliefs about money. Evidence piles up that, as Britain gets richer, it gets no better at Jeremy Bentham's "greatest happiness for the greatest number". Gross inequality of income is doubly dysfunctional: it gives only a little pleasure to the richest while creating dismay for the majority. It channels too much into private hands and not enough into state coffers that deliver the things that satisfy - universal, good education from the cradle, or safe and beautiful neighbourhoods.
The right responds by saying this is just old-style socialism in fancy new clothes. Some commentators hate the "happiness" concept, spouting John Stuart Mill's dictum that it is better to be Socrates than a happy pig, which misses the point: the hedonic proposition offers more Socrateses and fewer pigs. The right insists there is a zero-sum game between happiness and the long hours, high productivity and high-growth culture. Not so, says Halpern. Note how the happiest countries - the Nordics and Canada - combine wealth, growth, shorter hours, higher taxes and contentment. In France the 35-hour week created 450,000 jobs and it made most people happier. The only news reaching these shores was negative: some employers complained, though more discovered new useful flexibility. Some employees lost overtime earnings but 95% lost nothing, while productivity per hour and per worker rose sharply. It was almost all win-win.
Hedonic thinkers are treated as off-the-wall unrealists. How do you forge a politics where happiness is the priority? Politicians need to find a suitable language for it. An exchange at a policy network seminar for European social democrats, chaired by Peter Mandelson, descended into a zero-sum choice between a Europe that dwindles into insignificance in low-growth social contentment and a Europe that is a contender, punching its weight in the world. But hedonists say that is a false choice. Halpern says: "Satisfied nations are the most successful. This is about high human capital economics."
These ideas take time to drip into the body politic. As ever, New Labour is a hotbed of thinktank optimism when talking among its own kind, but afraid to whisper more visionary ideas in public. Its narrow economic focus still fears Britain's only productive advantage comes from driving a large, underpaid, under-protected workforce to work harder and for less than its EU competitors. Happy holiday!
· Mori report by Bobby Duffy; Mori Social Research Institute
polly.toynbee at guardian.co.uk