Happiness: Lessons from a New Science

by Richard Layard

above $20,000 per head, higher average income is no guarantee of greater happiness.

Your “perceived relative income” shows up as more important than your actual income.13

So one secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards.

So living standards are to some extent like alcohol or drugs. Once you have a certain new experience, you need to keep on having more of it if you want to sustain your happiness. You are in fact on a kind of treadmill, a “hedonic” treadmill, where you have to keep running in order that your happiness stand still.

In reading Happiness, by Richard Layard. Core idea quote right here.

People certainly adapt to some things pretty completely. But there are some things that people never fully adjust to. People never fully adjust to miseries like widowhood, loud and unpredictable noise, or caring for a person with Alzheimer’s. And there are some good things that never pall—like sex, friends and even to some extent marriage.16 Clearly the secret of

“Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune.”

So what really does affect us? Seven factors stand out: our family relationships, our financial situation, our work, our community and friends, our health, our personal freedom and our personal values. Except for health and income, they are all concerned with the quality of our relationships.

pattern for divorce is similar but in reverse. Before the divorce, people are becoming ever less happy. The year of divorce is the worst. After that year men return on average to their baseline level of happiness, but women continue to suffer.

What about the effects of having children? There is indeed great rejoicing when children are born.40 Yet within two years parents revert on average to their original level of happiness.

The psychologist Daniel Goleman is right about emotional intelligence: it exists and it can be taught by parents and teachers.66

Prod any happy person and you will find a project.

Chaos on the screen tends to desensitise—to make people more willing to engage in violence themselves and in illicit sex.

dominant ideas in the West are now Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”

among many primitive peoples for whom we have records, over 20% of all male deaths happened through war.28 By contrast, in Europe and the United States two world wars accounted for only about 2% of all male deaths in the twentieth century, even if we include the effects of wartime disease and starvation. Thus the idea of the peaceful Noble Savage is a myth.

It is a bit like what can happen in a football stadium. Someone stands up to improve his view. This obscures someone else’s view: he stands up. Eventually, everybody is standing. They all have the same view as before, but they also have the extra effort involved in standing.

Thus a tax on noxious emissions will reduce these emissions, and a tax on income from work will reduce work. In both situations the tax is not distorting (by discouraging something that is desirable) but corrective (by discouraging something that is undesirable). This puts a completely new light on our existing taxes, because both economists and politicians have tended to look on taxes as distorting, even at very low levels of tax.

In another study the psychologist Edward Deci gave puzzles to two groups of students.25 One group he paid for each correct solution, the other he did not. After time was up, both groups were allowed to go on working. The unpaid group did much more extra work—owing to their intrinsic interest in the exercise. But for the group that had been paid, the external motivation had reduced the internal motivation

This has led the psychologist David Lykken to suggest that parents should have to get a licence before child-bearing, or otherwise risk the danger that their child will be taken away for adoption. 20

There is little worse for children than to be born when neither parent wants them. Such children, often born to single mothers, have a high risk of criminal behaviour. That is why laws to permit abortion have greatly reduced the level of crime. On one estimate these laws are the biggest single cause of declining crime in

A high-turnover community is rarely friendly.

Beijing expat community? High turnover with high social identity/cohesion.

Altogether about a third of us experience serious mental illness during our lives, including about 15% who experience an episode of severe, disabling depression.

That is not the way to treat a major human problem. We spend too little on mental illness, compared with other diseases. If we take the entire toll of disease, which includes both disability and premature death, mental illness accounts for a quarter of the total.43

Our priorities need a radical change. It is a scandal how little we spend on mental illness compared with, say, poverty.

The fact is that we can train our feelings. We are not simply victims of our situation,

Though seemingly different, all the strategies offer one basic message—that we can liberate the positive force within us by dropping our negative self-perceptions and our inappropriate goals.

Buddhism tells us to address the “poisons” that are disturbing our peace of mind: our unrealistic cravings and our tempestuous anger and resentment. But not by frontal assault. We are to do it by calmly observing what is happening to us. If we feel anger, we do not simply suppress it; we note it from a detached point of view so that it can no longer consume us.

Physiologically, we know that simply smiling improves people’s hormones.7

A good test of your state of mind is to compare your number of positive and negative thoughts. That is a recommendation both of the ancient Buddhist Abhidharma and of modern cognitive therapy.

John Gottman has analysed how married couples discuss their problems. In stable marriages, people utter five positive thoughts for every negative one, while in failing marriages the ratio is less than one to one.

You cannot really address your emotions unless you are calm.

Cocaine, tobacco and cannabis originated in Latin America.

Cannabis isn't from Eurasia originally? I'm dubious of the author's claim here.

To get to the brain, the pain signal has to be carried across the synapses by a neurotransmitter. But the passage of the signal can be blocked by natural neurotransmitters called endorphins, and these are manufactured and released during trauma. They also appear after twenty minutes’ jogging to kill the pain and

But if we thought we should never tamper with nature, we would never treat cancer, heart disease, rheumatic hips or any of the thousand ailments from which we suffer.

Modern research has confirmed a link between creativity and mental instability.

The evidence shows that continuous reoptimisation is not the best route to happiness: you are more likely to be happy if you settle for what is “good enough” than if you feel you must always have the most.

Another important problem is what economists call adverse selection. For example, in New York law firms, associates work excessive hours to prove that they are fit to be partners. Each has an incentive to work longer than anyone else to signal his commitment. But they would mostly prefer to work fewer hours (for less pay) if others did the same (Landers et al. 1996, table 7). In law and finance especially, this signalling issue fuels a macho culture of work.

Interesting excerpts from the book 'Hapiness'

Happinessi = f(Leisurei, Valued consumptioni) + α Rankí + ß Outputí At the level of the whole society ∑ Ranki is constant, so we want α to be as small as possible, otherwise the quest for rank will lead to fruitless reduction of leisure. In contrast, we want ß to be as large as possible, so that people will work to produce output (as well as to get paid) and will obtain direct happiness from doing so.

Mathematical equation for happiness.