Don't worry, we're happy

A toxic coalition of anti-capitalist and anti-modern commentators would have us believe that Australia's economic success has caused a tidal wave of human misery. Anxiety, depression and sadness are tendered as evidence that freedom is not all it is cracked up to be.

In a 2004 discussion paper, The Disappointment of Liberalism (PDF 192KB), Australia Institute executive director Clive Hamilton declared that "the disappointments of money and freedom must be seen as a profound challenge to liberalism".

University of NSW sociologist Michael Pusey, in The Experience of Middle Australia: the Dark Side of Economic Reform (PDF 207KB) (Cambridge University Press, 2003) claims "economic reform has been imposed on people in the face of international evidence showing that economic engineering reduces happiness and causes depression".

In an article headlined "Living it up gets us down", The Sydney Morning Herald's economics commentator Ross Gittins asked "Why, now we're so much wealthier than we were, do we have more trouble, rather than less, with divorce, drugs, crime, depression and suicide? Why? What's causing this deterioration in the quality of our lives? Is it happening because of, or in spite of, our obsession with economic growth?"

But what seems to be happening is in fact not happening. The 2006 edition of the Australian Bureau of Statistics's Measures of Australia's Progress quotes the ABS 2001 National Health Survey, which found that 76 per cent of the population were "delighted", "pleased" or "mostly satisfied" with their lives.

A phoney crisis of national happiness is being manufactured to "prove" that economic liberalism causes depression, divorce, child abuse, environmental chaos, terrorism and bad manners.

In researching my new book, Don't Panic - Nearly Everything Is Better Than You Think (Pluto Press), I read a report, Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia, by the American-British academic team of David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, which argued that the relatively poor wellbeing of Australians was a clear rebuttal of the rhetoric of prosperity.

I subsequently discovered that this paper was challenged by Australian-American academic duo Andrew Leigh and Justin Wolfers, who concluded that there was no paradox and that Australians were not only happy, but happier than most other people in the world.

Leigh and Wolfers, in Happiness and the Human Development Index: Australia Is Not a Paradox, found high levels of happiness were a consistent theme in Australia since the first significant cross-national happiness surveys were conducted in the 1940s.

The disconnect between the public debate and the facts is starkest in relation to children.

Melbourne's The Age newspaper, a keen peddler of the "sadness epidemic", ran a piece by journalist Simon Castles on "the suicide generation". "It is surely not a coincidence," he wrote, "that the countries that most fervently embraced individualistic, neo-liberal, market-dominated doctrines - Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia - are the same countries that have faced crises of youth depression".

Yet the very state of childhood as we know it is a result of prosperity, not its victim. Previously, thousands of children lived and often died in workhouses, orphanages and factories, "kept essentially as slave labour ... Children as young as five years worked 16 hours a day, wore leg-irons and were beaten".

As for the argument that the relentless demands of a deregulated economy have a bearing on child neglect, it should be noted that child abuse is most serious in societies with poor economic growth.

Wealth may appear to have come at the expense of simple, virtuous modes of living but social complexity pre-dates the plough, let alone the Internet.

Take, for instance, an island fisherman in the Pacific, before contact with Western traders, living his days in the sun a world away from Prozac, interest rates and cholesterol. Surely he is a perfect example of the pre-industrial order of certainty and security: strong family ties, hard work, profound religious convictions. So far so good.

But a traditional fisherman's life was a complex web of social and familial obligations placing considerable strain on his time and resources. He was required to provide food and labour for his wife's family as well as his own. Depending on the order of his birth and marriage, he was at the beck and call of nominated senior relatives. He had to deliver labour and tribute to local chieftains.

Francis Hezel, director of the Micronesian Seminar, describes him as "a man enmeshed in a rather tight system". For our fisherman, the work-life balance was tough going and, with rare exceptions, it has ever been thus in every community, on every continent, in every century.

The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was adopted in 1979 because women in all manner of communities around the world were in various states of danger, distress and fear, arising from their ordinary, normal, daily circumstances. As the convention notes, these practices are in most cases the result of belief systems that have held sway for hundreds of years. That is to say that normal has been difficult for a long, long time.

Modern life, especially its freedoms, should be celebrated and yet it is being blamed for a manufactured epidemic of sadness. The facts show it's just not plausible.

Modern life can't actually be making us crazier but it may well be reshaping the way we outwardly manifest our craziness. You may be feeling stressed about your mortgage but you may be the sort of person who would otherwise have stressed about lions, poor growing seasons or miscegenation.

Some writers suggest our relative position to others is a growing cause of profound anxiety, exacerbated by living in an information age in which we can see exactly how difficult it is to keep up with Paris and Nicole, and the Joneses. But research indicates comparing ourselves with others works both ways.

It turns out that while we are sometimes jealous of success, we also take inspiration from it. We compare our plot with the greener grasses over the hill but also with the filth. We've seen Paris but also Rwanda and that awareness of others who have less provides us a sense of gratitude and perspective.

Success, like happiness, is objective and subjective. So while our relative position may cause concern, we have still the wit to be pleased with the improvement in our absolute position.

When scientists and psychologists began studying happiness, or what they call subjective wellbeing, early studies showed that happy people were most likely young, healthy, educated, well-paid, extroverted, optimistic, relaxed, religious, married.

Which raised a lot of chicken-and-egg questions. Was happiness an outcome or the basic temperament that allowed them to negotiate all the rest with ease? When surveys show married people report being happier, for example, is this because marriage leads to happiness or because happy people are more likely to get married and stay that way?

New research is leaning to temperament being a more significant factor than circumstance, explaining why happiness levels don't change much between countries or tax brackets. Wealth matters up to the point of a reasonable living standard, after which diminishing returns set in.

Which is to say, if you are hungry and you get something to eat it makes you very, very happy. If you have eaten six courses and are offered "a wafer, monsieur" you're as likely to need a bucket as a napkin.

So, if we're born with a basic predisposition to happiness, how is it that we instinctively feel that our life experience determines our happiness?

Part of the answer is in our brains. The human brain devotes large capacity to recognising people, keeping score of debts, evaluating trustworthiness and forming alliances. This is integral to human success and thus rewarded in evolutionary terms.

Reciprocity is as essential to our genetic success as self-preservation because we have mutual interest in living in big communities where we can, through specialisation, increase exponentially the resources available to all. This was as true 5,000 years ago when humans made tools and hunted as it is now in highly mechanised production. Nobody can fully prosper making their own clothes, killing their own food and defending their own territory but if we form a group and each do one thing well we can have more of everything than we need.

We can even start worrying whether we have too much.

Since reciprocity is vital to our survival, it's not surprising that humans are concerned about networks of trust and fearful of their erosion. Our brains are well designed to detect cheating; in fact, we identify it much faster and more effectively than we detect altruism or goodness. We are on the lookout for cheaters, liars and charlatans because they undermine the social survival contract we have made to co-operate with people beyond our immediate gene pool.

Anxiety is real but it isn't new. Evolutionary behaviouralists suggest we are programmed to seek the better campsite, richer hunting fields and superior tools. When scientists monitor serotonin and dopamine responses, it's clear the human brain believes the chase is in fact better than the kill. Which goes some way to explaining why the possibility of sex with a new partner is usually more exciting than the certainty of sex with an existing partner. Or why we eat beyond the point of pleasure. Or why we sometimes buy dresses that are never worn. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to improve our circumstances is wired into our neural pathways.

For all the theorising that the mouse wheel is a plot by capitalism to keep us working, it appears more likely to be a plot by our DNA to keep us living. Evolutionary biology teaches that fear is ingrained into our survival behaviours because it serves to help us assess risk and respond to threats. We survive today because thousands of our ancestors knew to run from the sabre-tooth tiger, not eat the strange berries, and get under cover at the sound of thunder.

The sensibly fearful bore our DNA through countless mortal perils and emerged to breed. Generations of reinforcing behaviour have left us intelligently scared of infection, injury, starvation, physical assault, removal from our group, freezing, burning, drowning and multiple other perils, chief among them the fear of death itself.

Anyone who has held their child at night explaining in vain there are no monsters in the shadows has seen our inner caveman at work. A small child, though carefully preserved from commercial television, junk food, pedophiles, famine, weapons of mass destruction and the lash will nonetheless wake in fright, vigilantly alert for danger.

Depending on circumstances, and especially if we are pushed in the right direction, this individual capacity for fear can be turned quickly into a collective capacity for panic. Throughout history humans have panicked about a stunning array of things from race to plague to radio plays. Many panics are based on real danger, but plenty are not.

These others are induced, sometimes accidentally and sometimes deliberately, when our fears of social ills or general dangers have been piled on top of each other like dry leaves ready for the tinderbox. It's not just laughter and irony that separate us from the beasts: we are the only animal that regularly scares the hell out of ourselves.

People scare each other to gain political support, get funding for scientific research, make headlines, raise money for causes or sell books. In a crowded society everybody's trying to get an edge on the competition for attention and resources and many of them are turning up the volume of their doomsaying to get a little love.

It is in the interests of both the extreme Right and the extreme Left to pretend our values are in crisis. Crisis suits extremists of all persuasions because an impending calamity suggests you must adopt new behaviours immediately to avoid annihilation. Go to church immediately! Abolish the World Trade Organisation immediately! Have more/fewer/happier children immediately!

What they all have in common is the desire to restrict our freedom. Intellectuals and elites spent centuries resisting giving ordinary citizens the vote. Now they want to restrict the enfranchisement that we experience in the modern capitalist economy.

Disposable culture and dumbing down are the constant concern of people who think they have better ways for us to live. And while everyone likes to have a go at Paris Hilton, the real targets of this derision are not the idle rich, they are the working class, the people who buy the big-screen TVs, McMansions and cheap Korean cars. It is over consumption and trash consumption by the masses that really gets up the snouts of the clever types.

Choice has become a four-letter word to many cultural commentators. For them it's just code for private schools and private wealth and over consumption and the decay of the great social contract.

Which is a pity because the weight of research on happiness suggests we are programmed for Jefferson's pursuit of happiness rather than its attainment, that the quest itself constitutes a kind of satisfaction.

Prosperity provides opportunities to explore the self-actualising behaviours and social engagement that improves our wellbeing. In addition, prosperity and the availability of a wider variety of experiences increase opportunities for sensory pleasure such as better food and more stimulating recreation that, although it isn't happiness, certainly helps the winter nights fly.

The problem with looking to social reformers and intellectuals to provide prescriptions for happiness is that freedom to choose for ourselves is fundamental to the pursuit of happiness. Within reasonable limits, that includes freedom to think, to do and, yes, consume what we wish.

Perhaps it makes Hamilton happy to sit in his office pondering how to make me happier by stopping me from consuming. But what makes me happy is to take my kids to laugh our heads off through the new Pixar movie, stop in at Time Zone to bust some moves in a video dance-off and put in an order for the new Harry Potter before wolfing down a Happy Meal.