What If We Didn't Want to Be Happy?

In his new book, Gross National Happiness, Syracuse University's Arthur C. Brooks pulls this quote from the great So-crates:

Do not all men desire happiness? And yet, perhaps, this is one of those ridiculous questions which I am afraid to ask, and which out not to be asked by a sensible man: for what human being is there who does not desire happiness?

But a sensible man living in the 21st century might want to ask these questions: How much happiness does a human being really desire? And where does happiness stand in comparison to life's other wants?

This is a subtle but important point in the well-publicized field of happiness research where economists have come to rely on a couple of different approaches in measuring well-being.

The first approach looks at what people's purchasing habits say about their feelings for a particular good or service. A simplistic example: if a burger and a slice of pizza are both $2 and I tend to eat pizza for lunch, then I'm said to derive more happiness from pizza.

The second approach is typically survey-based and asks people about their current emotional state, either in general or as they perform specific tasks. (There is also a third approach that combines both of these methods.)

But a shortcoming of these techniques is that they don't do a great job of determining what is more important in making us happy. Would you, for instance, rather live a life where you die at 30 but earn millions, or one where you live to 80 but never earn more than $50,000 per year? If you prefer the first then you could be said to value income more than longevity and vice versa if you prefer the second. And if it seems that the majority of a population prefers the first then a government may want to shift some of its resources from old-age care to other policies that would push wages higher.

In a new paper, Matthew D. Adler of the University of Pennsylvania and Paul Dolan of the Imperial College of London take the first stabs at quantifying these preferences using what they call a "different lives" survey.

In it they asked 72 students in the U.S. and U.K. to rank a set of 16 hypothetical lives that were derived from a combination of these four scenarios:

- Life expectancy: 65 or 75
- Health: able to move around freely or hard to move
- Happiness: 95 percent or 80 percent of the time in a good mood
- Income: $300,000 or $100,000

So, for example, would you rather lead a life where you lived to 65, were healthy, felt out-of-sorts 20 percent of the time and earned $100,000, or a life where you lived to 65, had trouble moving around, were happy nearly all of the time, and earned $300,000?

Based on the students' preferences for each life, Adler and Dolan estimate health was the most important concern, followed by happiness, then income, and lastly life expectancy. (The researchers caution. however. that the number of people taking the survey was too small for the finding to be seen as conclusive.)

If the results do hold up to further scrutiny, then it's quite interesting that feeling happy isn't the most important thing in leading a -- well -- happy life.