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| Happiness is not knowing what’s good for you |
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| Wednesday, 09 April 2008 | |
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As a journalist, my job is to pin convenient labels on stuff, including people, who only like to think they resist categorization. Yet I’ve struggled with a label for people like us: Americans Who Happen to End Up Living in France for Various Reasons? Too long. Americans Abroad? Too Junior League. Overseas Americans? Too Cold War. Expats? Too colonial. Immigrants? Too bleeding-heart, even for me. Love-pats? Too cuddly. But what about this one: ‘hedonic refugees’? This from a new book (currently in the Top Ten on ‘The New York Times’ bestseller list): ‘The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World’. The author, Eric Weiner, says hedonic refugees are people who wake up one morning and realize they were born in the wrong country. Like trans-gender folk, only trans-nationality; they just don’t fit in their own culture. I would label this column a Book Review except that France didn’t make Weiner’s map of the happiest places. What? How did France get to be the most visited country in the world if it’s not a Happy Place? Like Disneyland. Isn’t France right up there at the top of all the quality of life surveys? I felt insulted. Why did France not get a chapter in the Bliss book? So, I followed Weiner’s research steps in the new science of Happiness Studies and, yes, this is a real science; happiness researchers even have their own academic journal and they feel real good about that. It turns out that measuring happiness is one of the hottest topics in economics today. And, yes, France does have an admirably high quality of life, ranking number 10 (two spots above the US) on the United Nation’s Human Development Index. Earlier this year, President Sarkozy even invited one of the creators of that Index, 2001 Nobel economics prize-winner Armatya Sen, to France to help analyze how France can refocus its economics policy away from gross national product and onto quality of life. But here’s the problem: for most other countries, a high quality of life leads to citizens who report relatively high rates of happiness – or if you want to be geeky about it, subjective well-being. Except in France. According to the first-of-its-kind Map of Global Happiness (published in 2007 by Adrian White of the University of Leicester), the French only rank #62 out of 178 countries on the self-reported Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). For most of the map, this SWLS correlates to health, wealth and access to basic education. Yet the French, who have got all that in spades, continue to think of themselves as ‘Les Misérables’. According to this map, the Mongolians, Hondurans, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Guatamalans, Malaysians and Israelis are all happier than the French. My God: the Brits are happier than the French. Why is this? Fortunately, one of the only joys the French apparently do derive from life is navel-gazing. In fact, because of the same social welfare system that funds the aforementioned quality of life, the government paid for a study with the title: ‘The Société de Méfiance’ (Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc, 2007, CEPREMAP) This study quotes heavily from the World Values Survey to pinpoint the problem: the French can’t trust. Each other. Foreigners. The government. Their boss. The justice system. Their neighbors. And, above all, they don’t trust the kind of people who would declare a high Satisfaction With Life. Why? Because “getting to the top isn’t possible without corruption”, a belief held more strongly in France than any other European country except Russia and Poland, according to this study. Weiner reports from his travels that Trust is one of the prerequisites of a happy citizenry. All the happy places have it, even the ones without other elements we normally associate with happiness, like sunlight, which Icelanders manage to do without for much of the year while remaining absurdly happy. So all this begs the obvious question: what the hell is a self-respecting hedonic refugee doing here? Why ever would Americans dream of pursuing our unalienable right to pursuing happiness in France? And then, by so doing, declare ourselves happier, which almost all of us do? Are we all in deep denial about our Satisfaction With Life in France? As Americans, do we feel obligated to pump up the Happy? Or are we all the kind of people who find our cultural fit in a country where going native means great wine and healthcare, but also an abiding suspicion of anyone who reports themselves to be happy about any of that? France must be the hedonic refuge of masochists. I just love it here. But then I come from the country that came up with the Happy Meal so clearly I have a slim grasp on what’s good for me. Extracts fromThe World Happiness Map (Based on data reported by 80,000 people in 178 countries) Nation SWLS Score 1. DENMARK 273 2. SWITZERLAND 273 3. AUSTRIA 260 4. ICELAND 260 5. BAHAMAS 257 10. CANADA 253 11. IRELAND 253 23. USA 247 26. AUSTRALIA 243 41. UNITED KINGDOM 237 62. FRANCE 220 109. SOUTH AFRICA 190 178. BURUNDI 100 |
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