Book Review: Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile by Daniel Nettle
This book provides a fairly good, but not very novel, description of what does and does not influence happiness, the problems with measuring it, and some bits of evolutionary theory that hint at why it is hard to achieve lasting increases in happiness.
The claim I found most important is that “If you control for social class, there is almost no relationship between income and life satisfaction.” This seems to have important implications for what kind of social equality we ought to be encouraging. I’m disappointed that he doesn’t say enough about this for me to determine how robust this conclusion is to the way it’s measured.
I’m disappointed that he ends with some misleading arguments for an alarming trend of increased distress among the least happy. He reports that suicides have increased among the young in recent decades, but fails to note that overall suicide rates in the U.S. have declined over that period. He claims “People are as hard as they ever have”, but cites no references for that, and Robert Fogel has reported research that reached the opposite conclusion in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death.