The Happiness Industry Read online

  Campaigns for advertising-free spaces (against ‘visual pollution’) have had a few notable successes in various cities around the world. The Brazilian city of São Paolo has no public billboards, following the ‘Clean City Law’ introduced by the mayor in 2006. Other Brazilian cities have explored similar measures to reduce or ban the amount of advertising. Other campaigns have been more narrowly focused. In 2007, advertisements for luxury accommodation were removed in Beijing. The mayor explained that they ‘use exaggerated terms that encourage luxury and self-indulgence which are beyond the reach of low-income groups and are therefore not conducive to harmony in the capital’. A US organization, Commercial Alert, runs an annual ‘Ad Slam’ contest, in which $5,000 is awarded to the school that has removed the most advertising from its common spaces.

  Campaigns such as these are inevitably dependent on some quite traditional ideas of how to defend the public, and target some relatively old-fashioned techniques of psychological control. Product placement in ‘free’ media and entertainment content is a different type of problem altogether, while the internet enables marketing to monitor and target individuals in a far more subtle and individualized fashion. ‘Smart’ infrastructures, which offer constant feedback loops between individuals and centralized data stores, are assumed to be the future of everything from advertising, to health care, to urban governance, to human resource management. The all-encompassing laboratory, explored in Chapter 7, is a frightening prospect, not least because it is difficult to see how it might ever be reversed, should that be desired in future. But there is no reason to assume that practices such as facial scanning in public places must remain legal.

  What would the critique of smartness look like? And what would resistance to it mean? Would it be a celebration of ‘dumbness’? Would we simply refuse to wear the health-tracking wristbands? Perhaps. Some aspects of the Benthamite utopia can seem almost impossible to duck out of – the sentiment analyser who discovers the happiest neighbourhood in the city, through mining the geo-data of tweets; the instructions from one’s doctor to exercise more gratitude so as to improve both mood and reduce physical stress. But remembering the philosophical contradictions inherent in these ventures, and their historical and political origins, may at least offer a source of something which has no simple bodily or neural correlate, and involves a strange tinge of happiness in spite of unhappiness: hope.

  Acknowledgements

  My interest in economic psychology, broadly understood, originated in 2009 when I noticed, to my astonishment, that behavioural economics and neuroscience were being presented as credible explanations of the global financial crisis. I subsequently spent two years as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, which allowed me to start reading the burgeoning literature in behavioural economics, happiness economics and the policy applications of both. This research resulted in a couple of articles, ‘The Political Economy of Unhappiness’, New Left Review, 71, Sept.–Oct. 2011, and ‘The Emerging Neocommunitarianism’, Political Quarterly, 83: 4, Oct.–Dec. 2012 (the latter was subsequently awarded the Bernard Crick Prize for best article published that year in Political Quarterly).

  I also edited a series of articles for openDemocracy’s OurKingdom section on the topic of happiness over the course of 2011. In early 2012, I was invited to the Tavistock Clinic by Bernadette Wren to discuss my work, which resulted in various valuable social and intellectual connections, some of which have been crucial for this book. Sebastian Kraemer was particularly helpful and insightful. I am grateful to all of the colleagues, discussants and editors who assisted me in my work over this period.

  I began working on this book in late 2012, after fine-tuning the proposal with Leo Hollis, my editor at Verso. My colleagues at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, were always stimulating, and offered various ways of thinking critically about measurement and quantification. During the last months of working on the manuscript, I sent chapters to individuals who I knew were each far more expert on the given chapter topics than I was. All of them demonstrated admirable patience, even if they were not always sympathetic to the somewhat polemical style of the book. They were: Lydia Prior, Michael Quinn, Nick Taylor, Javier Lezaun, Rob Horning and John Cromby. I’m very grateful for the invaluable feedback I received from these readers. Julian Molina provided ample research assistance at a number of stages of the book’s development, and I was lucky to have someone so enthusiastic and diligent to support me. There are numerous bits of the book which he influenced for the better.

  Leo Hollis had a clear vision of this book throughout, including during those periods when I did not. Working with an editor like Leo was a remarkable learning experience for me, and I’ve no doubt it helped me to become a better writer. I’d like to thank him for all the tremendous energy and confidence he invested in this book.

  I’d like to thank my family and friends, as ever, for all your support and interest in my work, especially to Richard Haines, one of my most reliable sources of happiness. Martha appeared joyfully and noisily in my life only a couple of months after signing the contract for this book with Verso, and there were days (or more often, nights) when I worried that she’d scuppered the whole thing. She didn’t, and I think she actually improved it in some mysterious ways. In the last month, she has started to tell us when she is ‘appy, confirming Wittgenstein’s insight that ‘appiness is not something we can be factually right or wrong about, but which we either know how to express or don’t.

  Finally, to Lydia, who supported me throughout all of the above, from buying me a glass of champagne in the Ashmolean Museum the evening I learnt that the New Left Review had accepted my article on happiness in spring 2011, to the bottle of champagne we drank when I finally submitted the book manuscript in summer 2014, thank you for everything. Many of the themes explored in this book are ones which we’ve read about and discussed together, and which you’ll no doubt develop far more imaginatively over the coming years than I’ve managed here. The book is dedicated to you.

  October 2014

  Notes

  Preface

  1Jill Treanor and Larry Elliott, ‘And Breathe … Goldie Hawn and a Monk Bring Meditation to Davos’, theguardian.com, 23 January 2014.

  2Robert Chalmers, ‘Matthieu Ricard: Meet Mr Happy’, independent.co.uk, 18 February 2007.

  3Matthew Campbell and Jacqueline Simmons, ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk’, bloomberg.com, 21 January 2014.

  4Dawn Megli, ‘You Happy? Santa Monica Gets $1m to Measure Happiness’, atvn.org, 14 March 2013.

  5For example, the Penn Resilience Project was designed by Martin Seligman and a team of positive psychologists at University of Pennsylvania, to bring cognitive behavioural therapy into classrooms. In 2007, three UK education authorities sent 100 British teachers to visit the Penn Resilience Project, so as to recreate it in the UK.

  6‘Work for World Peace Starting Now – Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” Can Help’, huffingtonpost.com, 27 March 2012.

  7Sarah Knapton, ‘Stressed Council House Residents Get £2,000 Happiness Gurus’, telegraph.co.uk, 9 October 2008.

  8Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda and Fabrice Bartolomei, ‘Induction of a Sense of Bliss by Electrical Stimulation of the Anterior Insula’, Cortex 49: 10, 2013; ‘Pain “Dimmer Switch” Discovered by UK Scientists’, bbc.com, 5 February 2014.

  9Gary Wolf, ‘Measuring Mood: Current Research and New Ideas’, quantifiedself.com, 11 February 2009.

  10Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, New York: Penguin, 1990, 33.

  11Campbell and Simmons, ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk’.

  12See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane, 2009. Work by Carles Muntaner explores this issue further.

  13Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report 2013, 20
13

  14Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock, ‘Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 111: 24, 2014.

  15F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge, 1944.

  1 Knowing How You Feel

  1‘Hume was in all his glory, the phrase was consequently familiar to everybody. The difference between me and Hume was this: the use he made of it was to account for that which is, I to show what ought to be.’ Quoted in Charles Milner Atkinson, Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Work, Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press, 2012, 30.

  2See Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michael Quinn, eds., Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

  3Quoted in Atkinson, Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Work, 109.

  4Ibid., 222.

  5Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988, 20.

  6Ibid., 70.

  7Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

  8Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and Adam Anderson, ‘Population Coding of Affect Across Stimuli, Modalities and Individuals’, Nature Neuroscience, 17: 8, 2014.

  9This is not undisputed, but for a convincing argument for Bentham’s monistic philosophy, see Michael Quinn, ‘Bentham on Mensuration: Calculation and Moral Reasoning’, Utilitas 26: 1, 2014.

  10Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, 9.

  11Ibid., 29–30.

  12Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”’, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, transl. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

  13Paul McReynolds, ‘The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham: I. Background and General Approach’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 4: 3, 1968; McReynolds, ‘The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham: II. Efforts Toward Quantification and Classification’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 4: 4, 1968.

  14Gustav Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 30–1.

  15He defined psychophysics as ‘an exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of body and soul or, more generally, of the material and the mental, of the physical and the psychological worlds’. Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, 7.

  16‘No motive exists that is not directed towards creating or maintaining pleasure, or eliminating or preventing displeasure’, quoted in Michael Heidelberger, Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview, transl. Cynthia Klohr, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004, 52.

  17Relation between mind and body ‘are like those of a steam engine with a complicated mechanism. Depending on how much steam the engine develops, its kinetic energy can rise high or fall low’, Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, 35.

  18This is referred to in Bourke, The Story of Pain, 157.

  19Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong, New York: Random House, 2012.

  20Richard Godwin, ‘Happiness: You Can Work it Out’, Evening Standard, 26 August 2014.

  21Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Bentham’s Utopia: The National Charity Company’, Journal of British Studies 10: 1, 1970.

  22This understanding of ‘government’, as extending beyond the limits of the state, was discussed at length by Michel Foucault, who attached great weight to Bentham’s influence. Subsequently, a number of Foucauldian sociologists have analysed how ‘governmentality’ works in liberal societies such as Britain. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

  23Association for Psychological Science, ‘Grin and Bear It: Smiling Facilitates Stress Recovery’, sciencedaily.com, 30 July 2012.

  24Maia Szalavitz, ‘Study Shows Seeing Smiles Can Lower Aggression’, time.com, 4 April 2013.

  25Dan Hill, About Face: The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising, London: Kogan Page Publishers, 2010.

  26Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, London: Allen Lane, 2005, 113.

  2 The Price of Pleasure

  1Andrew Malleson, Whiplash and Other Useful Illnesses, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002.

  2House of Commons Transport Select Committee.

  3House of Commons Transport Select Committee.

  4Harro Maas, ‘An Instrument Can Make a Science: Jevons’s Balancing Acts in Economics’, History of Political Economy 33: Annual Supplement, 2001.

  5R. S. Howey, The Rise of the Marginal Utility School, 1870–1889. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.

  6Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

  7Margaret Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

  8Darian Leader, Strictly Bipolar, London: Penguin, 2013.

  9Quoted in William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1871, 11.

  10Howey, The Rise of the Marginal Utility School.

  11Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 101.

  12‘We labour to produce with the sole object of consuming, and the kinds and amounts of goods produced must be determined with regard to what we want to consume.’ Ibid., 102.

  13Harro Maas, ‘Mechanical Rationality: Jevons and the Making of Economic Man’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30: 4, 1999.

  14‘Now the mind of an individual is the balance which makes its own comparisons, and is the final judge of quantities of feeling’, Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 84.

  15Ibid., 11–12.

  16Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

  17Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 101.

  18Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 53.

  19Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 83.

  20Quoted in Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 219.

  21See Philip Mirowski, Edgeworth on Chance, Economic Hazard, and Statistics, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.

  22David Colander, ‘Retrospectives: Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 21: 2, 2007.

  23D. Wade Hands, ‘Economics, Psychology and the History of Consumer Choice Theory’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 4, 2010.

  24This case is discussed in Marion Fourcade, ‘Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of “Nature”’, American Journal of Sociology 116: 6, 2011.

  25See for example, Rita Samiolo, ‘Commensuration and Styles of Reasoning: Venice, Cost-Benefit, and the Defence of Place’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 37: 6, 2012. This paper explores how cost-benefit analysis was used to calculate the worth of Venice flood defences.

  26See Department for Culture, Media & Sport, ‘Understanding the Drivers, Impacts and Value of Engagement in Culture and Sport’, gov.uk/government/publications, 2010.

  27Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee, ‘Death, Happiness, and the Calculation of Compensatory Damages’, Journal of Legal Studies 37: S2, 2007.

  28Simon Cohn, ‘Petty Cash and the Neuroscientific Mapping of Pleasure’, Biosocieties 3: 2, 2008.

  29Daniel Zizzo, ‘Neurobiological Measurements of Cardinal Utility: Hedonimeters or Learning Algorithms?’ Social Choice
& Welfare 19: 3, 2002.

  30Brian Knutson, Scott Rick, G. Elliott Wimmer, Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein, ‘Neural Predictors of Purchases’, Neuron 53: 1, 2007.

  31Coren Apicella et al., ‘Testosterone and Financial Risk Preferences’, Evolution and Human Behavior 29: 6, 2008.

  32This argument was put forward by the former UK government chief science advisor, David Nutt. See ‘Did Cocaine Use by Bankers Cause the Global Financial Crisis’, theguardian.com, 15 April 2013.

  33Michelle Smith, ‘Joe Huber: Blame Your Lousy Portfolio on Your Brain’, moneynews.com, 17 June 2014.

  34Alec Smith, Terry Lohrenz, Justin King, P. Read Montague and Colin Camerer, ‘Irrational Exuberance and Neural Crash Warning Signals During Endogenous Experimental Market Bubbles’, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 111: 29, 2014.

  3 In the Mood to Buy

  1Ruth Benschop, ‘What Is a Tachistoscope? Historical Explorations of an Instrument’, Science in Context 11: 1, 1998.

  2Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.

  3See Maren Martell, ‘The Race to Find the Brain’s “Buy-Me Button”’, welt.de, 20 January 2011, transl. worldcrunch.com, 2 July 2011.

  4Robert Gehl, ‘A History of Like’, thenewinquiry.com, 27 March 2013.

  5Lea Dunn and JoAndrea Hoegg, ‘The Impact of Fear on Emotional Brand Attachment’, Journal of Consumer Research 41: 1, 2014.

  6Jeffrey Zaslow, ‘Happiness Inc.’, online.wsj.com, 18 March 2006.