Happiness and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

Submitted by tonyplant on August 30, 2006 - 08:40.

Polly Toynbee has written a piece asking "why have we never had it so good". She argues that:

There has never been a better time to be alive in Britain than today, no generation more blessed, never such opportunity for so many. And things are getting better all the time, horizons widening, education spreading, everyone living longer, healthier, safer lives.

However, it doesn’t seem as if all of these "[u]nimaginable luxuries and choices" have increased our happiness levels: it is also not clear that the opportunities and benefits that she describes with such approbation are available to all. Many people are involuntary participants in the postcode lottery that governs whether or not you are eligible for a variety of procedures on the NHS (e.g., cardiac catheter ablations). And the increase in foreign travel and holidays is limited: the number of British people who did not take a holiday over the course of a year has remained stable at 41 per cent over the last three decades.

Brad DeLong has posted an extensive and interesting review of Ben Friedman's thought-provoking The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

read more | add new comment | resilience | happystance | happiness | friedman | economic growth | depression | conspiracy theory

Defective Yeti On Teenagers, Terrorism And Behaviour Detection Guidelines

Submitted by tonyplant on August 18, 2006 - 11:37.

A hat-tip to the always enjoyable Defective Yeti for his irreverent coverage of the role of behaviour detection officers at airports. I work with a lot of teenagers who refuse to come out from their hooded tops or baseball caps. They speak in monosyllables and spend a lot of time in shoe-gazey mode, particularly when accompanied by parents. Courtesy of the photographs, I now know that they spend a lot of time torn between disgust and anger.

Matthew astutely observes that the average teenager would never be allowed to fly anywhere if these rules were applied rigorously.

in addition to having to forgo your iPod and hair gel you will now be required to check in your teen prior to boarding

As ever, the comments are great fun.

The photograph and quotation from Matthew's post is distributed under Creative Commons.

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FEAR, And The Fear Of Terrorism

Submitted by tonyplant on August 9, 2006 - 12:47.

It’s a cliche in positive psychology that FEAR is an acronym: depending on your preference it is either False Experience Appearing Real or False Experience Accepted as Real.

Happiness teacher and writer Robert Holden says that a lot of his work consists of showing people that they are already happy. When working with people it is not unusual to discover that if people look through their present circumstances, there is much for which they are grateful, and much that contributes to a sense of happiness.

Participants in my Happystance workshops can be initially reluctant to join in some of the group exercises: they frequently say that they can not visualise and have no power of imagination. Yet, in my experience, most of those people are experts at being frightened by something that hasn’t happened yet. They are afraid of something that may happen in the future: they can imagine this event of set of circumstances in full technicolour gore, and may even be capable of experiencing some of the accompanying emotions in advance.

“They need to do better than what is going on to make a dent in the fear that is affecting a million people.”- ANDY APAID, a businessman in Port-au-Prince, on the United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.

I read the above quotation some time ago in the New York Times. And I had it in mind when I met a few people this morning who all reported themselves as unhappy. After we had worked together for a while it became apparent that none of them was unhappy because of their current circumstances. The unhappiness lay in their expectation of future unhappiness, and they brought that emotion into their present, although it doesn’t belong there, and there is no guarantee that a future event will occur that will justify their present emotional state. It is well established that negative emotions have an adverse impact on people’s immune systems and can undermine their health and wellbeing. Fear of an adverse event in the future can undermine an individual’s ability to cope with it.

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NHS Squeeze: Will It Mean More Work And Fewer Resources For Carers?

Submitted by tonyplant on August 7, 2006 - 16:41.

I came across the following in Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for a New Millennium, by the 14th Dalai Lama. It is an interesting description of the ethics of caring for ourselves and others and the authenticity of happiness that is grounded in qualities such as love, compassion, patience and tolerance.

Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

 

Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others' happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace -- anxiety, doubt, disappointment -- these things are definitely less. In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense.

 

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Carers' Human Rights: Are They Invisible?

Submitted by tonyplant on August 1, 2006 - 10:06.

Carers UK is asking whether carers have human rights.  Carers UK report that

Carers, like everyone else in the UK, are entitled to rely on the protection of the Human Rights Act 1998, which should ensure that public bodies take account of their human rights when they provide services. Public services play a critical role in guaranteeing carers' human rights. They can ensure that carers have the support they need to maintain a normal life. The report we are publishing today shows that reality falls a long way short of this ideal.

 

Many carers are pushed to the brink of physical and mental collapse because of the lack of support they receive...

Why do carers seem to be the only group of people who are automatically exempt from the restrictions of the working time directive? Why are carers expected to work under conditions that are assessed as too much of a health and safety hazard for trained professionals? The Guardian offers several grim stories of overworked and exhausted carers that will be only too familiar to many people. In the light of today's news about tightening of eligibility criteria for care for elderly or disabled people, it seems as if relief will not arrive any time in the near future.

 

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