Happiness is … and isn’t
Andrew Anthony (“Joy to the world”, February 1) does not address the problem of one person’s happiness being directly consequent upon someone else’s misery.
He cites Richard Layard’s citing of Thomas Jefferson, declaring “the role of government should be … to sustain the life and happiness of the people”. Okay, yet Jefferson was virtually a lifelong slave owner. For him, the “people” entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” did not include his own slaves, among them four of his biological children, and their mother Sally Hemings, his slave mistress, and, later, de facto wife. How happy were they?
The income that supported his “happy” gentlemanly lifestyle came from the forced labour of field-slaves, who had no rights at all, and could at any time be whipped, or sold off to worse owners. How happy were they?
John Ross
(Palmerston North)
Happiness cannot be sub-divided, quantified and digitised without serious loss in translation. Succinctly, happiness is analogue; wealth and GDP are digital. Conversion from one to the other is an inexact process, which by its nature is imprecise.
When we form a thesis or publish a conclusion from a research questionnaire, we commonly ask for responses in whole numbers from 0 to 10. We then extract averages that can vary from 0.1 to 10.0 and rank them to those decimal places. As if 8.4 versus 8.5 is important, even though no responder has chosen it.
Growth is killing
