The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being

By William Davies

“Deeply researched and pithily argued.” —New York Magazine

“A brilliant, and sometimes eerie, dissection” of ‘the science of happiness’ and the modern-day commercialization of our most private emotions (Vice)

Why are we so obsessed with measuring happiness?
 
In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being.
 
Here, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why Freakonomics tells us less about the way people behave than expected, The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Davies shows that the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781781688472

Reviews for The Happiness Industry

[cecilturtle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Why are we suddenly so interested in happiness? How can we quantify it? How can we commercialise it? These topics are becoming more and more pressing: with Ministries of Happiness in some countries and on-going research in most others, a quest of happiness seems to have permeated all spheres. The problem, Davies postulates, is that it is organisations, governments and private companies that are asking these questions in an attempt to get more money or more brain power out of people. He retraces quite convincingly the various measures that taken to sell us more products, to reduce us to numbers through uploaded data in our phones, to equate our physical health to our mental health and to come up with solutions, services and products that meet these physical needs at the expense of our metaphysical, cultural and personal needs.With this problem becoming more persuasive, mental illnesses reaching an all-time high, instability a constant, Davies offers another perspective than just monitoring and pill-popping: understanding what happiness for each of us at a fundamental level and reconnecting with the philosophies and cultural indicators that will foster that sense of happiness.I thoroughly enjoyed this fascinating and accessible read, which I recommend.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

William Davies, The Happiness Industry: Free review copy. Imagine if a nicer Evgeny Morozov and a more theoretically oriented Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided) wrote a book about America’s culture of optimism and its relationship to technological solutionism: you’d get this engaging and often depressing book, full of sharp observations about our technologies and our selves. Positive psychology, Davies argues, is being deployed as a substitute for economic security, as when “happiness consultants” advise people who are unemployed or losing their homes on how to move on emotionally. He traces current versions of the happiness industry—now often based in claims about the physical structures of the brain—through hundreds of years of theories about economics, bodies, and minds. Jeremy Bentham, for example, rejected the proposition that there are different types of goods/pleasures, trying to reduce it all to physical pleasure in order to compare and quantify the benefits of different social orders. These are not apolitical theories. “In the long history of scientifically analysing the relationship between subjective feelings and external circumstances, there is always the tendency to see the ofrmer as more easily changeable than the latter.” Thus, he argues, the field is structurally biased towards trying to get people to accept (or possibly leave) bad circumstances rather than to change them for everyone. Moreover, we subjectively understand our experiences to have different qualities: despair and sadness are different, even if both reflect disutility. Given that, appropriate responses thereto will differ even if the quantity of utility/disutility in negative emotions were in some sense equivalent. Trying to make someone who’s angry feel better may miss the point so profoundly as to be a deep insult. Yet instead of suggesting politics, the happiness industry tries to convince us that if we can only make ourselves happy, then well-being (and even money) will follow. (This is the argument also so ably made by Ehrenreich.) The result is to blame people for their own misery—and, as Davies points out, this orientation even changes the definition of happiness—now a “source of energy and resilience, but always directed towards goals other than being happy, such as status, power,” and so on. Taylorism was awful, he notes, but at least workers weren’t expected to like it.One consequence of this dynamic is that happiness gurus can’t deliver on their promises. They can’t solve the problems that consumerism and late capitalism have caused; though our economy depends ever more on our psychological and emotional engagement “be it with work, with brands, [or] with our own health and wellbeing,” it’s increasingly unsustainable. While private suffering is only cognizable as economic harm (and the only escape from grinding work is often physical illness), such suffering is increasingly notable even on that metric. Not liking your work is now readily understood as a clinical disorder requiring management; to be healthy is to be happy is to be productive, and vice versa. Yet the response has been to try to make people more resilient, so we can tell them that they should be able to navigate a bewildering array of health care choices, instead of fixing the systems that hammer us down systematically and make work unlikable. Ironically, Davies contends, behaviorism is actually deeply compatible with goo-goo mysticism, and invites it. If objectivity means measurability and utilitarianism, then the only thing left for subjectivity is passive experience. We’re led to constantly self-monitor, in “neurotic and paranoid” fashion, asking ourselves “am I really happy?” in a way that stifles coordinated political change and counterproductively destroys the possibility of happiness. Anyone who’s ever obsessively refreshed a social media feed has had the experience of chasing satisfaction in this way.The final big piece of Davies’ argument is that technology has changed the nature of claims to understand the mind. As he points out, liberals touted the market as the best way to discover what people really wanted (and translating those wants into prices). But now, new technologies can purport to quantify feelings and extend even further into our lives than markets—think the Fitbit. Provocatively—and here’s where Morozov comes strongly to mind—Davies argues that in order to critique pervasive surveillance we now need to critique the maximization of “wellbeing,” “even at the risk of being less healthy, happy and wealthy.” Davies bolsters this conclusion by suggesting that behaviorism, or any anti-philosophical/anti-theoretical approach to humanity, requires an embrace of mass surveillance, since in the absence of a theoretical apparatus observation is the only way to really “know” things about people.Of course, today’s surveillance (harnessing narcissism “as research opportunity”) is part of a long tradition of hoping that measurement will become perfect, so that science can replace philosophy and ethics: “there is always the hope that it is possible to understand another human being wihtout talking to them.” To the technocrats who drive big companies and governments, our own perceptions, as deliberately reported by us, are unreliable; our heartbeats and our seemingly private conversations with other people on Facebook are by contrast “good hard data.” Big data analysis purports to substitute for confronting people in all their specificity and messiness, and the observer doesn’t have to risk being observed. (Davies is less concerned with whether the big data folks are right about their predictions: maybe we do behave differently than we aspire to behave, and we report the latter when specifically asked, and that probably does have implications for the best social policy in response. But how that interacts with democracy is an open question, since democracy depends on reasoned deliberation.) The political aim is “that individual activity might be diverted towards goals selected by elite powers, but without either naked coercion or democratic deliberation.” Behavioralism and nudging, Davies argues, are fundamentally undemocratic. Responses in response might come from any entity, not just a person. And while new forms of social exchange outside of monetary markets could be politically liberating, they can also be incorporated into management—so when Facebook tries to make you more likely to vote by highlighting how many of your friends have voted, it’s asserting and naturalizing its own power while supposedly promoting yours. We’re now not regarded by institutions as individuals, but as means to alter the beliefs and behaviors of those around us. So our user-generated content may be fun and free, but, distributed by platforms with their own significant interest in shaping both what we produce and how we react, it is not freeing. It’s particularly notable, Davies suggests, how these new social relationships are promoted: giving to others freely is a good idea because it makes us feel happier. “The advice is to stop thinking so much of oneself—but the justification is ultimately a self-centred one.”Further, in a society directed at maximizing wellbeing, “political authority lies with those who are most expert to measure and manage individuals,” and there’s no particular reason why those people ought to be in government instead of private corporations. Just as responsibility for individual wellbeing has become privatized to each individual, so can responsibility for shaping the systems of measurement and management that achieve desired results. (Desired by whom? Well, by the rich and powerful, of course.) Instead, he argues, we should return to the basic propositions of democratic discourse: ask people what they think, want, and mean, and believe them unless we have good reasons not to do so. Managerial elites don’t like this because it means that everyone’s thoughts are important, and not in an opinion poll/counting way but in the sense that other people would need to be convinced to assent to choices that affect large numbers of people. Listening, rather than watching, is what is needed in a democratic polity.

[davidwineberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This remarkable tour through the painful evolution of behavioral economics, management consulting, advertising and psychiatry fills us with the realization that happiness has always been a factor (not necessarily respected, appreciated or understood) in numerous fields. Now suddenly, it is front and center as giant corporations focus on it, the better to get more out of employees and customers. Happiness has made it to the front burner of multinationals. Look out. Rather than deal with the causes, happiness consultants actually advise companies to find the unhappiest 10%, and lay them off for being unhappy, somehow inspiring everyone else to become “super engaged.” Get happy or get out.It has come to the point where capitalism itself is under review: can measures of happiness replace market pricing as the main measure of the economy? Davies cites the Davos conference, where the who’s who of capitalism now actively pursues this approach. Over a third of Westerners suffer from some sort of mental health problem, he says, usually undiagnosed. It leads to inactivity, non productivity, lower government revenues and higher costs as the unhappy tap government services. It may already reduce GDP by 3-4%. Now a far greater cost than crime, it’s expected to double in the next 20 years. It currently costs the American economy half a trillion dollars.There is an undercurrent of cynicism throughout The Happiness Industry, as Davies relates crackpot theories and crackpot theorists. Then he comes clean with force: “Once social relationships can be viewed as medical and biological properties of the human body, they can become dragged into the limitless pursuit of self optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism.” He says disempowerment is at the bottom of stress, anxiety, frustration and mental problems. Not knowing if you have adequate income or even work is the most stressful condition in society. And it is now a way of life. By promoting happiness, companies deflect these anxieties without addressing them. It is a power play over employees and customers; companies want everyone’s decisions to be predictable, so they frame everything to maximize that, creating a new normal for both happiness as a state of being, and for data collection.The book takes a very dark turn, as happiness requires a surveillance society to work properly. How happy were you yesterday, Davies asks? We can tell you exactly by your tweets, facebook posts, texts, pins and instagrams. Also your health-recording wristband. “They” no longer care what people say in surveys; raw data is far more trustworthy.It is a fascinating turnaround for happiness, and well worth understanding, because it’s coming to company near and dear to you.David Wineberg