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Mom Was Right

Summer 2001
by Bruce Fellman

Many of us grew up hearing the venerable axiom, “Money can’t buy happiness.” But to look at modern life, it appears that a sizable number of adults believe quite the opposite.

The bursting of the dot.com bubble and the slide of the stock market notwithstanding, a majority of people in the United States, as in many developed countries, are richer than they’ve ever been. And yet, when social scientists measure the happiness quotient of the population, they report something paradoxical.

“Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world,” says Robert E. Lane, the Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus of Political Science and an expert in the study of well-being in industrialized societies.

In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000), Lane analyzes data from sources as disparate as questionnaires and brain scans which demonstrate that mom was right. “Once you get past the poverty level, there’s no correlation between increased wealth and greater happiness,” says Lane. “If anything, it’s quite the reverse.”

This relationship is no surprise to therapists, but it certainly calls into question the tenets of utilitarianism, the 18th-century political philosophy articulated by Jeremy Bentham who believed that the goal of society is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people—the philosophy that undergirds Western democracies. “Bentham thought that money was the source of happiness,” says Lane. “But that’s not what the research shows.”

Lane and his colleagues measure what they call subjective well-being (SWB) with surveys that ask respondents whether they are happy or not, as well as how satisfied they are with their emotional lives and their achievements. These answers are validated by asking similar questions of family members, friends, and co-workers. Recently, it has also become possible to use magnetic resonance imagery techniques to watch the brain at work. Happiness, incidentally, shows up on the left side of the brain.

The several decades of investigations summarized in Lane’s book make it clear that a large raise in pay or a new BMW keeps only a fleeting smile on the recipient’s face. “These promise so much but they don’t deliver,” notes Lane. “The main source of longterm happiness is friends and family.”

This conclusion points to a modern dilemma that helps account for the epidemic of unhappiness. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, one of Lane’s former students, documents the trend away from participation in civic, religious, and social organizations. “We are endowed by evolution for human contact,” says Lane, “but the marketplace is a distraction that keeps us from focusing on people and relationships.”

The researcher explains that democracies can help restore a balance by such measures as mandating better parental leave policies and preventing companies from pulling up stakes and destroying communities. Individuals might boost their own SWB levels by singing in the choir, joining the Elks, or spending more time around the water cooler and less time in the cubicle.

Still, given the downward trend of the last 30 years, Lane doesn’t expect a renaissance of happiness anytime soon. “I’m hoping for a five percent increase per decade,” he says.  

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