Happiness August 1, 2006

I remember again the economist who did a study of a Third World village with a view to determining the factors that improved quality of life, or the perception of it. I do not now recall the name of the economist or the village he studied, but I recall that he visited the village periodically to see how things had changed.

He was surprised at one point to find that most of the villagers agreed that their quality of life had dramatically improved. He looked at their current economic indices and compared them with the ones he had taken the last time. He saw that virtually nothing had changed, and that indeed they were worse off in some respects. He did a little sleuthing and swiftly discovered the source of the villagers' newfound buoyancy: Many of them were now wearing shoes. That simple fact had a tremendous impact on the villagers' sense of well-being.

That is not entirely as surprising as it seems. There's a whole literature on shoes as a factor in self-esteem, and I half suspect Imelda Marcos' fetish with them has something to do with it. Our very own culture denigrates the unshod and equates them with the unlettered.

But this is not a column about shoes, this is a column about happiness. I remembered the above in fact in relation to the various items I read over the past week about the studies ranking countries according to "happiness." One came out in this newspaper last Saturday. It was done by a University of Leicester academic who also produced a World Map of Happiness. It ranked the Philippines 78th. The top five were Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Bahamas.

This survey follows several other surveys along the same line with widely disparate results. A bigger survey done by the marketing company GfK NOP, which interviewed 30,000 people, proclaimed that the happiest nations on earth were Australia, United States, Egypt, India, Britain and Canada. The British think tank, New Economics Foundation, which produced its own "Happy Planet" index based on 178 countries earlier this month, had Vanuatu, a tiny South Pacific island (pop. 209,000), as the planet's most cheerful country. And it had the world's largest economies, Germany, Japan and the US, at 81st, 95th and 150th respectively.

The wide divergence in results must suggest how alternately gratifying and frustrating the prospect of measuring happiness is. Unlike the amount of goods in a basket, the amount of happiness in the heart doesn't lend itself to easy arithmetic. It's not an objective thing, it is a subjective one. As the story of the shoes above shows, people's sources of happiness vary wildly from place to place.

On a not entirely facetious note, "happiness," as I've learned recently, is the term used by showbiz writers for the "fee" that goes their way for attending press conferences -- the amount of "happiness" rising and falling according to the importance of the writer and the project being pitched. You attend a press conference daily, or several of them, which happily would also get you free meals along the way, you would be absolutely gleeful by the end of the day. It's enough to make you think about shifting careers, or subjects.

I can see an upside and downside to the attempts to introduce happiness as a measure of development. As their authors themselves argue, it's an effort to veer away from the traditional measures of GNP, GDP and per capita income, which tend to equate well-being with material abundance. And which encourages consumerist values. As the New Economics Foundation suggests, the happiness index is meant to compel governments to rethink more into better.

That point I can subscribe to. Particularly in this country where the greed of public officials, and of the elite in general who continue to preside over an order characterized by opulence on one hand and destitution on the other, runs riot. Indeed, where acquisitiveness, a continuing legacy of American rule, holds sway, people measured not by the number of books on their shelves but by the number of cars in their garages. Makes you wonder: How much is enough? How many cellular phones and mistresses can make you happy?

I've always thought the only thing that should be insatiable is the thirst for knowledge or the hunger for wisdom. But that's another story.

The downside of it, well, the happiness index can also encourage bovine smugness and lack of aspiration. The local phrase, "mababaw ang kaligayahan" (literally, "shallow happiness threshold," or more idiomatically, "easy to please") catches the spirit perfectly. Unfortunately, being easy to please isn't always a natural state, it can always be induced. You don't need to go far to see proof of it, you need see only what's happened to us. From an Asian country next only to Japan and dreaming of becoming another Japan, we've become a Southeast Asian country that's better off only than Burma and dreaming only of sending ex-doctors-turned-nurses abroad. Today, we snag a job abroad and we're deliriously happy. Indeed, today we snag a job at home and we're boundlessly ecstatic.

More importantly, many years ago during the pit of martial law, I heard one of Imelda's minions perorate on his boss' favorite prescription for happiness, which was the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. During the open forum someone asked perfectly seriously: "But what if your spouse was cheating on you, would it pay to know the truth, or would you be better off not knowing you were being cuckolded?" The speaker thought for a while and laughed. "Well," he said, "sometimes it really does not pay to know the truth. It can make you very, very unhappy."

A happy people can be a sign they are not materialistic. But it can also be a sign they do not know, or care, that they have a president they did not vote for.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=12741