In danger of being happy

By Daniel Thwaites

There's been talk that measuring well-being, as the authors of the World Happiness Report try to do globally, is a conceptually difficult undertaking. It isn't. Look at a people's health, longevity, social relationships, opportunities for creativity, access to meaningful work and enjoyable leisure, and you've got the important bases covered.

There are some interesting wrinkles when it comes to subjective reports of happiness. We are such deeply social animals that our sense of our own 'happiness' seems closely tied to our assessment of others and how they're doing. In this, it's a lot like wealth. This is the source of Mencken's hilarious observation that a wealthy man is "one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband".So, too, a person's assessment of how he's doing depends on how and what the neighbours are doing.

The bad news is that resentment and 'red eye' aren't passing hiccups in people's understanding of others, or in their own self-assessment. They're permanent features of how people judge their relative position in the world.

The good news is that this same competitiveness makes people invent and deploy smartphones, iPods, Ferragamo shoes, cool cars, and breast-augmentation surgery to outshine their contemporaries and make old classmates feel like underachievers.

So it turns out that Jamaica isn't the most miserable place on earth! Not even close. In fact, we're nearer the other end of the spectrum and are actually in danger of being a relatively happy place! Should we be alarmed? Probably.

With a basically stagnant economy, a four-decade-old crime wave, and aspects of popular culture threatening new lows each year, it's sorta surprising to find ourselves so high up the list. But there we are. We can safely conclude that there must be a lot of spectacularly miserable places out there. There are. The globe is festooned with socially barren and environmentally depleted places where people basically sit around and drink vodka (or the local equivalent) for the few decades of their sad lives.

This world recession hasn't helped. The New York Times carried an article last week about a Belgrade couple trying to sell their kidneys for 30,000 euros. "Elsewhere in Spain, Italy and Russia ... people [are] peddling everything from kidneys to hair, sperm and breast milk ... with asking prices for lungs as high as €250,000."

MISERY ALL AROUND

Then there are places like Zimbabwe, with life expectancy in the 30s and 20 per cent of the population with HIV. We've had way too much devaluation, and the Government should follow Edward Seaga's advice and peg the dollar, but we've not had to issue a $100-trillion bill like in Zimbabwe.

Fact is, there's a lot of global misery. John Lanchester's wonderful piece called 'Marx at 193' in the London Review of Books notes that a "representative human in 2012 is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man, [with] no bank account but a mobile [phone], earning on average less than £8,000 a year." This is not a happy guy. And he's not going to get much happier anytime soon either.

Apart from everything else, there's a demographic nightmare coming caused by the widespread abortion of females in India and China, where about 120 males are born for every 100 females. "By 2020, China will have between 30 million and 40 million more men than women under the age of 19. So, within eight years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America permanently single." That's going to be a REALLY unhappy guy, and he will go in search of the only thing that'll be on his mind.

Now it's one thing for China Harbour to come for a few highways and the port. Suppose they come for that other thing? All of a sudden the 'uneconomic' highway systems will make sense! Shabba did say, "It can't done," but he forgot to notice that it can't always share. Well, not without war.

There are still a lot of very poor people in the world. Earlier this year, the World Bank reported that 1.29 billion people live in extreme poverty. That number represents about 22 per cent of the world's population and a vast improvement over the 52 per cent in 1981, or the 44 per cent in 1990.

There is a lot to say about the World Happiness Report and why Jamaica placed 40th in the rankings. Here I've focused on just one factor in the ranking, which is that there's a lot of misery elsewhere. Another time I can look at why, despite our catalogue of woes, "Nowhere nuh better than yaad!"

Daniel Thwaites is a partner of Thwaites, Lundgren & D'Arcy in Westchester and Bronx counties in New York. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.