So, believing that a little more money would make us a little happier, and having seen our affluence ratchet upward little by little over nearly four decades, are we now happier?
We are not. Since 1957, the number telling the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center that they are "very happy" has declined from 35 to 30 percent. Twice as rich, and a little less happy. In fact, between 1956 and 1988, the percentage of Americans saying they were "pretty well satisfied with your present financial situation" dropped from 42 to 30 percent.(15)
We are also more often downright miserable. Among Americans born since World War II, depression has increased dramatically--tenfold, reports University of Pennsylvania clinical researcher Martin Seligman.(16) Today's twenty-five year olds are much more likely to recall a time in their life when they were despondent and despairing than are their 75-year-old grandparents, despite the grandparents having had many more years to suffer all kinds of disorder, from broken legs to the anguish of depression. Researchers debate the actual extent of rising depression...but no matter how we define depression, the findings persist: Today's youth and young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less overall happiness, and much greater risk of depression, not to mention tripled teen suicide and all the other social pathologies we have considered. Never has a culture experienced such physical comfort combined with such psychological misery. Never have we felt so free, or had our prisons so overstuffed. Never have we been so sophisticated about pleasure, or so likely to suffer broken relationships.
These are the best of times materially, "a time of elephantine vanity and greed" observes Garrison Keillor,(17) but they are not the best times for the human spirit. William Bennett, no critic of free market economies, is among those who recognize the futility of economics without ethics and money without a mission: "If we have full employment and greater economic growth- if we have cities of gold and alabaster--but our children have not learned how to walk in goodness, justice, and mercy, then the American experiment, not matter how gilded, will have failed."(18)
How, then, can we avoid a startling conclusion: Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased psychological well-being. The same is true of the European countries and Japan, reports economist Richard Easterlin.(19) In Britain, for example, sharp increases in the percent of households with cars, central heating, and telephones have not been accompanied by increased happiness. The conclusion is provocative, because it explodes a bombshell underneath our society's materialism: Economic growth in affluent countries provides no apparent boost to human morale.
David G. Myers is Professor of Psychology at Hope College, Holland, Mich. This article is excerpted by permission of the author from the forthcoming book, The Consuming Passion, edited by Rodney Clapp (InterVarsity Press 1997). Prof. Myers is also author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy, and Why (Avon 1993).
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