1Do you believe that your life would be better if you owned certain things you don’t have now? 2 Do you feel a little down about the privatisation of the gas industry? 3 Do you earn £20 million a year, expect to inherit a £1 billion, love sex with teenagers, use drugs and have a paranoid fear of terrorism?

Answer “yes” to any of these questions (in my case I said “yes” to number one. You?) and I am afraid that I am the bearer of bad tidings. You are infected with the Affluenza virus.

It gets worse. The virus is contagious, you already share it with Peter Mandelson and the cure requires purchasing an expensive book by the broadcaster and psychiatrist Oliver James. And even if you follow all his advice, you will remain vulnerable until the Government changes the structure of the newspaper industry and bans attractive women from appearing in advertisements.

I am not making any of this up. I am simply trying my best to set out for you the thrust of Affluenza, James’s new book. For, despite sighing deeply as I encountered each page from the introduction to the index, this is a volume I commend to you. True, Affluenza is merely the latest contribution to what is now a vast literature on happiness and capitalism. But the bold strokes employed by James, his brazen self-confidence bordering on arrogance, make his book a good place to join this important debate.

The central contention of Affluenza is, oddly, contained in an appendix. Here it is posited that there is “a strong and statistically significant linear Pearson correlation between the prevalence of any emotional distress and income inequality”. In other words, in countries where there is high inequality, there appear to be high levels of emotional distress. James uses this statistical relationship to go further than other “happiness” theorists. Where they argue that greater prosperity has not produced greater levels of happiness, he argues that what he calls “selfish capitalism” has produced inequality and, through it, mental illness.

The whole book rests on this. The remainder consists of inconclusive anecdotes about poor little rich boys (such as the depressed billionaire sex addict) encountered on an unnecessary research trip around the world, along with some bitty personal advice on child rearing and an extremely odd manifesto. (Is he seriously suggesting that reforms of media ownership and having more referendums will reduce mental illness?).

So it is vital that he be right in his appendix. Is he?

I am sure that emotional distress and income inequality in developed countries are correlated, that they are both high in the same places. But this does not necessarily mean that income inequality causes emotional distress. It could just as easily be that emotional distress causes income inequality. Or there may be no direct causal link at all. The academic who works with me on my soccer statistics column always points out that you can demonstrate a correlation between the price of fish in China and the height of adults in Britain, without changes in one having caused changes in the other. A strong possibility is that income inequality and emotional distress are correlated because they have a common cause without causing each other.

This is not nit-picking. On the book’s dust jacket, Affluenza is described as “a contagious middle-class virus causing depression”. And the majority of James’s case studies tell of the suffering of rich and upper middle-class people. He praises the simplicity of the less well-off and himself fancies being a Third World cab driver. It isn’t remotely clear why the size of the gap between the top 20 per cent of income earners and the bottom 20 per cent should make the affuent ill. Or why reducing it (as James and other happiness theorists suggest) should make the affluent better.

In a brilliant lecture on happiness, the Tory MP and social theorist David Willetts makes a further point. It is, he says, tiny differences with the neighbours that cause tension — “if people are unhappy about their lot, it is not because they are trying to keep up with the Windsors, it is because they are trying to keep up with the Joneses.” Greater equality may even increase this source of distress.

So I think James and his friends have selected inequality as a culprit because they don’t like it, rather than because months of work in the stats lab convinced them of its explanatory power as a variable.

Let me provide an alternative, much less comfortable, explanation of increased rates of mental illness in developed countries — social mobility. In his compelling book The Scent of Dried Roses, Tim Lott tries to make sense of his own encounters with mental illness, including his suicidal depression. He concludes that the disappearance of the English lower middle class from which he came and his own rise (he is now a justly successful novelist, then already well on his way) made him feel disorientated. He lost a sense of who he was, a sense of his story.

I find this very convincing. But its implications are disturbing. It suggests that the best way for James to reduce Affluenza would be for everyone to know their place. With fewer aspirations and ambitions people might be more content. I don’t think he, or the other happiness theorists for that matter, are far away from this view. James is already pretty scathing about the consequences of the drive towards female equality. And if he is right that China and Nigeria are happier (or at least have less emotional distress), presumably they would be better off staying as they are.

And here’s another explanation — not selfish capitalism but secular liberalism. Aren’t the decline of the nuclear family, the questioning of bourgeois values and doubts about the existence of God more likely causes of emotional discomfort than James’s ridiculous choice of policies on the regulation of the electricity industry?

Do we really want to reduce social mobility? Can we really do anything about the rise of secular liberalism? The happiness theorists are right to focus on wellbeing and not just prosperity. But the impact on freedom may be greater than they admit. And more than we want to pay.

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