How much would you pay for more sex? Say you had sex once a month but you wanted it once a week, what would that be worth to you financially? The answer, apparently, is $66,000 (£55,000) a year.
Nobody, I hasten to add, is questioning your morals, or suggesting you should pay the money upfront. Rather that, it would take a $66,000 increase in income to make the average American feel as happy as if they’d quadrupled the frequency of their love-making. Confused? Welcome to the strange world of “happiness economics”.
To your average Joe, it may sound a bit Alice in Wonderland, but the proponents of happiness economics argue their line of research may stop us from working ourselves to death, and generally make us more satisfied with our lot. Now some bright sparks at the Scottish Economic Policy Network have decided to apply some of these ideas to Scotland. Their report, The Scots May be Brave but They are Neither Healthy nor Happy was published last week, and it makes depressing reading.
The authors, Professor David Bell of Stirling University and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also responsible for the sex and happiness research), have looked at how unhappy Scots say they are compared to the rest of Britain and other European nations.
They used figures from the Eurobarometer survey, a monthly questionnaire commissioned by the European Union. One standard question was: “On the whole are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied or not at all satisfied with the life you lead?”
Results showed that between 1973 and 2002 there had been no increase in people’s life satisfaction in Scotland despite average incomes shooting up in real terms. There had also — shock, horror! — been no improvement in happiness since devolution. What’s more, people in Scotland consistently declared themselves to be less happy than their English neighbours. We suspected it for years, but now it is official: Scotland is a nation of miserable blighters.
Rab C Nesbitt might have told you as much (“In Glasgow there’s no such world as ‘happy’. The nearest we have is giro or blootered.”) Others might put our collective misery down to a Calvinist inheritance, the weather or the inevitable failure of the national football team. The difference is that these bar-room philosophies are rarely based firmly in economics — while Bell and Blanchflower’s most certainly are.
According to this standard classical economic model, all that economists can do is follow the money. It’s assumed that when people spend their hard-earned cash, they will do so in ways aimed at improving their happiness. The more money people have, the more desires they can fulfil; therefore if the economy is growing, everything must be rosy in the garden.
Happiness economics counters by pointing out that our desires are not constant. They change depending on what we see around us. Human nature dictates we like to compete with those around us.
Although my new car may be better than my old model, I probably won’t be happy if all my neighbours have better cars. But if all we do is work harder to keep up with the Joneses, our labours are in a sense unproductive. It’s a bit like being caught in an arm’s race, if this line of reasoning is correct. Nobody ends up a winner. The rats just keep racing round on their treadmill. No wonder we’re sad.
However, none of this explains why the Scots should be less content with their lot than their English cousins. In search of an answer, I took a walk up Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. Where better? A place for reflection and also a showcase for some of the “quality of life” that we’re often told has non-Scots eager to relocate. Standing by one of the cairns at the summit I found Jimmy Burns with his wife, Cheryl. He lives in Johannesburg where he moved 30 years ago but he was born in Scotland. Could his expat’s eye explain the Caledonian gloom? Not exactly.
“If it’s true you’re all more miserable, then I’m amazed,” he says. “I’ve come over to see my mother who is in Stirling hospital after a stroke. Your health service works, and, look at this” (he swings his arm at the horizon). “At home there’s so much crime. But then we do have sunshine. I reckon your weather has a lot to do with it.”
Alice Smith, a teacher at a local primary school, came to the summit to take in the view with her teenage daughter. “I think there’s a feeling that there aren’t as many jobs here as before,” she says tentatively. “People are having to go south. A lot of families are being stretched by that. I blame the weather, too. Well, it can’t help.”
These are both tempting arguments but the truth is that, although unemployment is higher than in the rest of the UK, it’s still historically low. As for the effect of bad weather, as Bell himself says, the Nordic countries’ citizens are (according to Eurobarometer) among the happiest in Europe.
It must be something more deeply ingrained in the culture. I sit on a rock and phone Richard Holloway, the ethicist and former bishop of Edinburgh: Richard, why are the Scots unhappier than the English?
“I have to say I’m a little suspicious of the business of asking people how they feel. Happiness tends to be what psychologists call an epi- phenomenon. It attaches it to something else. If I go fly-fishing, I forget about everything else and suddenly realise I’m happy. If you start examining happiness in abstract it becomes quite a different thing.
“That said, I’ve just this minute returned from the Vale of Leven where I grew up,” he says. “The unhappiness is palpable. I don’t think you should underestimate the misery that the death of heavy industry has left.”
One of the sticking points in all of this is that if you are to be able to factor happiness into any economic equation you have to be able to define it. How is that possible? Back at his desk, even Bell seems to concede it’s a thorny issue.
“The economics of happiness is a newish area,” he says. “At the moment it’s a rough-and-ready guide and I don’t think we’re ever going to understand it fully.” He concedes: “I don’t think economics has all the answers.”
Holloway though tries to provide some. “We just don’t do pleasure very well in Scotland,” he says. “There’s a lovely little new book I’ve just read called The Wee Book of Calvinism by Bill Duncan. I think there may be something residual in the Scottish temperament that has always suspected happiness and felt we were never meant to have it.
“You know the end of Alastair Reid’s poem Scotland: ‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it.’ We’re now a very, post- Calvinist society. But perhaps there’s just something in the psychic DNA.”
Whether the economists of happiness can assign a financial value to Scotland’s “psychic DNA” waits to be seen. Whether they should attempt to is another matter.
Holloway certainly has his doubts. “The philosopher Karl Popper said it was never the job of government to bring good things in, but rather to screen bad things out,” he says. “I can’t help feeling that the pursuit of happiness is a private thing.”
Or, to put it another way: if the average American will pay $66,000 to have more sex, how much more might we pay to retain the right to be Calvinist curmudgeons?
