Happiness: What is it good for?

If you're happy and you know it, leave The Morning File immediately. Trying to figure out whether you are happy will only lead to depression and more global warming. If you are unhappy, jot this down: Don't bother winning the Powerball lottery, because after you get the yacht, the Hummer with gun mounts and the 102-inch wall TV, you'll eventually wind up just as miserable as you were before. So says Jonathan Haidt in an exploration of happiness in the Washington Post by Bridget Bentz Sizer. Haidt, author of "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom," says, "We all have a biological set point that predisposes us to happiness." In other words, some people, it seems, are just born happier than others.

Are you one of them?

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How can you tell how empty your glass is? Go to the Authentic Happiness Inventory testing center in the Philadelphia area of cyberspace at Authentichappiness.com. (I'm not making this up -- it's authentic.) I scored a 3.17 on a happiness scale of 1 to 5. Does this mean my glass is slightly more full than empty? That I could use a refill or an increase in my dosage? That I'll always be a C student?

The University of Pennsylvania site is not particularly helpful: "We cannot yet tell you whether or how scores on this questionnaire are related to happiness. We can only tell you how your scores compared to those of others using the site."

Turns out, I'm in the middle of the pack among males and journalists on the happiness scale. But I'm only in the 37 percentile among my apparently upbeat fellow Squirrel Hillians (the test asks for zip code) and only slightly better than that among other junior senior citizens. Is this bad news? I prefer to think it means I'm alive to life's harsh existential realities -- our essential aloneness in the world, the burden of freedom and the inevitability of death and a last-place finish for the Pirates.

Enrico Marcelli, a Harvard researcher, contends that happiness among American adults peaks at age 51 and that men start becoming happier earlier than women after age 48. One possible explanation: Men are more likely to be married than older women, who often are alone -- either widowed or divorced. Or it could just be men are playing more golf at that age.

Can money buy it?

In 1972, the king of Bhutan, a small Buddhist nation in the Himalayas, decided to eschew the gross-domestic-product measurement in favor of "Gross National Happiness." The four yardsticks: socio-economic growth, cultural values, environmental conservation and good governance. In the Bhutanese model, good government makes its people happy, not necessarily rich.

Some economists were thinking like the King of Bhutan. Economics has been called the dismal science, but over the last 20 years the field of "happiness economics" has emerged, The Los Angeles Times reports, with scholars looking for ways to better measure the essentials of happiness, sometimes translating them into financial values. A prominent example: A study found that boosting the frequency of sex in a marriage from once a month to once a week brings as much happiness as an extra $50,000 a year. (Anyone willing to provide testimony one way or he other is welcome to do so.)

Can money buy happiness? A University of Southern California study concluded that the answer was no. In 1947, about 42 percent of Americans pronounced themselves "very happy." By 1970, even though the average American family had become 60 percent richer over the 23 intervening years, the "very happy" level had risen only to 43 percent.

Here's the key to it

UC Irvine economist Michael McBride: "People ask me all the time, 'What do you learn about happiness? What's the secret to happiness?' " His standard answer, only half-kidding: "Low expectations."

Happiest country you've never heard of

The most happy place in the world is the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, according to The Happy Planet Index, developed by Britain's New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth. It used three factors: life expectancy, human well-being and "environmental footprint." Vanuatu comes out on top because its people are satisfied with their lot, live to nearly 70 and do little damage to the planet. (We imagine the weather is decent, too.) The big industrial nations did poorly, the Guardian reported. The U.S. was 150th of the 178 nations assessed.

From Vanuatu Online, the country's newspaper: "This is not a consumer-driven society. Life here is about community and family and goodwill to other people."

Unalienable right: pursuit of unhappiness

From Janadas Devan's review of "Happiness: A History" by Darrin M. McMahon in The Straits Times (Singapore):

"The Greeks took [life] as the tragic predicament. Suffering was considered the norm. Enlightenment visionaries [like the Declaration of Independence signers] dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole. The strange thing is, despite the actualization of that vision in much of the industrial world, the majority, surveys show, say they are unhappy.

"What happens when there is no earthly reason to be unhappy? What happens when housing is commodious, food plentiful, pleasures various, distractions prodigious? We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created restless, that they are endowed by Nature with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are dissatisfaction, diminishing happy returns and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. If the tragic predicament in the ancient world was the impossibility of happiness, the tragic predicament today is the impossibility of finding happiness happy."