The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies Hardcover – 1 Feb. 2000

This book is probably the most complete Western book about happiness. Robert Lane recommends that to the goal of happiness should be added the goals of justice and personal development. He uses "happiness" with the meaning of "satisfaction with life", or with "Subjective Well Being" (SWB). The difference being that happiness is a fleeting emotion and satisfaction with life a more profound view.He accuses economists of wanting to maximise one dimension only like "the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people" (Jeremy Bentham), or maximise increases in GDP per person. The belief of many people in prosperous countries is, that increasing GDP per person will lead to increases in happiness. Prof Lane refers to this belief as the "Economistic Fallacy" which he considers a major threat to the future of the USA. He proves conclusively that in the USA and other prosperous countries, increases in GDP per person do not lead to increases in happiness. He points out that governments focus too exclusively on increasing GDP. Governments should in all their policies ask themselves if their policies contribute to the three goals of happiness, justice and personal development. The title of the book can create the mistaken impression that Professor Lane is against a free market and democracy. His main point is that the market and democracy on their own do not lead automatically to increased happiness and that the three goals should also be considered by governments when attempting to make the free market and democracy function satisfactorily. He points out that happiness is dependent on what he refers to as "companionship" (that is friends) and a good family life. At no point does he suggest that the free market and democracy can be replaced by better systems.He refers to the need to make trade offs between wealth on the one hand and, companionship and family life on the other. Trade offs is a concept economists like. My preference is to figure out how these interdependent concepts can reinforce each other. That is, not seeing it as a zero sum game but as a win-win situation. This is not to deny that fathers and mothers that work so much that they spend hardly any time with their children do not have the right balance.Similar ideas to those of Prof. Lane have been presented in other interesting books by economists in "Happiness and Economics"- "How the economy and institutions affect human well-being" by Frey and Stutzer and in "Development as Freedom" by Amartya Sen (see my reviews). There is also a vast Buddhist literature about happiness as a vital aspect of the science of the mind. See for example "The Universe in a Single Atom" by the Dalai Lama (see my review).The importance of the book by Prof Lane is that he is a prominent political scientist, as shown by the fact that he was President of the American Political Science Organisation and also President of the International Society of Political Psychology. His book refers to and evaluates a very large number of scientific studies in the two fields of political science and political psychology and the book is also in that respect invaluable.

This beautifully written book provides so many answers to so many fundamental questions that we face today! I keep re-reading it and I warmly recommend it to anyone who would like to get a better understanding of a the context we live in: What we need to be happy and why it's so rare to find (although it costs nothing). It's kind of a Psychological version of Paleo Diet. Yale University must be a great place if they have such professors - it makes me want to study there.

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A pompous intellectual treatment of a simple subject. This book has enough material to fill a one page editorial in the Economist. With all its statistics and graphs it tells us what we already know: Money doesn't buy happiness ( unless your'e very poor ). I read the first half and just browsed the rest. It has an intro that goes on and on and references that take up a large section of the end. Conclusion: Some good insights but way to much gobbledygook .