Since Easterlin’s “discovery”, thousands of academic papers have been published trying first to identify what makes us happy, and then to distil that into an index to use instead of GDP.
As “unhappiness” in various extreme forms has broken out
across the world over the past year – not just in
Hong Kong, but also in France, Chile, Catalonia, India, Lebanon – the need has never been greater to identify the sources of our malaise, and what we need to do to treat it.
From the Better Life Index by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nation’s
World Happiness Report, to more specific efforts such as Canada’s
Index of Well-being, Maryland’s Genuine Progress Indicator, Britain’s National Accounts of Well-being Accounts, the
Happy Planet Index that aims to track the environmental sustainability of our behaviour, and even Denmark’s homely fondness for
hygge, authors identify key ingredients that consistently coincide with perceived improvement in our lives.
The World Happiness Report relies on six measures: income, healthy years of long life, people to turn to, trust in others, perceived freedom, and habits of generosity. Professor Richard Layard, at the London School of Economics, home of “happiness economics”, adds work stability.
Immediately, you can see where Hong Kong is in trouble, even though the index misses other criteria that I think are generating stress and unhappiness in Hong Kong: household incomes are moderately high by global standards, but have stagnated for most of the population since the
1998 Asian financial crisis, checked by the bursting of the
dotcom bubble in 2000, the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, epidemic in 2003, and the 2008
global financial crisis. For a community to suffer wage stagnation and persistent job insecurity for more than 20 years must surely severely sap morale.
Anxieties about future freedoms are also at boiling point, for obvious neighbourly reasons. Angst has been turbocharged by artificial intelligence-driven
social credit schemes being developed on the mainland that snoop deep into ordinary people’s daily lives.
Inside the most recent World Happiness Report is a
chapter called “The sad state of happiness in the United States and the role of digital media”. It notes striking jumps in teen depression since smartphones became common in 2011, and notes strong connections between a collapse in social interaction and a lack of sleep as important risk factors for unhappiness. There are surely lessons for Hong Kong here.
Not surprisingly, Hong Kong ranked a miserable
76th in the 2019 World Happiness Report, down from 46th when the report was
first published in 2012, and must surely have plummeted even further over the course of 2019’s season of violent protests.
Hong Kong is ahead of China (93rd) and Malaysia (80th) but behind the Philippines (69th), Japan (58th) and Singapore (34th). Most striking, we are far behind east Asia’s happiest economy – Taiwan, at 25th. Quite what makes Taiwanese people so much happier when they share Hong Kong’s anxieties about the mainland is not terribly clear. Perhaps the simple freedom to participate in
robustly democratic elections really does make all that difference.
Further contributing to Hong Kong’s overall misery must surely be the
extremity of inequality, the stratospheric
unaffordability of property, and the tiny
shoebox spaces that families are forced to squeeze into and call home. A world-beating public transport system might impress outsiders, but as Professor Layard said: you’ll never see any difference in human happiness because of how quickly you can travel from London to Liverpool.
Low and simple taxes, paid by barely half the population, might impress the
Heritage Foundation, but not so much local people when they coincide with poor old-age security. It is not an accident that the world’s happiest communities as ranked in the World Happiness Report – Finland, Denmark, Norway – are those that pay strikingly high tax rates in exchange for solid assurances of impeccable health care and financial security in old age.
We have for decades boasted that Hong Kong ranks highly in
competitiveness, or economic freedom, or the independence of our judiciary, but these are accolades – measures of success or progress – that remain unconvincing for and unappreciated by local people when they look for progress in their lives.
On the (perhaps naive) assumption that Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s administration is forming plans to dig our community out of the miserable hole we find ourselves in after half a year of shocking violence and street protests, launching
initiatives aimed at improving livelihoods and putting some puff back into economic growth may be necessary, but not sufficient. We must also find satisfactory ways to measure our future progress.
Most useful to Hong Kong might be the OECD’s Better Life Index, which builds on 11 qualities essential to well-being: housing, stable income, secure jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, personal safety and work-life balance. Hong Kong scores terribly by most of these qualities, so this index would provide an impeccable starting point to explain our misery and track progress towards more fulfilling lives.
As Professor Layard notes, such an index would not just show us how to get ahead. It would also show us how to get along. That would not add up to Denmark’s warm and fuzzy hygge, but would surely point us towards a happier and more meaningful future.
David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: For a happier future
