How happy are we? There are lots of ways to measure that, although it’s not always a simple question to answer. The idea of happiness and what makes us happy can also vary a lot from person to person.
The World Happiness Index aims to get a sense of it, using metrics including healthy life expectancy, generosity and positive and negative emotions. The most recent report, which takes in data averaged between 2022 and 2024, finds Finland as the happiest country on Earth, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. The U.S. is ranked 24th, just behind the UK and just ahead of Belize; that’s the lowest we’ve ever ranked in the report’s more than decade-long history.
Dan Horowitz, a cultural historian whose work is focused on consumer culture and author of nearly a dozen books, wrote 2018’s "Happier?: The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America."
Horowitz joined The Show to discuss if there was a turning point where Americans started thinking about happiness and its relative importance in our lives and mental well-being, or if it was something that just kind of evolved over time.
Full conversation
DAN HOROWITZ: Well, if by Americans you mean general public, I, I suspect that waxed and waned over decades and depends on whom you're talking about, but in terms of kind of public discussions of the subject, the transformative moment comes in the late 1990s when a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania named Martin Seligman gave a presidential address at the American Psychological Association, and called on his colleagues to stop, or maybe stop too strong a word, but to focus less on negative aspects of people's lives and more positive ones, and that led to, of course, with precedents, but led to a, a field called positive psychology, which studies the factors that make people have a greater sense of well-being than ill being commonly known as happiness.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so how big of a cultural change was that to go to positive psychology from where we had been?
HOROWITZ: Well, of course, it has precedence deep in American history. The most notable is Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's book in the early '50s, but it was an enormous sea change. I mean, obviously in history, nothing happens out of nowhere or immediately or at one moment. But, in terms of the kind of organized focus on happiness, it was an enormous moment that had outcomes not only in universities but in popular culture, you can see this on TED Talks, you can see this on the smiley face that we see around us so much.
BRODIE: Yeah, I'm curious, like, in what ways this new movement made itself known to people, you know, maybe not necessarily people who are seeking this topic out, but just sort of in everyday life, like what difference did it make?
HOROWITZ: Oh boy, that's hard to gauge. But, Marty Seligman defined what he was doing as coming at what he called a "Florentine moment," where democracy was spreading around the world, where hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, billions were rising out of poverty and hundreds of millions into the middle class.
And in the United States, somewhat an occasional or more robust sense of a promising future. So it coincides with the larger issues, out in the society of confidence about the future of America, not something we see a lot of today, but prominent in an earlier period.
BRODIE: Do you yourself have a definition that you use of happiness? Like how, how do you gauge it?
HOROWITZ: Well, people in the field gauge it by, in some cases really actually trying to measure it with people by giving them a pagers or so or a similar instrument and having them record every so often, how they're feeling. So, some people in positive psychology, I'm of course suspicious of this, think you could actually measure it in a personal life on a day by day, hour by hour.
How do I define it? People in the field don't love the word happiness, in part because it, it suggests a certain superficiality of emotions, they prefer the term a sense of well-being, psychological well-being, a sense of confidence in oneself, a sense that, the world is OK, that they can achieve things, that they can be effective in the world.
BRODIE: It's interesting the idea of relating in some way the concept of happiness to politics, because it seems like at a certain point and maybe this is that point right now, in the world that what makes some people extremely happy politically makes other people extremely unhappy politically, and it seems like it might be kind of difficult to reconcile that in some way. Like, is this an era of happiness or not, when, you know, maybe half the people are happy with what's going on and the other half are really not.
HOROWITZ: That's a wonderful question. I think we are at a certain time in American culture, where happiness, at least in, in my view, seems to be, or people seem not very happy, that you could see a lot of this in the rhetoric of the last election. I also think in a different way from where your question is leading about the relationship between politics and happiness, in the sense that if you ask the question, what can we do politically, what can we do legislatively or non-legislatively to increase the sense of well-being among people.
And on that issue, and I hope you don't mind my going off in this direction, yeah, on that issue, there's a wide range of responses. And on the left, is a man, an economist, political economist named Richard Layard, now in the House of Lords in England, who sees it this way and somewhat the way I see it. It's very clear from studies that once a certain income level is reached, more money doesn't make you happier. And the implication of that study or those studies is income redistribution, tax the wealthy, and develop policies that will support the less fortunate, more robustly.
At the other end of the spectrum is the work of a man named Arthur Brooks, a conservative who points out that in general, conservatives are happier than liberals, and his policy recommendation is not to rely on the federal government, not to rely on legislation along the lines Layard emphasized, but rather to strengthen family life, to strengthen social connections, to increase liberty and individual freedom.
BRODIE: Well, it seems like what they both agree on perhaps is that government maybe can't create or legislate happiness, but it can maybe create the environment in which people can be happy. However you define that, whether it's based on income or whether it's based on being left alone and sort of whatever it is that makes you happy, like government can't make that happen, but it can kind of create the environment in which it could.
HOROWITZ: That's right. I would think on the left, the answer would be more economic. Among conservatives, it would be more cultural. How do you strengthen families? That position or that approach isn't primarily governmental, but it could involve churches, strengthening community, strengthening family, etc.
