1.2. The Sources of Subjective Well-Being
The pattern of ever-increasing consumption at fixed hours of work is particularly puzzling in the light of recent research on happiness and well-being. The results of this research throw into question the assumption that the trade-of of free time for increased consumption characteristic of industrial capitalism reflects the application of a utility maximizing calculus. This is because the correlation between increasing income and improvements in subjective well-being progressively weakens after a certain standard of living has been achieved. The research on subjective well-being also indicates that happiness does not necessarily require much in the way of expenditure. At the same time, it indicates that work, for most people, is not a particularly important source of happiness, while it can be a very significant source of unhappiness.
Measuring happiness and well-being is certainly rife with conceptual and methodological, not to say philosophical, dificulties.9 Empirical work on subjective well-being has tended to be cross-sectional and comparative rather than deeply historical, so it should be treated with caution when interpreting developmental trajectories. A more fundamental problem is that the evaluation of life has, as Amartya Sen puts it, a “complex grammar” that complicates eforts to measure well-being.10 Human welfare has a number of qualitatively distinct dimensions, which comprise what Sen ([1985] 1999) refers to as a “constitutive plurality.” Sen suggests that welfare should be thought of as a composite of goods realized along those dimensions rather than as reducible to the kind of atomic common denominator utility theorists have in mind—the economists’ hypothetical “util” of satisfaction. The conceptual complexity of well-being, and the often quite subtle diferences in the meaning of terms associated with it, means that the precise wording of questions about well-being influences the answers people give to them. This makes the attempt to measure well-being a rather treacherous endeavor. Nonetheless, it would be unwise to dismiss the growing body of empirical work on subjective well-being—it provides at least something to go on for those who are concerned with questions of welfare and certainly represents an advance on the expedient move economists tend to make of simply using money as a proxy for well-being.11 While self-reports of happiness are subjective, they tend to be corroborated by reports of friends and family members, which strengthens their validity (Diener 1984). Moreover, there is evidence that reports of subjective happiness are correlated with more objective emotional markers, such as how often people smile (Eckman and Friesen 1990). There is also an increasing amount of research indicating that subjective reports of well-being are associated with various physiological measures of health, such as inflammation levels, sleep quality, and cardiovascular and immunological function (Ryf, Singer, and Love 2004; Steptoe, Wardle, and Marmot 2005). The research on happiness and well-being could be plausibly interpreted as indicating that there is indeed something contradictory about the organization of economic life under capitalist modernity. In light of what seems to promote human welfare, broadly construed, there is a significant tension between how things are arranged under industrial capitalism and how they could be arranged. The relentless drive toward economic growth that characterizes capitalism as an economic system is not easily explained just in terms of its benefits for human welfare.
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Time for Things