The Happiness Industry (32 page)

Preface

1
Jill Treanor and Larry Elliott, ‘And Breathe … Goldie Hawn and a Monk Bring Meditation to Davos',
theguardian.com
, 23 January 2014.

2
Robert Chalmers, ‘Matthieu Ricard: Meet Mr Happy',
independent.co.uk
, 18 February 2007.

3
Matthew Campbell and Jacqueline Simmons, ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk',
bloomberg.com
, 21 January 2014.

4
Dawn Megli, ‘You Happy? Santa Monica Gets $1m to Measure Happiness',
atvn.org
, 14 March 2013.

5
For example, the Penn Resilience Project was designed by Martin Seligman and a team of positive psychologists at University of Pennsylvania, to bring cognitive behavioural therapy into classrooms. In 2007, three UK education authorities sent 100 British teachers to visit the Penn Resilience Project, so as to recreate it in the UK.

6
‘Work for World Peace Starting Now – Google's “Jolly Good Fellow” Can Help',
huffingtonpost.com
, 27 March 2012.

7
Sarah Knapton, ‘Stressed Council House Residents Get £2,000 Happiness Gurus',
telegraph.co.uk
, 9 October 2008.

8
Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda and Fabrice Bartolomei,
‘Induction of a Sense of Bliss by Electrical Stimulation of the Anterior Insula',
Cortex
49: 10, 2013; ‘Pain “Dimmer Switch” Discovered by UK Scientists',
bbc.com
, 5 February 2014.

9
Gary Wolf, ‘Measuring Mood: Current Research and New Ideas',
quantifiedself.com
, 11 February 2009.

10
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ
, New York: Penguin, 1990, 33.

11
Campbell and Simmons, ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk'.

12
See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett,
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
, London: Allen Lane, 2009. Work by Carles Muntaner explores this issue further.

13
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report 2013, 2013

14
Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock, ‘Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks',
Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences
111: 24, 2014.

15
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
, London: Routledge, 1944.

1 Knowing How You Feel

1
‘Hume was in all his glory, the phrase was consequently familiar to everybody. The difference between me and Hume was this: the use he made of it was to account for that which is, I to show what ought to be.' Quoted in Charles Milner Atkinson,
Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Work
, Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press, 2012, 30.

2
See Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Michael Quinn, eds.,
Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

3
Quoted in Atkinson,
Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Work
, 109.

4
Ibid., 222.

5
Jeremy Bentham,
The Principles of Morals and Legislation
, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988, 20.

6
Ibid., 70.

7
Joanna Bourke,
The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

8
Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte and Adam Anderson, ‘Population Coding of Affect Across Stimuli, Modalities and Individuals',
Nature Neuroscience
, 17: 8, 2014.

9
This is not undisputed, but for a convincing argument for Bentham's monistic philosophy, see Michael Quinn, ‘Bentham on Mensuration: Calculation and Moral Reasoning',
Utilitas
26: 1, 2014.

10
Bentham,
The Principles of Morals and Legislation
, 9.

11
Ibid., 29–30.

12
Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”', in
Kant: Political Writings
, ed. Hans Reiss, transl. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

13
Paul McReynolds, ‘The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham: I. Background and General Approach',
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
4: 3, 1968; McReynolds, ‘The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham: II. Efforts Toward Quantification and Classification'
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
4: 4, 1968.

14
Gustav Fechner,
Elements of Psychophysics
, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 30–1.

15
He defined psychophysics as ‘an exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of body and soul or, more generally, of the material and the mental, of the physical and the psychological worlds'. Fechner,
Elements of Psychophysics
, 7.

16
‘No motive exists that is not directed towards creating or maintaining pleasure, or eliminating or preventing displeasure', quoted in Michael Heidelberger,
Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview
, transl. Cynthia Klohr, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004, 52.

17
Relation between mind and body ‘are like those of a steam engine with a complicated mechanism. Depending on how much steam
the engine develops, its kinetic energy can rise high or fall low', Fechner,
Elements of Psychophysics
, 35.

18
This is referred to in Bourke,
The Story of Pain
, 157.

19
Martin Lindstrom,
Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong
, New York: Random House, 2012.

20
Richard Godwin, ‘Happiness: You Can Work it Out',
Evening Standard
, 26 August 2014.

21
Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Bentham's Utopia: The National Charity Company',
Journal of British Studies
10: 1, 1970.

22
This understanding of ‘government', as extending beyond the limits of the state, was discussed at length by Michel Foucault, who attached great weight to Bentham's influence. Subsequently, a number of Foucauldian sociologists have analysed how ‘governmentality' works in liberal societies such as Britain. See Michel Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978
, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Nikolas Rose,
Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller,
Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life
, Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

23
Association for Psychological Science, ‘Grin and Bear It: Smiling Facilitates Stress Recovery',
sciencedaily.com
, 30 July 2012.

24
Maia Szalavitz, ‘Study Shows Seeing Smiles Can Lower Aggression',
time.com
, 4 April 2013.

25
Dan Hill,
About Face: The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising
, London: Kogan Page Publishers, 2010.

26
Richard Layard,
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
, London: Allen Lane, 2005, 113.

2 The Price of Pleasure

1
Andrew Malleson,
Whiplash and Other Useful Illnesses
, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002.

2
House of Commons Transport Select Committee.

3
House of Commons Transport Select Committee.

4
Harro Maas, ‘An Instrument Can Make a Science: Jevons's Balancing Acts in Economics',
History of Political Economy
33: Annual Supplement, 2001.

5
R. S. Howey,
The Rise of the Marginal Utility School, 1870–1889
. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.

6
Anson Rabinbach,
The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

7
Margaret Schabas,
A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

8
Darian Leader,
Strictly Bipolar
, London: Penguin, 2013.

9
Quoted in William Stanley Jevons,
The Theory of Political Economy
, London: Macmillan, 1871, 11.

10
Howey,
The Rise of the Marginal Utility School
.

11
Jevons,
The Theory of Political Economy
, 101.

12
‘We labour to produce with the sole object of consuming, and the kinds and amounts of goods produced must be determined with regard to what we want to consume.' Ibid., 102.

13
Harro Maas, ‘Mechanical Rationality: Jevons and the Making of Economic Man',
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
30: 4, 1999.

14
‘Now the mind of an individual is the balance which makes its own comparisons, and is the final judge of quantities of feeling', Jevons,
The Theory of Political Economy
, 84.

15
Ibid., 11–12.

16
Rosalind Williams,
Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

17
Jevons,
The Theory of Political Economy
, 101.

18
Alfred Marshall,
Principles of Economics
, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 53.

19
Jevons,
The Theory of Political Economy
, 83.

20
Quoted in Philip Mirowski,
More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 219.

21
See Philip Mirowski,
Edgeworth on Chance, Economic Hazard, and Statistics
, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.

22
David Colander, ‘Retrospectives: Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility',
Journal of Economic Perspectives
21: 2, 2007.

23
D. Wade Hands, ‘Economics, Psychology and the History of Consumer Choice Theory',
Cambridge Journal of Economics
34: 4, 2010.

24
This case is discussed in Marion Fourcade, ‘Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of “Nature”',
American Journal of Sociology
116: 6, 2011.

25
See for example, Rita Samiolo, ‘Commensuration and Styles of Reasoning: Venice, Cost-Benefit, and the Defence of Place',
Accounting, Organizations and Society
37: 6, 2012. This paper explores how cost-benefit analysis was used to calculate the worth of Venice flood defences.

26
See Department for Culture, Media & Sport, ‘Understanding the Drivers, Impacts and Value of Engagement in Culture and Sport',
gov.uk/government/publications
, 2010.

27
Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee, ‘Death, Happiness, and the Calculation of Compensatory Damages',
Journal of Legal Studies
37: S2, 2007.

28
Simon Cohn, ‘Petty Cash and the Neuroscientific Mapping of Pleasure',
Biosocieties
3: 2, 2008.

29
Daniel Zizzo, ‘Neurobiological Measurements of Cardinal Utility: Hedonimeters or Learning Algorithms?'
Social Choice & Welfare
19: 3, 2002.

30
Brian Knutson, Scott Rick, G. Elliott Wimmer, Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein, ‘Neural Predictors of Purchases',
Neuron
53: 1, 2007.

31
Coren Apicella et al., ‘Testosterone and Financial Risk Preferences',
Evolution and Human Behavior
29: 6, 2008.

32
This argument was put forward by the former UK government chief science advisor, David Nutt. See ‘Did Cocaine Use by Bankers Cause the Global Financial Crisis',
theguardian.com
, 15 April 2013.

33
Michelle Smith, ‘Joe Huber: Blame Your Lousy Portfolio on Your Brain',
moneynews.com
, 17 June 2014.

34
Alec Smith, Terry Lohrenz, Justin King, P. Read Montague and Colin Camerer, ‘Irrational Exuberance and Neural Crash Warning Signals During Endogenous Experimental Market Bubbles',
Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences
111: 29, 2014.

3 In the Mood to Buy

1
Ruth Benschop, ‘What Is a Tachistoscope? Historical Explorations of an Instrument',
Science in Context
11: 1, 1998.

2
Jonathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
, New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.

3
See Maren Martell, ‘The Race to Find the Brain's “Buy-Me Button”',
welt.de
, 20 January 2011, transl.
worldcrunch.com
, 2 July 2011.