This confusion of material wealth with reduction of intrapsychic conflicts doesnot go unpunished. The consumer becomes increasingly estranged from hishome and family, and, to his dismay, finds that he has little time to spare forleisure activities. Work becomes a deeply needed and yet hated tyrant (thecolloquialism “TGIF”, meaning “Thank God It’s Friday”, conveys this verysentiment). Vacations make one spend more money. On returning, one findsoneself in debt and compelled to work extra to pay it off. Fatigued, one longs foranother vacation. This cycle is repeated over and over again.

Such cross-currents between societal economics and individual psychologyform the focus of Robert Lane’s book The Loss of Happiness in MarketDemocracies and its review by Abu Salim. The former is a prominent Americanpolitical scientist and the latter is a distinguished retired economist in India.Abu Salim also happens to be my uncle and to have included a piece of hiswriting in this psychoanalytic journal is certainly a source of happiness for me. Ididn’t have to spend a dime for it!

Salman AkhtarProfessor of Psychiatry

Jefferson Medical College33 S. 9th Street

Suite 210-CPhiladelphia, PA, USA

Salman.Akhtar@jefferson.edu

THE LOSS OF HAPPINESS IN MARKET DEMOCRACIES

By Robert E. LaneNew Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. 480pp. $21.00

Reviewed by Abu Salim

Professor Robert E. Lane’s book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies is adifficult book to review. Its canvas is large, the topics it covers are so varied andthe academic disciplines it deals with are so many that the scholarship requiredin the reviewer is almost beyond the reach of any social scientist, who mostlikely would be a specialist in one field or another. Politics, economics,philosophy, psychology, to name only a few disciplines, are all there. ProfessorLane’s scholarship is real and impressive. Not without reason has Robert D.Putnam of Harvard University described Professor Lane as one of the nation’smost thoughtful and creative political scientists. A hundred pages of notes andreferences to the extensive literature covered give an idea of Professor Lane’stremendous academic reach.

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Professor Lane’s thesis is that, although “the economic and political institu-tions of our time are products of the utilitarian philosophy of happiness ... theyseem to have guided us to a period of greater unhappiness”. Professor Laneproduces evidence to show that between 1972 and 1994 there has been adecline in “very happy” responses to surveys by about five percentage points.During the same period the “very satisfied” response in respect of people’s jobsand housework has also declined by a similar percentage. Similarly, thepercentage of people “pretty well satisfied” with their financial situation hasalso declined. Between 1973 and 1994 the percentage of those who felt “veryhappy” declined by six points, as did the percentage of these who felt “prettywell satisfied” by their places of residence. The evidence of a similarphenomenon in other market democracies is patchy. Evidence is produced from10 countries about lifetime rates of major depression, which shows that theyoung are falling victim to depression. Among the countries where this ishappening are Italy, France, Canada, West Germany and the US. It so happensthat, of these countries, the US has the lowest rates of depression and the Parisregion has the highest. Beirut (Lebanon), Puerto Rico, South Korea andTaiwan are the other countries included in this survey, perhaps because of theavailability of data. Apart from in Beirut, where the rates of depression areunderstandably high, given the country’s unfortunate experience with civil warand Israeli invasion and occupation, depression rates elsewhere are pretty low.From another survey it appears that the US ranked tenth among 23 countries –below Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Britain and Australia, and justahead of Norway, France and Germany. But these data related to 1980, so aquestion mark remains about whether unhappiness has really increased.

Let us turn now to why and how the market makes people unhappy.Professor Lane analyzes this issue under three main headings. First, “the marketeconomics require that most of the population enter careers that demand fortheir gratification some love of money” and it is his judgment that materialists– economic men – who are endowed with the qualities that economics assumesare the characteristics of winners tend in fact to be losers from the start. Thedifficulty here is, as pointed out by a cross-national study of subjective well-being by Diener and Diener, that materialism is more characteristic of poorcountries than richer ones. If this is so, materialism has other origins and issustained by other considerations, and the market system is only partially to beblamed for it because it is obvious that the market system is far less developedin the poorer countries than in the richer ones. And not to be too harsh on theworld’s most market-oriented economy, one must mention that the percentageof people reporting that “getting rich” was their most important goal in life wasthe lowest in Britain and highest in Japan, with the US somewhere in between.If unhappiness or a diminution in subjective wellbeing has happened in the US,materialism, supposedly nurtured by the market mechanism, is only one sinner.

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Professor Lane does not, it seems, think that poverty amidst plenty,exploitation, greed or avarice, “while they may be all true”, contribute tounhappiness. His second indictment of the market economy is on othercomments. The problem is (a), that the one source of happiness that is withinthe power of markets to give – money – is losing its power to make peoplehappy, and (b), that the principal sources of happiness and unhappiness aremarket externalities that markets may ignore, or make better or worse withoutendogenous correction. Let us take (b) first. Professor Lane’s focus is on thelabor market. He questions the assumption generally made by economists thatwork is disutility for which income and consumption are the compensationutilities and argues that even in the market economy this is often, perhapsusually, not true. However, the pleasantness and security of work are external-ities in his view because worker satisfaction has almost no effect onproductivity and because worker compensation does not compensate forunpleasantness and dirtiness of work. It is difficult to reconcile this view withthe lack of concern about exploitation that Professor Lane displays.Unhappiness among workers seems to come more from the lack of security,which of course the market does not insure, and the possibility ofunemployment, which the market also does not guarantee. To turn to (a), it isdifficult to accept that income, even in the rich countries, has reached a pointwhere it is subject to diminishing marginal utility. In a survey of “veryimportant aspects of money” the respondents listed “security”, “being able tohelp children”, “comfort”, “freedom” and “pleasure”. Given that monetaryincome can help achieve so many different objectives, it is difficult to see thatthe population of any country – naturally more so in the lesser-developedcountries – has reached a point where they are ready to sacrifice income. Afterall, nearly a third of the US population is below the poverty line. The poor doadvance in wellbeing as income increases and Professor Lane sees hope that theeducated classes might escape “into a post-materialist world of friends andideas”. May it not also be that the materialist middle – it is not clear whetherthis middle consists of the uneducated and whether materialism is notsomething which even the educated may suffer from – would also wish to livelife at a stage beyond bread alone?

People in the democracies seem to be victims of disappointment, suffer fromweariness with democracy, and what observers call alienation, cynicism and,more generally, negativity. The decline in trust in the US government may begauged from a recent report that says that some 54% of the people say that it isno longer “of, by, and for the people”. Professor Lane documents this: between1964 and 1992 the number of people who said that governments pay attentionto the people “a good deal” has been continuously declining. Professor Lanetraces the causes of the growth of this political negativity on a philosophicallevel and does not deal with such mundane questions as to why a democratic

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government can be so out of touch with the people. Nor does he look into thenexus between political and business power. Lobbyists and special interestgroups are not under scrutiny or examination.

If the institutions, market and parliamentary democracy – the institutionsthat have allegedly brought about the end of history – do not maximize humanwellbeing, where do we go from here? Professor Lane offers the idea of acompanionate democracy. In his view, wellbeing, human development andjustice are three competing ultimate goods, no one of which is sufficient for atheory of democracy. The problem may be that the people are not always thebest judges of their wellbeing. For a culture change we need what Keynes saidultimately rules the world – idea; Professor Lane suggests an agenda for theacademic world. For the economist the search should be for a “better theory ofmeasured utility” which might help turn the apparatus of economic analysis tothe purpose of improving wellbeing. Political theorists are called on to reducetheir extended moralizing to make room for something as prosaic as wellbeing.Psychologists, biologists and neuroscientists are called on to join in seeking tounderstand how institutions influence pain and pleasure. The permanentproblem of humanity – as Keynes said, of trying to learn how to live well –remains unresolved and every institution in human society must remain underconstant scrutiny and reform. History has not ended; the search for a humanesociety has not ended.

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