By Ashley Manning
On January 22, the Dickey Center for International Understanding hosted Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who spoke about her recent book The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being. Born in Lima, Peru, Graham attended Princeton University (A.B.), the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (M.A.), and finished her Ph.D. at Oxford University before beginning work with the Brookings Institute in 1988. For the last decade, Graham’s research has focused on “happiness economics.” The Pursuit of Happiness reflects the fruits of this research, as she analyzes “happiness” in econometrics and tentative implications for policymaking.
Graham opened her talk with a pivotal issue: the difficulty of defining happiness and its many different meanings. Eventually, she breaks down the situation by focusing on two types of happiness, contrasting Bentham’s ideas of welfare and hedonic happiness with Aristotle’s idea of happiness as the “opportunity to live a fulfilling life.” Graham first began with a keen focus in Latin America, where she carried out some of the first “happiness” investigations in the continent. However, as her field continued to expand, she became involved in happiness investigations at a global level and encountered a certain consistency in results. Not only did Graham discern certain predominate factors that determine an individual’s or a society’s happiness worldwide, such as health, security, and stable relationships, but that there are correlations between happiness levels and work productivity.
Throughout the presentation Graham noted the limitations of her research, such as cultural barriers and a personality of innate happiness. Similarly, her results also reveal what she describes as the “frustrated achievers” paradox: a tendency for the poorest of society to present higher and more optimist results than the richest. Her overall results indicate that it is seen at a domestic as well as global level, with those living a comfortable economic life presenting higher levels of happiness than those in poverty.
Graham also explained the interdisciplinary nature and growing respectability of this field, which requires the combined efforts of economists and psychologists to understand the phenomena of “happiness.” The field has also resulted in Nobel-prize winning work.
Finally, Graham explored the implication of these discoveries for public policy, since such work has begun to affect policies in the UK. She personally believed in an Aristotelian definition of happiness, due to its greater potential impact in improving the quality of life and opportunities for people in both in developed and developing nations.