LONDON – Al Gore, facing political defeat in an election that appears to have been stolen, certainly knows what unhappiness is. George W. Bush and his mother clearly know the contrary feeling. “Gosh,” Barbara Bush told CBS television, “It was great to be the mother of the president for 30 minutes”. Unlike the rest of her tough-blooded brood she is known as a modest woman. Perhaps that was sufficient for her. After all every sensible person knows that moments of peak happiness don’t last for much longer than half an hour anyway.

Yet high moments aside do we know what happiness is? Is the world becoming a happier place? Are we happier than our parent’s or grandparent’s generation? What could give us a little more happiness?

I recall twenty-five years ago an article on the subject published by Geraldine Norman, the art saleroom correspondent of the London Times. I haven’t seen it bettered. She had just been to Africa for her honeymoon and being a rather bookish sort of a girl took with her the Penguin introduction to psychology and books on statistical game theory, anthropology, economics and comparative religion. After all this heavy reading, no doubt interspersed with long walks up the paths that stretch aside the Victoria Falls and, I suppose, some canoodling with her new husband, she came up with six principal factors that appeared to be universal requirements for a happy life:

1) Understanding of your environment and how to control it

2) Social support from family and friends

3) Species drive satisfaction, in particular sex and parental drive

4) Satisfying of drives contributing to physical well-being- eating, sleep, exercise etc.

5) Satisfaction of aesthetic and sensory drives

6) Satisfaction of the exploratory drive- creativity, discovery and, one should add for the likes of Messrs Bush and Gore, the pursuit of political power

She then weighted these, dividing one hundred points between them, giving the most points to physical well being. “Better red than dead”, she wrote at the time of the Vietnam War. Next she looked at individual countries and, on deciding how much they had of each virtue, multiplied the total. In this somewhat arbitrary but engaging way she decided that Botswana, then a ridiculously poor country, scored higher than Britain.

Since then there have been numerous attempts to quantify happiness or, at least, progress. My favourite for the last decade has been the Human Development Index, thought up by the Pakistani economist, the late Mahbub ul Haq and brought up to date every year by the United Nations Development Programme. Essentially it tries to measure the rate of progress for countries not, as is traditional done, by looking at national income but by substituting the yardstick of quality of life. Thus momentum in improving life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy and the status of women become the key criteria. Not surprisingly, Canada, Japan and the |Scandinavian countries end up trumping the United States, the richest country in terms of average incomes.

Now comes a thoughtful analysis in the current issue of the British journal, Prospect, by an American writer, Robert Wright. Provocatively, he compares happiness in the Third World with that of the rich world. “Indonesian workers want to raise their income by moving from farm fields to Nike factories. Nike customers want, well, they want a shoe that has not just a generic “Air Sole”(old hat) but a “Tuned Air Unit” in the heel and “Zoom Air” in the forefoot.

His thesis is straightforward: “Once a nation achieves a fairly comfortable standard of living, more income brings little, if any, additional happiness.” The point where wealth ceases to imply more happiness is around $10,000 per caput annually- roughly where Greece, Portugal and South Korea are today. Therefore, in terms of psychological pay-off, the benefits of globalisation go overwhelmingly to the world’s lower classes, nations with a per capita income under $10,000.

Still, he concedes, even in wealthy societies the really affluent are a bit happier even if there is a per capita income level beyond which more money brings “declining utilitarian bang per buck”. Even so it raises the questions if making more money improves happiness even a bit why doesn’t the U.S. collectively get happier as it gets richer? The answer seems to be that what gratifies people at this level is not their absolute income but their ability to point to an improved relative position- I’m better off than Mr Jones. So in this situation one man’s gain is another man’s loss. A zero-sum game. Compare this with developing countries where as they become more educated and healthier, have better nutrition and build, as is usual with economic progress, a more democratic society more disposed to respecting human rights, they increase their happiness without reducing anyone else’s.

Of course, in the mad world we live in, fast economic progress for the poorer nations can at an early stage in development throw up problems that neutralize some of the happiness achieved- pollution, crime, abandoned children and so on. As the already rich nations discovered two hundred years ago the industrial revolution can be a cruel business. If societies are sensible -as say South Korea, Botswana and Taiwan have been and as say Brazil and Nigeria are not- they will learn some lessons from the eighteenth century experience of the rich world- most importantly to favour the development of small farmers, the education of young girls and the concentration of resources in the villages not cities.

There is a lot we now know about achieving happiness. Whether we want to apply it is a political judgement. At the moment things don’t look propitious. George Bush and his mother might momentarily be about to experience some brief personal high but neither seems to have a clue about helping make the world a happier place. Certainly a tax cut for America’s already rich is the wrong place to start.