What makes you happy?

1. In pursuit of happiness -- by David Cohen

Robert Burke is a chipper-sounding former chief executive who, these days, says he feels happy to be working as an executive educator. He ought to know.

For this businessman turned Melbourne Business School faculty member, personal happiness rates highly.

Indeed, happiness has figured more and more as a theme in Burke's work with senior corporate clients during the past decade, including seminars such as this week's five-day residential gathering organised by the Mt Eliza Centre for Executive Education.

Burke's mission is to get corporate leaders to "rethink what their lives are about, at least a little bit".

"The methodology is based [on] a conversation about what it means to be a human, not as a resource but as a living person, in an organisation and in our modern society as a whole," he says.

Which is where this pesky business of happiness comes in.

Happiness, of course, is the fuzziest of human commodities, as thinkers from Aristotle on have concluded, even as it is touted as being one of life's most essential ingredients. The US Declaration of Independence goes so far as enshrining "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable human right, and the same culture churns out happiness books apace, offering starkly different ideas on what this commodity is.

Within academe, too, the "science of the smile" has become one of the decade's fastest growing intellectual industries, spawning 3000 papers to date along with a Journal of Happiness Studies and the World Database of Happiness.

From Burke's vantage, happiness is, or ought to be, about a person experiencing a sense of inner purpose and identity, and being allowed the space to ask the big questions: Who am I? How did I get to be where I am? Where do I want to be? What kind of life should I be living?

"And, of course, the question of how does one treat others," Burke adds. "Do I want to care for them or abuse them?"

If applying this to life in general remains an elusive quest, its application in the executive business environment is even more difficult. As a consequence, Burke believes, most corporate leaders and by extension their workers are, to some extent, unhappy.

Company profits, he posits, bring joy to a few but they don't necessarily inspirit many others. Even the purported happiness of getting a great bonus, he says, needs to be weighed against the frequent unhappiness of having less and less personal time to spend it or the friends and loved ones with whom to spend it. According to the self-described futurist, it seems that "although we are individually wealthier than our parents, we really are not as happy".

The issue of a work-life balance is one example he gives of the way people are rethinking their purpose and value. His view echoes that of the Australia Institute's Clive Hamilton, co-author of Affluenza (Allen & Unwin), who argues that, while today's Australian executives enjoy triple the income of the previous generation, they're only half as cheerful.

At the executive level, things only get worse, in Burke's view. "A lot of chief executives are trapped," he argues. "They have this noose around their necks, which is the pressure to perform and perform now, and to think only about silly things like sales targets and shareholder dividends."

The Melbourne educator's career trend offers a case in point. Before entering academe, he was chief executive for international giant Century Oils Australia. "At one stage we were considered the most profitable organisation of our kind in the world, at least on a per head, per employee basis," he says. "And I had all the trappings of success; I drove expensive cars, and what have you, but there was a lot lacking in my life." He wasn't happy. He was working seven-day weeks. Worse, for him, he saw little of his two children.

"I probably only ever saw my daughter play sport once," he says. "So they missed out on me and I missed out on them. Which is all too common in this kind of setting.

"I saw a lot of corporate unhappiness around me, too, a lot of which came from the fact that the systems people were using often seemed to be, I felt, amoral. We were involved in short-term gains, in which winning was all that counted. But we were losing our sense of identity, of purpose, of humanity."

As Burke points out, executive culture says that it's OK for a corporate boss to spend a couple of hours checking email on a Sunday night, but not for the same leader to take his children to see a film on Monday afternoons. "Apparently it's fine for you to take your work home but not to take your kids to work," he says.


2. Public squalor, private bling: the stuff we splash out on! -- by David Boyle

Bling, bling. It’s David Beckham’s £20,000 mobile phone -- made from diamonds, platinum and the lightweight alloy used for the space shuttle.

Corporate excesses across the Atlantic, of course, can out-bling even Beckham. Take Dennis Kozlowski, the fraudster and former Tyco chief executive who managed to spend $6,000 on shower curtains, $15,000 on an office umbrella stand, and literally millions on a birthday party for his wife, held in Sardinia around a vodka-urinating ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David.

Even I, David Boyle, am the owner of a toaster so complex that I can’t work most of the sophisticated functions flagged up by the flashing lights on its control console.

But why are we so loath to spend money on other ‘goods’ -- like less congestion, clean streets, healthy air and other goals of sustainability? There is no doubt that we want them, because we complain about not having them -- in 2001, one government attitude survey showed that a staggering 94% of us wanted stronger controls on polluting factories.

Yet, of all the possible priorities, when we have money available that could make a difference, we choose to splash out on ever flashier phones, £50 frying pans, toasters which could make the beds, or ice versions of major Renaissance statues.

‘Private affluence, public squalor’, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed it back in 1958, is a central issue when it comes to working out how to save the planet. Our chances of tackling global warming are pretty slim if we consume so inefficiently, yet baulk when it comes to paying for a congestion charge in Edinburgh -- or complain about the fuel tax, although it barely pays for half the actual cost to society of driving.

There are anthropological explanations for our fascination for material goods, because they express who we are, where we belong, and what our dreams are. There are also social explanations: private spending gives us status. Then there’s sheer habit -- plus the power of the institutions that encourage us to consume, while simultaneously limiting our choices.

‘The trouble is that we are surrounded by messages that the dream is out there,’ says Professor Tim Jackson of the Centre for Environmental Strategy at Surrey University, one of the UK’s major experts on consumerism. ‘We don’t have the right structures for people to negotiate identity, meaning and purpose. We have delegated all these tasks to consumer society and it isn’t doing a very good job at it.’

This has become known among academics as the ‘post-purchase dissonance argument’. Paradoxically, it provides a small ray of hope. When the status and meaning we think we’ll get from shopping fails to satisfy, can we find more solid satisfaction through joint engagement in the pursuit of public goods?

If our structures and social messages were different, you could imagine people finding status, dreams and a sense of self from cleaning up rivers, just as they now throw their money at ‘stuff’.

It seems to work if the threat is imminent enough. There was a real social cachet about the common good in the Second World War. A photograph in a recent exhibition in Bath ( Blitzed ) shows the Circus, one of the city’s most prestigious landmarks, in 1940, complete with an early recycling facility, divided into paper, rags, rubber, jars and bottles, tins and metal, food and bones.

It also seems to work if you are really hopelessly rich. The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie spent over $350 million on libraries and the arts. George Soros is trying to rebuild democracy personally. Bill Gates is trying to defeat Aids.

It seems to work -- at least it is beginning to -- if you can feel a little better about yourself. As much as £5.5 billion is now invested ethically in the UK. The worldwide fairtrade market is pushing $1 billion a year. There is no doubt that there is increasing demand among consumers for what they regard as ‘real’ -- organic food, complementary medicine, vintage recycled fashions, real beer. People are more aware of the value of authenticity, not just for the rich -- and one aspect of this is that products should be sustainable in some way, and preferably local and ethical too.

When getting on for 50% of the population at least understands these concepts when they buy, as now seems likely, then the glimmer of hope is rather stronger.

Sustainable Bling might also work when there are television cameras around. Sarah Beeny’s recent Channel 4 series Streets Ahead persuaded all the residents of a series of rundown streets to pool money and time to drag themselves up in the world.

But perhaps the most important proviso is that people must believe it will work.

The evidence is that people would actually be prepared to spend more to make our lives sustainable -- just as they happily changed their mind about the congestion charge in London -- if they see the change.

The problem is that they don’t trust the institutions which would make this happen, whether it is their local council or the United Nations. It isn’t that they believe politicians are dishonest -- they are just not sure they have the power. We get exhortations from government, of course. But we notice also how little they are prepared to risk or spend to make a difference, and we notice how long it takes train companies just to mend a lavatory -- and we back off.

If we could buy cleaner air off the peg in a shop, we would do it. We could try it on, take it home and insure it.

And maybe that provides a clue about a small way forward. We need a new kind of insurance product that would add a small premium to the cost of joint investment ventures -- anything from cleaning up the local park to cutting air pollution over London. It would then pay back most of people’s investment if the enterprise failed to achieve the desired result.

It is time for the financial services industry to come to the aid of the party, so that we can club together risk-free and feel confident about the greener outcome, certainly locally and maybe nationally too.

Imagine we could club together and pay for an expensive package of measures to replace the polluting school run, in the area where I live in south London -- knowing that if it didn’t work, we’d get most of our money back.

Imagine we could persuade all the bus operators in London to switch to fuel that wasn’t also boiling the planet, knowing that if our parameters of success were not met, the insurance would repay most of the investment.

Maybe there would be a spate of projects much smaller than these, but just as vital to a few people’s lives. At least then we would have the choice.

(David Boyle is the author of Authenticity and an associate at the New Economics Foundation.)


3. The Pleasure Principle: Happiness, not selfishness, as the catalyst of human behavior -- by Mark Ehrman

At the ripe old age of 92, Walter Goldschmidt, professor emeritus of anthropology and psychiatry at UCLA, continues to question what makes humans human. He's studied California farming communities, land use in British Columbia and agrarianism in East Africa. His latest work, "The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene" (Oxford University Press, 2005), points out the shortcomings of the Selfish Gene—the explanation of altruism in vogue in behavioral science—as it applies to humans. We did a little research of our own in the Brentwood hills, which this award-winning scholar calls his native habitat.

What is affect hunger and how does it explain human altruism?

I don't like the word altruism, and I don't think we are pushed to altruism. I think we're pushed to wanting to do, and get pleasure out of doing, things that turn out to be good. Mammals have to take care of their young on a one-to-one basis. Well, it's a job. But it's also a pleasure. We get pleasure out of doing these things because we have a hunger for affect. Just like we get pleasure out of eating because we have a hunger for food. And there's some chemical evidence that this satisfaction is neurological. The body produces these things, oxytocins, that are fundamentally opiates.

The Selfish Gene theory says that we engage in this kind of behavior because our genes are programmed to perpetuate the DNA. Why is this insufficient to explain human behavior?

The Selfish Gene was the phrasing of biologist Richard Dawkins for the fact that our genes are not out to protect our lives, that the ultimate aim is to make sure that your seeds could produce—whether you're a lion or an apple tree or a man. What he's saying is that the genetic process is inherently selfish. The thing about mammals and humans, in particular, is that we deny our genetic selfishness all the time. Contraception and small families are just an example. As a matter of fact, the best contraceptive is prosperity, in that people have sex to just have pleasure and don't get all their pleasure from having children. There is apparently an advantage if you can overcome this business of the selfish gene. And all of us mammals have overcome this by creating a desirableness of the social interaction.

At this point in our history, there are no pure primitive cultures left, so what do anthropologists try to study?

Anthropology was never viewed as the study of primitive cultures, it was the only discipline that did study primitive people. But it was always the study of mankind. My doctoral dissertation was on the town of Wasco, just north of Bakersfield. These were farmers. There was nothing pristine about them. I don't think there is an aboriginal people, and I don't think there ever was. When Captain Cook first discovered the people in British Columbia and southeast Alaska, they had this ritual called the potlatch. It was a ceremony in which my clan gives everything we've got to the rival clan. It started out as a very simple ceremony, and it got wilder and wilder. By the time they were discovered by Captain Cook, they had acquired steel traps so they had fur coming out of their ears. And the more they got, the more they had to give and display.

As anthropolgy, Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan" is widely regarded as a hoax. Do you regret writing the foreword to that book?

Yes, I'm a little ashamed of it, but not that much. If you read what I wrote you will see that I was not all that complimentary. What I assumed was that he had taken peyote and he was recording those experiences as if they really happened. In that sense, I thought it was true. My first paragraph reads, in part—"this book is both ethnography and allegory."

What do people in L.A. and their culture share with, say, a Mongolian herdsman on the Asian steppes?

I don't think there are cultural commonalities. If you're asking the question "What are the biological uniformities?" then they're not cultural by definition. Of course there are basic biological needs and desires, one of which is the need for affect. But what you get your Brownie points for is learning what differs from culture to culture. In the Mongolian nomads, for instance, you get judged by the amount of horses you have and the accuracy with which you can shoot an arrow from horseback.