by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week, as the House ethics committee stepped up its investigation of New York congressman Charles Rangel, I was reading Derek Bok’s latest book, The Politics of Happiness. Bok, former president of Harvard, begins his brief, detailed, and well-constructed study with a description of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan.

This tiny kingdom, tucked between India and China and as picturesque as it is inaccessible, has its own way of measuring progress. Most countries chart gross national product. Since the early 1970s, Bhutan has been measuring “gross national happiness.” Setting out to improve the happiness of its people, it has made remarkable advances in the last four decades along many fronts, including income levels.

Rep. Rangel has been serving the people of Harlem for four decades, too, but these days he isn’t making anyone happy. In March, his fellow Democrats, having promised to elevate ethics in government, stripped him of his chairmanship of the influential House Ways and Means Committee in the face of charges that he failed to report income, accepted improper gifts, and misused his office for personal gain. Now they face the unusual spectacle of a public ethics hearing on these charges just as the midterm elections heat up.

Bok doesn’t mention Rangel, though I’ll explain in a moment why he might have. His task is to examine the relatively new field of happiness research, which strives to measure public happiness in ways that the nineteenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham longed to do. These days Bentham (along with John Stuart Mill) is best known for a seven-word phrase — the greatest good for the greatest number — that is the core tenet of utilitarianism and is used today as a yardstick for doing right by millions who have no idea whom they are quoting.

Or, perhaps, misquoting. While we talk about the greatest good, Bentham in fact talked about the greatest happiness. He saw his “principle of utility” as a standard that “approves or disapproves of every action” in proportion as it can “augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” He even proposed a wonderfully curious term, “felicific calculus,” that would allow governments to assess the public felicity arising from their policies.

What got in Bentham’s way, Bok reports, is that “neither he nor his supporters could explain how to measure the intensity and duration of pleasures and pains.” Over the last four decades, however, social science researchers have begun to develop such measures. Examining their work, Bok finds it accurate enough to be taken seriously. What it tells us, he says, is that:

• The vast majority of Americans “appear to be happy most of the time,” although a recent Gallup poll put the United States in 15th place behind such happier nations as Denmark, Finland, Australia, and Canada.

• Most of the variation in happiness (aside from individual temperament) can be accounted for by six factors: marriage, social relationships, employment, perceived health, religion, and the quality of government.

• Notably missing from that list is wealth. In the last half-century, while real per capita income in the United States has risen dramatically, happiness has remained fairly constant, even among the poor. In fact, writes Bok, “psychologists report that those who attach great importance to achieving wealth tend to suffer above-average unhappiness and disappointment.”

• In contrast, the great surprise on that list is the last point, quality of government. To a remarkable degree, the research shows that people’s “trust in political leaders and … confidence in the agencies of government” are central to their happiness.

It is on this last point that Bok’s trademark judiciousness slips toward exasperation. The negative attitudes Americans hold toward government, he writes, create “a toxic situation with dire consequences for the country,” adding that “it is important to recognize how serious this problem has become.”

Given Bok’s even-tempered equanimity, this amounts to a triple-forte scream. It’s a scream that brings us back to Rep. Rangel — and to a crucial question. How do we uplift attitudes toward government, and thereby improve our gross national happiness, when some of our most senior and influential leaders appear to be unapologetically corrupt? The fact that this particular case finally is under investigation is a good start. But simply rooting out grafters one by one won’t do it. Nor will governmental reform alone elevate our happiness. What’s needed is a full-fledged effort to create cultures of integrity in our institutions — and in ourselves.

If there’s any fault with the happiness research, it is that it misses this point. So far, the research has approached its themes — marriage, relationships, employment, and the rest — as though they were the causes of happiness. But what if they are effects of a larger cause? What if they are outgrowths of a people’s deeper sense of the ethical, the virtuous, and the good — the way, I suspect, Bentham would have seen them? It took four decades for the interwoven strands of scholarly research, Bhutanese policy, and congressional finagling to show us the importance of public happiness. It needn’t take us 40 more years to understand the indissoluble link between national happiness and public integrity.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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