According to this author, there's plenty of research tying happiness to economic freedom and labour mobility. We need to chase our tails, as the author asserts, rather than stopping to smell the roses, if we want to be happy.
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/33639--books-why-chasing-money-and-success-makes-us-happy
Books: Why chasing money and success makes us happy
A few years ago, Todd Buchholz started researching a new book. A decorated Harvard economics instructor, a former White House policy adviser, and the author of bestsellers like Market Shock and New Ideas from Dead Economists, Buchholz found himself surrounded by people he deemed to be seeking tawdry material gain at the expense of real quality of life. He believed that the "frenzy" of modern life was stressing us out, creating an almost structural unhappiness in North American society.
Popular opinion seemed to support his premise, with a wave of recent tracts arguing that even a strong economy made us miserable. Buchholz's was to be another voice in the chorus arguing that we cheat our true selves when we compromise happiness in the quest for a raise, a promotion or the next big deal.
That book never got written. As he researched his subject, exploring economics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Buchholtz became convinced that much of the modern happiness project was a crockânot just unhelpful economically, but unhealthy and unnatural. What he's written instead is Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race (Hudson Street Press), and it couldn't have landed further from its author's original concept.
To be fair, Buchholtz isn't exactly a recovering socialist utopian; he's a hedge fund manager, and his White House service came under Bush 43. But he's only recently come to the belief that competition is actually "integral to our beings," in contrast to the preachings of what he calls the "Edenists." "We feel a natural yearning to go back to simpler times, to some Eden that exists in our Jungian memory," he writes. But the burgeoning happiness industry takes that yearning and twists it into a belief that "if we could just stomp out competition, we could achieve self-realization and bliss."
The notion of measuring the GWBâgeneral well-beingâalongside the GDP, once the near exclusive province of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, has recently gained traction with David Cameron's Tories in Britain. Meanwhile, the body of literature analyzing and measuring happiness is growing and increasingly popular: from 1991 to 1995, Buchholtz writes, there were just four economics papers published on the topic; between 2001 and 2005, more than 100 appeared. Most of this research backs what happiness gurus have been telling us since before R. H. Tawney wrote about The Acquisitive Society a century ago: that the constant pursuit of more and better stuffâhigher salaries, privilege and the baubles that accompany successâdoesn't result in increased happiness.
Fine, says Buchholtz. But on both policy or personal fronts, there's no real argument those things make us unhappy, either. If anything, there's plenty of research tying happiness to economic freedom and labour mobility. And in individual jobs, he writes, happiness has more to do with personal control than with compensation. "Someone who earns peanuts at the zoo, but who decides when to feed the elephants and when to take his own break, may be happier thanâ¦the harried dentist who has to ask his office manager when he can slip out to the bathroom."
What we're naturally inclined to do with that personal control, in professional and entrepreneurial settings as well as in private life, is to get things done. On a biological level, Buchholz believes, happiness is linked to achievement. "The truth is, most people have a deep need to work and to create."
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http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/33639--books-why-chasing-money-and-success-makes-us-happy
Books: Why chasing money and success makes us happy
A few years ago, Todd Buchholz started researching a new book. A decorated Harvard economics instructor, a former White House policy adviser, and the author of bestsellers like Market Shock and New Ideas from Dead Economists, Buchholz found himself surrounded by people he deemed to be seeking tawdry material gain at the expense of real quality of life. He believed that the "frenzy" of modern life was stressing us out, creating an almost structural unhappiness in North American society.
Popular opinion seemed to support his premise, with a wave of recent tracts arguing that even a strong economy made us miserable. Buchholz's was to be another voice in the chorus arguing that we cheat our true selves when we compromise happiness in the quest for a raise, a promotion or the next big deal.
That book never got written. As he researched his subject, exploring economics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Buchholtz became convinced that much of the modern happiness project was a crockânot just unhelpful economically, but unhealthy and unnatural. What he's written instead is Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race (Hudson Street Press), and it couldn't have landed further from its author's original concept.
To be fair, Buchholtz isn't exactly a recovering socialist utopian; he's a hedge fund manager, and his White House service came under Bush 43. But he's only recently come to the belief that competition is actually "integral to our beings," in contrast to the preachings of what he calls the "Edenists." "We feel a natural yearning to go back to simpler times, to some Eden that exists in our Jungian memory," he writes. But the burgeoning happiness industry takes that yearning and twists it into a belief that "if we could just stomp out competition, we could achieve self-realization and bliss."
The notion of measuring the GWBâgeneral well-beingâalongside the GDP, once the near exclusive province of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, has recently gained traction with David Cameron's Tories in Britain. Meanwhile, the body of literature analyzing and measuring happiness is growing and increasingly popular: from 1991 to 1995, Buchholtz writes, there were just four economics papers published on the topic; between 2001 and 2005, more than 100 appeared. Most of this research backs what happiness gurus have been telling us since before R. H. Tawney wrote about The Acquisitive Society a century ago: that the constant pursuit of more and better stuffâhigher salaries, privilege and the baubles that accompany successâdoesn't result in increased happiness.
Fine, says Buchholtz. But on both policy or personal fronts, there's no real argument those things make us unhappy, either. If anything, there's plenty of research tying happiness to economic freedom and labour mobility. And in individual jobs, he writes, happiness has more to do with personal control than with compensation. "Someone who earns peanuts at the zoo, but who decides when to feed the elephants and when to take his own break, may be happier thanâ¦the harried dentist who has to ask his office manager when he can slip out to the bathroom."
What we're naturally inclined to do with that personal control, in professional and entrepreneurial settings as well as in private life, is to get things done. On a biological level, Buchholz believes, happiness is linked to achievement. "The truth is, most people have a deep need to work and to create."
More