The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-being
William Davies
Verso
Political economist and sociologist William Davies begins this fascinating survey of happiness management with a concrete example: the most recent World Economic Forum. The conference epitomised a culture of lifehacks and self-optimisation, focusing just as much on improving well-being as bettering fiscal affairs, and providing ‘a glimpse of a future in which all behaviour is assessable in terms of its impact upon mind and body’. Rather than tackling the generic ideas of positive psychology, this book specifically traces how human happiness is measured via these psychosomatic strategies. In accessible, anecdotal style, Davies sketches a comprehensive history of happiness promotion. He locates the primary impetus in 19th century utilitarianism – specifically in its confidence that social, political and economic ills could be solved by controlling ‘positive’ emotions as the ‘common good’ – and moves through more modern contexts of consumer decisions, political policy and neuroscientific and social media analytics.
It would be easy for this work to slide into overly paranoid theories of surveillance, overly conservative anxieties around government interference or overly simplified theses of manufactured docility through the ‘opiate’ of happiness. After all, some of the more disturbing strategies mentioned include CCTV smile recognition and ‘nudging’ techniques for outright civic manipulation. Davies does conclude that societal preoccupation with individual feelings and choices inevitably leads to complacent, if not complicit, citizens. But the book succeeds in maintaining a nuanced, multi-perspectival approach, and finally hints at alternative moral and social ways to understand well-being, around and outside of corporate and governmental design.
Words: Gill Moore
