Happiness research

The field of happiness research is one that is easy to mock and is horribly subject to light headed projects. However, there have been some fascinating studies over the past couple of decades. There is an article, Big Brother Wants You to be Happy, by Laura Rowley in Money & Happiness, February 4, 2010. Rowley features Carol Graham's Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires. I'll provide a link as soon as we get it in. The article in general, and Graham's book in particular, frame the topic of happiness in all its glorious complexity.

Graham's book reviews the recent research on happiness (more than 100 papers were published between 2001 and 2005 analyzing self-reported happiness surveys). Generally speaking, within countries, wealthy people are happier than the destitute, but after that the relationship is complicated. Once people make a certain amount of income, comparison effects start to kick in, and then happiness depends not so much the wealth we enjoy, but how it compares to what our neighbors, co-workers or other members of our reference group have.

Cross-country studies of wealth and happiness are even more problematic. "Across countries we find that on average wealthier countries are happier than destitute countries -- but after that there's no linear relationship," Graham explains. "People in Afghanistan are as happy as people in Latin America, even though objective conditions are worse in Afghanistan. Kenyans are as satisfied with their health care as Americans."

That's because cross-country surveys are rift with mitigating factors, such as innate cultural traits. "Some of the poorer countries are very happy when you look at average per capita happiness and average per capita GDP, but you are picking up cultural differences in the way people answer surveys," says Graham. "Nigerians, Danes and Venezuelans are naturally cheerful in the way they respond. That gets muddied in cross-country comparisons."

For the real twists and turns in comprehending happiness:

And among the truly quirky findings about happiness: People report that they prefer unpleasant certainty to positive uncertainty. Consider the happiness of Americans at the beginning and late stages of the economic crisis that erupted in late 2007. "Happiness levels were higher in June 2009 than in January 2008, although living standards were markedly higher in 2008," says Graham. That's because in early 2008 no one knew the size of the economic storm the country was sailing into, Graham suggests.

Between January 2008 and June 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by roughly 30 percent, and unemployment had nearly doubled to 9.5 percent, but "the same respondents assessed living standards as better in June 2009 than January 2008," says Graham. "The idea is, 'I'm poorer than I was before, but now I know what I've got to deal with.'"

Graham has found a similar phenomenon in fast-growing economies: People prefer stability to break-neck growth. When a country such as Brazil experienced double-digit growth, "that was a very destabilizing experience," says Graham. "Things are changing rapidly, rewards are changing; people around you are making big gains, so even if you're gaining it doesn't seem to be as much. The uncertainty bothers you."

Pick them up again and tack them on where they were not at all needed

From Jack Corbett Mariner by A.S. Hatch and obtainable through www.jackcorbett.com with all proceeds going to the New York City Rescue Mission.

Jack's peculiarities of speech became more pronounced, and the Irish brogue, mixing with the cockney dialect he had picked up in English ships and about the Liverpool and London docks, which was at other times less noticeable, asserted itself more distinctly when he was deeply moved. The cockney features of his dialect were intermittent. Sometimes he would drop his h's all about in a most promiscuous and reckless way and pick them again up and tack them on where they were not at all needed; while at other times - in the same sentence perhaps - he would keep them where they belonged.

Herodotus and Chesterton on Travel and Customs

Herodotus, the father of history and raconteur extraordinaire had this observation to offer after all his travels around the ancient world.

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their relative merits, choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country.

Which makes me think of G.K. Chesterton's observation in this post, ending with:

A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.

Jack Corbett Mariner

Just completed a wonderful little gem of a book. Jack Corbett Mariner by A.S. Hatch can be obtained via www.jackcorbett.com with all proceeds going to The New York City Rescue Mission. A.S. Hatch was one of the wealthy bankers of the gilded era of American commerce when fortunes were being made through finance, industrialization and national expansion (including railroads and canals). Hatch's origins were humble and provincial. He was born in 1829 in Vermont to a country doctor.

Slight and asthmatic, his father recommended that he ship as a sailor, which experience would either "cure him or kill him". Clearly someone had been reading Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (published 1840). In 1849 Hatch came to New York to find a suitable ship. While lodging in seaman's quarters along the harbor front, he struck up a friendship with an older sailor, Jack Corbett. Corbett took Hatch under wing, found a well captained and crewed ship and encouraged Hatch to sign on. They shipped in a Liverpool packet, the ships of the period that carried miscellaneous cargo to Britain but made their primary money by bringing the tens of thousands of emigrants (particularly refugees of the Irish potato famine) to America on the return voyage.

Corbett looked out for Hatch and taught him all that he needed to know to be a competent sailor and more importantly to survive the perilous duties of a sailor of the north Atlantic in the winter. Hatch and Corbett became separated after that first voyage. Hatch ended up making two voyages. He then went on to make his fortune as a banker and financier.

Thirty years passed before an aged Corbett found Hatch and made contact with him again. Hatch took him on as a family retainer, general handyman, and life guard of his eleven children.

In his later years, Hatch wrote up an account of his early sailing days and his adventures with Corbett. The manuscript knocked around the family for a century or so before his grandson, Denny Hatch, prepared it for publication. Apparently it only required light editing. This is quite remarkable as the language feels almost contemporary. In this regard it is not dissimilar to Clarence Day's Father books or Frank Gilbreth's Cheaper by the Dozen.

Touching, informative of an often overlooked but fascinating period of American history, and simply a compelling read, this is to be recommended to any adult and YA interested in history, maritime tales, or anyone prepared to be touched by a very human story.

The dedication by Hatch gives you a flavor of the book:

To JACK Who was my rough but tender guardian and mentor amid the hardships and perils and in the unaccustomed duties of my first voyage at sea: who afterwards became a humble but useful member of my household ashore and the faithful playmate and protector of my children in their aquatic sports and who died in my arms this book is affectionately dedicated.

Books and Religion

I came across this painting which I find fascinating. Painted in 1509 by Jean Bellegambe (active from 1504-1534), this triptych is titled The Le Cellier Altarpiece and is held by the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York City.



It is the centerpiece which caught my eye. This is believed to have been painted in 1509, seventy years after Johannes Gutenberg's initial invention of the printing press in 1439.




Look at all the books in this scene. Only seventy years. This seems to capture early evidence of that delicate tipping point where books, rationality and broad based discourse substantially intersected with a predominately religious world view. The painting is beautiful in its own right (I particularly am attracted to the use of colors, the light and the architectural sense of perspective) but it seems to be a harbinger as well.

Define: Mithridatism

Mithridatism, from a review by Tom Holland in Literary Review, January 2010.

What really made Mithridates's name, though, and has ensured its commemoration in a whole host of European languages, was his mastery of poisons. The English word 'mithridatism', meaning 'the practice of systematically ingesting small doses of deadly substances to make oneself immune to them' , is to this day a fitting tribute to his toxocological obsessions.

Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: mith·ri·da·tism
Pronunciation: \ˌmith-rə-ˈdāt-ˌiz-əm\
Function: noun
Mith·ra·da·tes VI Eu·pa·tor \ˌmith-rə-ˈdāt-ēz-ˈsiks-ˈyü-pə-ˌtȯr\ (died 63 BC), king of Pontus. Mithradates the Great ruled from 120–63 BC. A great military leader, a brave warrior, and a cunning politician, he was one of the few serious threats to Roman domination in the ancient world. A revolt of his own soldiers led him to attempt to take his own life. According to legend, he was ever suspicious of treachery, so he had consumed doses of poison in increasingly greater amounts in order to build up a tolerance. When he vainly sought to commit suicide, he found that he had become totally immune to poison. He finally resorted to ordering a follower to stab him to death.

We are a living metaphor

From the New York Times, February 1, 2010, Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally.

Turner and the Cayman Trough

A.C. Grayling, Where no one has gone before, in the August 23, 2008 edition of the Spectator on the excitement of exploration and imagination.

As Turner saw, a society that explores is in little danger of becoming stale. That applies to a society's collective intelligence as well as its scientific muscle: they both need to be challenged and exercised. Like all front-line science, the Autosub6000 project is good news because it takes us to a genuine frontier, with all the promise it offers.

Avoiding the Wide World

From The Spectator, December 19, 2009. Avoiding the Wide World by Susan Hill. An interesting discussion about one of the more wonderful of our children's classics, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, by one of the most quietly striking authors of today.

In 1903, a shocking incident took place at the Bank of England, where the soon-to-be author of one of the most magical of all children's books was then Secretary. A man had walked in from the street asking to see the Governor but had to settle for Grahame. He held out a roll of paper with two ribbons tied round it, one black, one white, and asked Grahame to pull either one. Grahame chose the black and when he pulled it the man took out a shotgun and fired three times at Grahame. Every shot missed.

Kenneth Grahame had never much cared for the Wide World and now he retreated into the past, the idyll, as he remembered it, of the years he spent as a child living with his grandmother in the beautiful Thames-side village of Cookham Dean. In fact, those years were a mere two, but any perfect period of time has no limit, it expands in the memory and those happy, carefree days with his siblings spent playing around the river are at the heart of Grahame's classic story.

To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century .

From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the printed word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.