Research psychologists are also offering interesting cognitive guidance for those with adequate incomes but not adequate personal well-being. A recent “how-to-spend-it” guide by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues suggests eight specific principles to derive more happiness from income.4 First, buy experiences instead of things, since experiences (vacations, trips to the museum, concerts, dining out) offer long memories to savor. Second, and crucially, use our incomes to help others instead of ourselves, because as hypersocial animals, “almost anything we do to improve our connections with others tends to improve our happiness as well.”5 Third, buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones, in essence slowing down to smell the roses. Fourth, buy less overpriced insurance (such as product warranties), because we adjust much better to adverse shocks than we suppose. Fifth, pay now and consume later, rather than buying now on the credit card and paying later. The anticipation of a future purchase will give us anticipatory joy, which the authors call a source of “free” happiness. Impatient purchases, on the other hand, give us fleeting benefits and long-term debt. Sixth, be attentive to the details of a purchase, since they may disproportionately affect the happiness of the experience. Seventh, beware of too much comparison shopping, since it can focus our attention on unimportant distinctions. Eighth, listen to others about what can bring happiness. They can add new and useful perspectives.
The second approach might be called reflective or meditative. We are swept along today by the pseudo-urgency contrived by PR and advertising. The advertisements scream at us to buy; the presidential press conferences scream at us to invade. The mechanisms are the same: propaganda is deployed to overcome our real interests by appeals to emotion, notably to fear or sensory pleasure. Buddhists have long developed and deployed a special tool for rebalancing needs and daily sensations: meditation. This kind of mind training aims to unplug the mind from the daily sensory overload to regain a balance with longer-term needs. A related step today should be to unplug from the TV, the mobile phone, and the Facebook page. Systematically unplugging to gain quiet time and composure is a necessary step toward breaking free of many of today’s most addictive compulsions.
The third approach is practice. As Aristotle rightly emphasized, we foster virtue by practicing virtue. Virtuous qualities are self-reinforcing, just as are harmful addictions. Acts of compassion awaken our desire to be even more compassionate. The cultivated practice of increased household saving, more leisure time, increased compassionate giving, and other acts of moderation build the courage, stamina, and pleasure of virtuous behavior.
The Importance of Meaningful Work
Nearly every study of happiness underscores the importance of meaningful work to personal well-being. Unemployment is the single largest factor in the public’s unhappiness and political restiveness. Yet America’s work environment has deteriorated notably over the past quarter century. Unemployment is high and stagnant; fear of job security is pervasive; corporate malfeasance is shockingly high; and the mismatch of jobs and skills is becoming a national crisis and scandal. We need a new mindfulness of work to recover our bearings.
There are vast improvements possible in the quality of working life for average workers. American workers have little job security, no guaranteed vacation time, little flexibility regarding working hours, meager union protection, and no representation on the corporate boards regarding compensation, employment, work sharing, training, and other issues. Libertarians claim that any further worker representation in company decision making would destroy U.S. competitiveness. Yet throughout northern Europe, workers participate in corporate deliberations and often decision making, without a loss of productivity and with more creative solutions on job flexibility and vacation time.
Many European governments have also pioneered and demonstrated the efficacy of “active labor market policies,” which use government funding to match workers to jobs and to improve targeted job training for skills that are in demand. The U.S. labor market is increasingly mismatched. High-skilled workers find good jobs, while poorly skilled workers settle for poverty-level pay or fall out of the labor force altogether. The unemployment rate of college graduates is around 4 percent, but for workers with a high school education or less, the rate is three times that.6 Yet the United States is pushing more and more poorly trained young workers into the labor market and doing little to help them stay in school.
Knowledge in an Age of Complexity
Mindfulness of knowledge is an approach to life and science exemplified by the Dalai Lama. He has written and said on numerous occasions that his own belief system, Tibetan Buddhism, must always keep an open door to science and that all Buddhist doctrines are open to revision based on new scientific evidence. He has taken this pledge much further by sponsoring and attending many sessions of Buddhist monks and Western scientists, and these meetings are leading to new insights regarding the interface of neuroscience and human happiness. That kind of openness to science is urgently needed in America today.
Most Americans have little idea about the scientific underpinnings of their lives and of public debates. When they type on a computer and transmit an e-mail, they don’t realize that this seemingly straightforward action embodies some of the greatest scientific and technological discoveries of the twentieth century, including quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, optical physics, and computer science. Nor do they realize that the same laws of nature that underpin their e-mails underpin the science of climate change (e.g., the laws of quantum mechanics and optical physics that determine that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and thereby warms the planet). Nor do they realize that the basic physics of greenhouse gases, that carbon dioxide absorbs heat energy, predates the beginning of quantum mechanics by three-quarters of a century.7
The fact is that technology is so effective and well packaged in our phones, computers, seed varieties, and elsewhere that Americans can remain scientifically illiterate, and sometimes even averse to science, while at the same time benefiting from the very advances in science and technology that they blithely deny. Perhaps if we had to understand our technologies in order to use them, we’d have a remarkable spurt in scientific knowledge! Short of that, we must convince our fellow citizens that knowledge of science, and expert knowledge more generally, is vital to our well-being and even survival. Fortunately, Americans overwhelmingly appreciate science even when they don’t cultivate their own knowledge of it. Eighty-four percent of Americans in a recent Pew survey “see science as having a mostly positive effect on society.”8
The mindfulness of knowledge, therefore, properly begins with the recognition of the complexity of our economy and the need for scientific and technical expertise to help manage it. With 7 billion people trying to gain or to maintain a foothold of prosperity on a crowded planet already under unprecedented ecological stress, only advanced technologies—such as high-yield food production, renewable energy sources, sophisticated recycling of industrial materials, and efficiency of resource use—can hope to cope. Perhaps with several billion fewer people on the planet, we could contemplate a reversion to simpler lives. Such hopes today, however appealing they are to some people, are an anachronism. We will have to work hard and fast, and with the best technological tools, to achieve a planet that is prosperous, fair, and sustainable.
One well-meaning variant of antiscience is the illusion that we should revert to simpler ways: all-organic farming, local foods, and preindustrial knowledge. Yet these are illusions as great as denial of climate change. Preindustrial knowledge could support only around one in ten of the planet’s residents today. At this point in human history, we have no choice but to try to live effectively with advanced technologies and to understand them, govern them democratically, and try to ensure that they serve broad human purposes.
Mindfulness of knowledge assuredly does not mean leaving all matters to the experts. Experts do agree on many things, but they have no special talent to make critical choic
es for all of us when it comes to social values, risks, and priorities. They have their own biases and special interests, and certainly their own blind spots as well. Mindfulness of knowledge therefore requires not only respect for expertise but also respect for democratic governance. We need to identify new ways for the public to share in complex problem solving, advised by experts but with the citizenry given a central role in shaping its own future.
The federal government has done a notably poor job in recent years of encouraging an informed debate about complex policy options. The health care debate during 2009–2010, for example, was held largely behind closed doors. Aside from a few designated experts who participated in the backroom policy deliberations, America’s large and talented public health community mostly watched from the sidelines, as did the general public. Even for me, a professor in a major school of public health, the twists and turns of the deliberations were mostly baffling. So many powerful interests were at play that honest opinion was never spoken.
Reviving Compassion
The most difficult challenge in America today is mindfulness of others. The social safety net is frayed. The poor are suffering while the politicians discuss cutting the social safety net even further. Mindfulness of others is typically far stronger within an in-group than across racial or ethnic divides. Religious fundamentalists, for example, are more likely to harbor racist sentiments than are adherents to mainline religious denominations. Sociologists have long surmised that the greater racism among white evangelical Protestants reflects the stronger in-group bonds within fundamentalist religious families and communities.9 The problem has been exacerbated by the residential stratification of the society. As we have noted, the nation has increasingly sorted its communities according to race, class, and even political ideology. Any kind of realistic understanding of the lives of “different” others has suffered accordingly.
I have already discussed the American “poverty trap.” The result is a system of handouts, in which the poor are not helped enough to overcome poverty but just barely enough to survive in poverty. Thus, a society that disdains handouts ends up living by them rather than promoting true solutions with lasting value.
Instead of these endless meager handouts and ancillary high social costs (such as crime and punishment), a society truly mindful of others would address the needs of the poor in a way that attempts to end the poverty trap rather than simply to react to it. Yet in the short term that would require more public funding so that poor children of this generation could enjoy the benefits of a healthful diet, quality preschool and public school, and assured access to higher education enjoyed by the children of more affluent households. They would then be much more likely to grow up with higher skills and incomes, able to impart those same benefits to their own children. The vicious circle of intergenerational poverty could thereby be ended or at least greatly attenuated. The increased funding would prove to be temporary, mainly for this generation of poor children. Their children would not need the same degree of help. The long-term costs of ending poverty would almost surely be far lower than the status quo of simply “managing” poverty.
Mindfulness of others goes far beyond the question of alleviating poverty. Americans, we have seen, have retreated from the public square to the private space, often to watch TV for hours each day in individual bedrooms, not even as a family. We have become a country of strangers. And that estrangement is accompanied by falling trust. We are, in the words of the sociologist Bob Putnam, “hunkering down,” especially in the major cities, marked by ethnic groups that don’t know and don’t trust one another.10 Markets cannot overcome the distrust. Indeed, markets have facilitated the sorting. We need new social norms and more participatory political processes—such as greater democratic decision making within local communities—to get strangers talking and working together once again.
Addressing the Ecological Overshoot
Throughout human history, ethicists and gurus have appealed to humanity to respect nature as the irreplaceable font of life and indeed to understand human destiny as part of the web of life. When the vast majority of humanity lived as farmers, the vital role of nature was obvious. The harvesting of rainwater, the cleaning of irrigation canals, and the replenishment of soil nutrients all meant the difference between life and death. Natural climatic variations, such as prolonged droughts, often spelled the downfall of vast civilizations. Cities and entire regions had to be abandoned as life-giving waters dried up.
Our age is fundamentally different in two regards. First, today’s global society is much further removed from nature than in the past. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, cut off from the daily realities of nature. This is especially true of the world’s rich and powerful elites. Second, and even more dangerous, the human impacts on nature are for the first time in human history so great that they threaten the planet’s core biophysical functioning. We have reached, or will soon reach, dangerous thresholds of human activity that fundamentally threaten life on the planet.
Mindfulness of nature, therefore, is not a tree hugger’s plea but a practical imperative for twenty-first-century survival. Our peril is unprecedented, and human knowledge, values, and social institutions are far behind the curve. The global economy has suddenly become so large—$70 trillion a year and doubling in size roughly every twenty years—that the earth’s air, water, land, and climate are all under threat. Our global response to date has been so obtuse, so absurd, so shortsighted that it almost seems that humanity has a death wish. This ignorance and shortsightedness can lead us to disaster. Of course, more than a death wish has been at play; the greed of powerful vested interests has been far more consequential than public confusion and shortsightedness.
The American performance in the face of ecological dangers is especially sobering. Americans impose the highest per capita impact on the planet yet show the least regard for their actions. The UN climate change treaty was signed and ratified by the United States in 1992, but the U.S. Senate has refused to take even one small step since then in limiting America’s impact on climate. Many American senators are notoriously and aggressively ignorant or dismissive about the science, such as Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, who described human-induced climate change as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”11 Politicians may be knowledgeable but still deeply cynical, playing for campaign contributions rather than the well-being of their grandchildren. They are ready to close their eyes to the looming disaster rather than earn their pay by explaining the tough realities and difficult policy choices to their constituents and to the Big Oil and Coal interests that fund their campaigns.
Unfortunately, the ecological threats continue to multiply, yet America is passive and resistant to action. Market forces, alas, will never solve these threats but only exacerbate them, until society, acting collectively at last, mindfully commits to creating a protective cordon around the threatened planet.
Responsibility Toward the Future
We can’t address any of these problems if we can’t think systematically about the future. And the future extends beyond the next election. The time horizon of public deliberation in America has shrunk to an unimaginably brief scale. When we need to build infrastructure, we aim for “shovel-ready” projects. Yet infrastructure worth building cannot be shovel-ready, a fact that Obama finally acknowledged in late 2010, after championing such projects in the 2009 stimulus package. Similarly, when we go to war, we aim for a short, brief “surge” to do the job. Repeatedly, and predictably, we fall woefully short of our objectives by choosing such short-term measures.
Mindfulness of the future therefore requires a special act of will: to take moral and practical ownership of the long-term consequences of our actions and to trace those consequences as carefully as possible into the far future. One great philosopher, Hans Jonas, has argued that we need a whole new ethic for the future, since never before has a human generation held in its hands the prosperity or ruin of the generatio
ns to come.12 We profess our commitment to “sustainability,” that is, to ensuring that the future will be able to meet its needs with the knowledge, capital, and environment that we bequeath it. Yet we really don’t know what sustainability entails as we continue to plunder the planet for resources and simply hope for the best.
Taking moral responsibility for the future, accepting the reality that our actions today will determine the fates of generations yet to live, is daunting enough. Taking practical responsibility is equally difficult. We are causing enormous disruptions to the planet, but we lack the ability to trace the implications of those disruptions with precision or high scientific confidence. “Futurology” was once mocked as pseudoscience. Yet now we must make it operational, at least within the boundaries of our understanding and capacity.
The sad truth about Washington today is that we lack serious institutions charged with carrying out systematic planning for the future. The Office of Management and Budget prepares federal budget proposals one year at a time. The U.S. Treasury has little capacity or mandate to undertake long-term economic strategy. There is no coordinating agency for public investments by the federal government, nor is there a planning agency, as in many other countries. Each department or agency manages the specific investment projects under its particular jurisdiction. Issues such as energy, climate, water, demographic change, and so forth are either neglected or chopped up into the work of several different parts of the government.
The United States has several important agencies that undertake high-quality analysis of global trends. The National Intelligence Council has prepared important studies about the global challenges that will face the United States to the year 2025, most notably Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, in 2008.13 The findings were stark, suggesting that
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