Building the skyscraper down

The search for happiness, says author and researcher Arthur C. Brooks, often starts in the wrong place | Marvin Olasky

Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is one of the handful of statistics whizzes who are adept at not only crunching numbers but slinging words. He writes pithy columns for The Wall Street Journal and also produced two years ago a stereotype-slashing book, Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (WORLD, Dec. 9, 2006). Now he's done it again with a book published this month, Gross National Happiness (Basic).

WORLD: Do you define "happiness" as fleeting feelings, a sense of overall contentment, a sense of doing what's right, or some combination of those?

BROOKS: "Happiness" is really all of these things. We enjoy momentary happy feelings when something nice happens to us, of course. But we also calculate whether we are happy with our lives "on balance," and many people strive to live a good and moral life because we know that it will ultimately reward us in a much larger sense. What social scientists measure on surveys is the second kind of happiness—how we feel when we consider both the nice and not-so-nice things in our lives, and decide whether overall we have a happy life.