This book in a nutshell:
Instead of fixing unhappy people we should fix the system that makes people unhappy.

What if, instead of working on our own selfish happiness, we should be focusing our unhappiness outward — at the way society is unfolding? Most, specifically, the uneven distribution of wealth and the lack of a voice in the world’s proceedings?

This is the basic premise of this book, which looks at the history of, and current emphasis on, happiness research.

The first 30% of the book is dry, but if you plug through the historical figures, you’ll find a lot of gems. There are a lot of facts to support the notion that society needs “happy” citizens in order to continue running “smoothly.”

Depression, and other mental illness, costs our unjust society a lot of money. The people in power are concerned about finding it and rooting it out, because a depressed person is not a big spender. A depressed person does not have the energy to play the game. People who are “mentally withdrawn from their jobs… cost the US economy as much as $550 billion a year. Disengagement is believed to manifest itself in absenteeism, sickness, and — sometimes more problematic — presenteeism, in which employees come to the office purely to be physically present. A Canadian study suggests that over a quarter of workplace absence is due to general burn-out, rather than sickness.”

The antidepressant industry, the DSM, and the APA are, according to this book, very close friends. Drug companies helped qualify depression as a “disease” so the FDA would approve of medicines (its drugs) to treat it. General unhappiness at life became diagnosable as “depression,” to be treated with antidepressants, which are able to selectively attack the brain in a way that is not fully understood. “Nobody has ever discovered precisely how or why they work, to the extent that they do.”

But they work, and they ease the pain of being part of the 99%. “Relative poverty — being poor in comparison to others — can cause as much misery as absolute poverty, suggesting that it is the sense of inferiority and status anxiety that triggers depression, in addition to the stress of worrying about money. For this reason, the effect of inequality on depression is felt much of the way up the income scale.”
According to this book, we are being studied by marketers and psychologists who are keeping the machine running smoothly. There is a project underway, “at University of Warwick, UK, [that] has used real suicide notes to teach computers how to spot suicidal thoughts within grammatical construction.” Is that protective — or invasive? The more we voluntarily share about ourselves on the Internet, the easier it is for those gathering the information to influence us. Rage at Facebook’s algorithms and privacy violations “is a symptom of a more general anxiety regarding technologies of psychological control.”

I am having difficulty telling whether the author is paranoid, but the arguments he makes are compelling, and well-researched, and I will be thinking of this book for a while.

Overhyped. Based on the introduction and first part of the book, I had hoped the author would explore some of the grandiose existential questions around happiness and economics, however, the historical background biographies became cumbersome and overly biographical. Didn't have the patience to finish.

The largest reason why this book excels is how it uses the history of business development as its evidence. Davies identifies the players, their ideas, methods of implementation and because he is so detailed on it all his explanation of the results becomes sound. This book more than anything is advocating for the political recognition of public health and well-being showing how the structures we have that base well-being on individual "tracking" and "surveillance" are a conservative and ultimately oppressive mechanism meant only to maintain the system we have. There is no want to overhaul how we do things, we want to mold individuals en masse to be able to constantly adjust to how we do things, our government wants conformity most of all and thus all data they mine for ends with the goal of how to achieve that goal. The dominant theory is always prioritized over the actual people.

A must-read from where I stand.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being by William Davies is a historical perspective on the increasing focus on measures of happiness and well-being as indicators of success. The writing is academic in approach. It sites research and anecdotal evidence from economics, neuroscience, psychology, and management to document to the increasing industry created focus on well being.

Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/05/the-happiness-industry-how-government.html

Reviewed based on a publisher’s galley received through NetGalley

This was hard to get through, mostly because i think this is a book that actually needs to be a physical book instead of listening to it like i did but i got through it. Most of it was new to me, but i already knew governments were keeping tabs on us. How this whole keeping tabs on us started was interesting. I might have to get the physical book and re-read it again to fully understand the content but it was a good book.

Stopped reading it about 20% of the way in. I would recommend Brightsided instead.

This book wasn’t what I expected. Normally, for a nonfiction, that isn’t a good sign because people are looking for certain information, or in the very least, have the vague but vested interest in the topic and thus anticipate certain ways the book would turn out. The title suggests more of an analytic approach to today’s model of well-being investment while the majority of the book focuses on the history of how the industrial and political economy has come to invest in the notion of happiness. The last chapter (“Critical animals”) was what I imagined this entire book would be. Regardless, I really like the book, probably because this topic is relatively new to me, and it didn’t hurt to know the origin story of the happiness industry.

Davies has done justice to the development of the industrialized mental investment as he took the readers chronologically through economic, political, psychological, and philosophical perspectives to explore the topic. The structure of the book is well organized and there is a sense of consistency throughout, which helps a lot in keeping my engagement; plus, his voice is academic and formal yet easy to understand. I also appreciate the fact that he introduces many concepts (accompanied by intimidating -ism words, ha ha) and explores them in-depth as opposed to just verbosely mentioning them. His tour to the past also includes notable figures and technological development related to the topic. Although he did not tackle the premise in the way I thought he would, he was successful in a way that makes me reevaluate positive psychology and more aware of the underlining motif to well-being campaigns.

I would definitely recommend this book to everyone. If you haven’t any mistrust of the elites (ie. scientists, politicians, big corporates, etc.), you will; if you already are skeptical of how the society is designed, you will have another well-reasoned point to argue.

Book fascinating, very interesting and well-written concerning the happiness, all the studies from psychology and neuroscience that have made it a major topic and the way in which it is used, economically speaking. The weight of research on well-being in the society in which we live and happiness in strictly economic terms is something fundamental, but we often ignore it.

Libro affascinante, molto interessante e ben scritto riguardante la felicitá, tutti gli studi che a partire dalla psicologia e le neuroscienze ne hanno fatto un argomento dibattuto e il mondo in cui viene usata economicamente parlando. Il peso delle ricerche riguardanti il benessere nella societá in cui viviamo e la felicitá in termini strettamente economici sono qualcosa di fondamentale, ma che spesso ignoriamo.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND VERSO BOOKS (US) FOR THE PREVIEW!