Climate, Cash, and Culturally Embedded Happiness

Abstract

(from the chapter) Like all warm-blooded species, humans can be frozen or boiled to death. As an evolutionary consequence, we tend to feel at ease in temperate climates and under threat in colder-than-temperate or hotter-than-temperate climates. As a further consequence, it makes sense to expect global inequality in happiness as a result of differences in climate. As a final consequence, this inequality in happiness poses a problem if we buy Jeremy Bentham's moral philosophy that we should create the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The problem reads: What would it take to make all earthlings happy? This chapter tells the fairy tale of that seemingly silly question, a stupid search for clues in terms of climate, cash, and culture, and the happy ending of a wise answer. In this chapter I elaborate on these relations between distinct climato-economic habitats and culturally embedded happiness. Borrowing from leading cross-cultural psychologists, I define culture as a rich complex or syndrome of values, evaluations, and practices passed on and changed from generation to generation in a nongenetic way. Happiness is seen as a component of national culture, broadly defined as the degree to which a country's inhabitants evaluate positively the overall quality of their lives, In this chapter I use happiness interchangeably with terms such as life satisfaction, subjective wellbeing, and perceived quality of life. My widely accepted point of departure from other psychologists is that large and stable cross-national differences in culturally embedded happiness vary only moderately in response to current events. The first section of this chapter introduces the joint influence of climatic demands and monetary resources as climato-economic roots of happiness. The next section discusses a study across 77 nations showing that poor societies in demanding climates evolved cultures around happiness; rich societies in demanding climates evolved cultures around happiness; and societies in poor and rich countries with temperate climates evolved cultures with moderately happy members. As a by-product of this research, the third section reports estimated baselines of culturally embedded happiness for 178 nations. The chapter ends with some hope for the future, by sketching four future scenarios for creating culturally embedded happiness through climate protection and poverty reduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)