The fruits of globalisation - employment and economic growth - do not necessarily bring more happiness, writes Michael O'Sullivan
Over the past five years Ireland has consistently ranked in the top group of most globalised countries. The AT Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine globalisation ranking, released this week, placed Ireland in fourth place behind Singapore, Switzerland and the US.
The picture of Ireland that emerges from the AT Kearney/Foreign Policy reports is of an economy very much open and attuned to the flow of trade and investment, but one that is only moderately globalised in political and technological terms. The uneven nature of globalisation in Ireland is consistent over the past four years and is underlined by the fact that Ireland is an outlying country when measures of human development (i.e. education spending) are matched against its high overall globalisation ranking.
This lop-sided quality to globalisation in Ireland, which is confirmed by other reports such as the UN Human Development Report, begs the question as to whether globalisation is making us happier, as well as better off.
Indeed, the release of the AT Kearney/Foreign Policy study comes at a time when happiness is enjoying a revival as a topic of interest to economists.
One of the clear conclusions of the literature is that with the exception of those on very low incomes, more money does not make people more happy.
Unemployment, and to a lesser extent inflation are the main economic variables that cause unhappiness, while health and family life (especially a good marriage) are key determinants of a happy life.
Transparent political systems that encourage active citizenship are also found to increase happiness. In this respect, the drop in unemployment from 17 per cent to close to 4 per cent over the past 20 years as well as the taming of inflation globally, are the biggest contributions of globalisation to the happiness of Irish people.
At the same time, one of the reasons that rising income does not bring about a commensurate increase in happiness is that expectations change as people get wealthier, acquire more possessions, become used to certain levels of well-being and in turn compare themselves to their peers.
In this context, our growing economy and particularly its buoyant property market could challenge our sense of well-being and any presumption we have that happiness is brought about by rising wealth.
While expectations of economic growth, wages and house prices are rising across the board, actual growth in incomes and wealth has not been equally spread, and is creating rising benchmarks of wealth and achievement that many feel stretched to match.
Another area that lends support to the view that Irish people may not be as happy as some surveys suggest is health. The rise in suicides in Ireland is now well-known, and it is a sad, but perhaps unsurprising coincidence that rising wealth in Ireland is associated with a rise in suicides over the past 15 years. The concentration of suicides around the young male category; the section of society most challenged by rising expectations of what they can produce and how they must behave, seems to be closely related to the trend of globalisation.
Moreover, physical health, as measured by the incidence of heart disease, infant mortality, cancer, alcohol consumption or indeed obesity remains at levels far in excess of EU averages, again suggest that more is not better.
These trends show that more imaginative healthcare policies are needed to combat the range of health problems in Ireland.
Spending on healthcare in Ireland as a proportion of total social protection expenditure and GDP is not low by comparison to other European countries, though there is a strong consensus that the quality of public healthcare in Ireland does not reflect this expenditure, suggesting that a serious rethink in overall healthcare policy is required.
Overall, there are aspects of Irish society, such as political stability and family life that contribute to a happy society. What globalisation has done is to end unhappiness, primarily by eliminating unemployment. However, if Ireland is true to the findings of the economics literature on happiness, rising incomes are not guaranteed to make Irish people much happier, and in fact are more likely to lead to dissatisfaction and stress as people compare themselves to their peers, and to the costs associated with maintaining certain standards of living.
While an increasing number of commentators internationally are calling for public policy to be focused more on the notion of happiness and less on income growth as a policy goal, this argument is not a novel one.
The late JK Galbraith's well known book, The Affluent Society, proposes that in wealthy societies too many productive resources are devoted to goods which ultimately do not contribute to the quality of life, and too few to important public resources (i.e. education and healthcare) that would. This trend seems to describe life in Ireland today.
Michael O'Sullivan is author of Ireland and the Global Question, published in July by Cork University Press