William Flew on Happiness

When things look bad, one set of people does well . Doommonger s are currently on such a roll they are spoilt for choice.

First, the bankers have stolen all the money and inflation is about to rob us of the future. America is sinking and China is rising, making the world so unbalanced that it threatens to topple over.

Even if that doesn’t happen, say the doomsters, we still face global warming. Though recently on the back burner of popular consciousness, fossil-fuel Armageddon is simmering away.

And if carbon emissions don’t get us, there is, well, the oil shortage. Peak oil theory may be past its prime, but petrol at £6 a gallon is surely the end of civilisation as we know it.

Another thing: how on earth are we going to feed and water a global population of 9 billion (due by 2050, according to United Nations estimates) when we only have one planet? Even Stephen Hawking recently warned that extinction looms unless we start to colonise space within the next 200 years.

Clearly we’re doomed — unless an asteroid hits Fukushima first. In which case we’re doomed slightly before we were otherwise doomed. Or maybe not. In Oxford last week thinkers and futurists gathered to discuss the “megatrends and context for large scale change”. While not underestimating the challenges, some participants were decidedly more upbeat about our prospects than you might expect.

For a start, the mega-trends of global development have so far been remarkably positive. Average life expectancy at birth across the world has risen from under 50 in 1955 to more than 65. In the UK, life expectancy for men is now 77 and for women 82 — and still rising.

Global GDP, a measure of the goods and services we produce, has rocketed since the industrial revolution from below $1,000 to $6,000 (using the dollar value in 1900), generating far more freedom in how we spend our money. In the 1790s a typical English worker spent 75% of his income on food; in 2005, it was 14%.

Technological advances have brought huge gains in that most precious commodity: time. In 1900 the typical American employee had to work an hour to pay for one kilowatthour of electricity; now he has to work for only five minutes.

Despite such gains, many people remain doubtful, even fearful, of the future. However, Mark Stevenson, author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and a participant in last week’s conference, is on a mission to counter the doomsters.

“The future doesn’t have to be about damage limitation,” he said. “It could be a renaissance. There are potentially game-changing technologies out there. What I am trying to do is put an optimism of ambition back on the table.”

It is already possible, he points out, to build “synthetic trees” that extract carbon from the air. “One hundred million such machines could offset all our global carbon emissions,” says Stevenson, who inter-viewed leading scientists around the world for his book. “That sounds like a lot, until you realise that we make 60m cars every year.”

At the same time biotechnology companies are creating bacteria that consume carbon and expel material that can be used as fuel. Bring the two kinds of technology together, Stevenson suggests, and you might one day create the “carbon-neutral petrol station”.

Nanotechnology — the science of manipulating matter at the scale of individual atoms or molecules — is another area with immense potential. “It is probably at the stage where information technology was in 1965. We have hardly scratched the surface,” he says.

Less than 50 years ago, electronic info-tech was nascent and the internet did not even exist as an idea. Nanotechnology, or “molecular engineering”, may yet create tiny machines that revolutionise what we make and how we make it. Companies are already investigating how it could transform desalination systems, a development that could see off doomsters’ predictions of future “water wars”.

What about the risk of rogue nanotechnology turning us into the “grey goo” feared by Prince Charles?

Stevenson concedes that many people are hard-wired with a “precautionary principle which says, ‘If you don’t know what is over the brow of the hill, you should approach it with a certain amount of trepidation’.” However, he also believes that science and communication have reached such a pitch that change and development are inevitable.

The solution? Embrace change, he says, and influence it constructively.

Nick Bostrom, another participant at the conference and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, takes a similar view. “A lot of the most powerful developments are ones that could go either way,” he said. “They could be dangerous, but they could be extremely helpful if we manage them wisely.”

Bostrom picks out “human enhancement” technology. He doesn’t mean breast implants. I nstead , he suggests t hat advances in medicine and biotechnology will increase lifespan and “cognitive capacity ” . Hu mans have already been improving their physical and mental attainment through better nutrition and education, he says. Biotechnology could radically speed up the process, perhaps through t he linking of brains with computers.

The “collective wisdom” made possible by social networking could also become a powerful tool. “If you want humanity to end up in a good place in the long run,” he says, “then something that improves the way we aggregate information and reach judgments could be potentially important.”

Perhaps the most likely and powerful prospect is the rise of intelligent machines. “Breakthroughs in machine intelligence could cause fundamental changes,” says Bostrom. “If you are talking about a 50-year time horizon, you can’t rule it out.”

The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil goes further. He suggests the “singularity”, when machines become more intelligent than humans, is only about 35 years away.

He sees a future in which, to use the words of Bill Gates, “technologies have advanced so far and so fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations”.

Given the rate at which computer processing power keeps increasing, such dramatic changes may be possible — though it is worth remembering that earlier futurists suggested we woul d ha v e hotels on the moon by now.

However, you don’t have to entertain seemingly sciencefictional extremes to find cause for hope. In his recent book The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley sets out two persuasive cases. First, he argues that we tend to underestimate the strides already made. While millions still face poverty and other tribulations, the vast majority of people are better fed, sheltered and protected against disease than earlier generations.

As Ridley putsit : “ This generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts . . . square feet, gigabytes, megahertz . . . bushels per acre, miles per gallon and, of course, dollars than any who went before.”

Though a rising population could pose threats to resources, there is more food per capita available than there has ever been. The fault lies in its unequal distribution.

He also argues that inventions take time to produce their greatest gains, as costs reduce and benefits spread. He cites air travel: flying off on holiday has been possible since the 1930s — but it was a luxury back then. It only became cheap enough for mass travel decades later.

Ridley’s second theme is that “ideas have sex”. The more ideas mingle, the more they evolve, helping us to shape the future and address its challenges . Here we have entered a new phase.

Bostrom says: “Most people who ever lived probably did not notice any technological change in their lifetime — you grew up and died with the same technology. We, on the other hand, expect to see a new iPhone every year.”

Today’s older generation saw the arrival , among other things, of air travel, antibiotics, computers and cloning. The next generation may see similarly bold advances.

Nor is change solely about technology . Among o t her positive themes identified at the Oxford conference were increasing personal freedoms, with the demise of various totalitarian states; progress in social equality, particularly for women; and the economic dynamism of Asia.

Though sunlit uplands may seem distant to people hunting jobs in a recession or students facing daunting fees for university, there are reas ons f or optimism. Oddly, though, a “brighter” future, even one filled with brainy robots to satisfy our every whim, may not ultimately make us happier.

Material gains have had little impact on our sense of wellbeing, judging by official surveys conducted regularly for nearly 40 years in America.

In 1972, long before today’s essential life-support systems of Facebook and mobile phones, 30% of people said they felt very happy and 53% pretty happy. In 2008 the figures were 30% and 55%. OVER the decades of economic and political change, the proportions of people seeing themselves as happy and unhappy have remained remarkably stable, averaging 32% very happy, 56% pretty happy and 12% not too happy.

Within those broad findings, researchers such as Andrew Oswald at Warwick University have identified some notable variances that, in some ways, put fears about the current economic malaise in perspective.

Yes, contrary to the popular saying, money can buy happiness — up to a point. According to Oswald’s research, an income of $100,000 a year confers slightly more happiness than being married, which, with being slim and taking exercise, is another marker of contentment.

Others argue that we are “creatures of comparison” and that what matters is relative wealth. If everyone trades up from a Ford to a Lexus, after a while no one is any happier.

Instead the most striking finding is that happiness traces an arc through life, as Lewis Wolpert, the British biologist, discusses in a new book entitled You’re Looking Very Well.

Wolpert, once a world leader in embryonic development and an emeritus professor of University College London, suffered serious depression when he was 65. Now recovered, aged 81 and content, he examines research that shows that the older you are, the happier you become.

The evidence indicates that teenage happiness turns to gloom in the forties and fifties. However, the sun re-emerges, and in their seventies and eighties people tend to be more cheerful and optimistic, even though poverty, lack of care and discrimination remain common among the elderly. Perhaps they stop worrying about the future.

Though it may be our instinct to be cautious of the unknown, the optimists suggest that human endeavour and ideas follow a form of evolution that builds on the past, producing innovation and a better future.

In his book, Ridley twice quotes the historian Lord Macaulay. In one instance, Macaulay noted: “On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

On another occasion Macaulay observed: “We see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations . . . creates faster than governments can squander and repairs whatever invaders can destroy.”