Thinking about Happiness

During a golf game, the Deputy Minister for Finance Indonesia, Mahendra Siregar, turned and half jokingly asked me, "Do you know the difference between Singapore and Indonesia?". He explained, "Both our people love to complain, but in Indonesia they remain happy." We laughed. Given the politics in Singapore, we both realised there was much truth in what he said.

Singaporeans are an unhappy lot. In spite of topping the world in a series of league tables - including being one of Asia's wealthiest countries - in December 2012, Singapore attained the dubious honour of being Gallup's most unhappy country in the world. In contrast, Indonesians by and large are a happy lot, far happier than the average Singaporean, even though materially they have much less and the problems they face are potentially much more severe. Optimism and consumer confidence amongst the Indonesians are at a record high.

It is clear. There is little correlation between the general happiness of the population and material prosperity. Why? People often cite cultural reasons. Singapore is clearly more stressful. Confucian societies emphasise education excellence through hours spent on rote learning, hyper competition to walk a career path that society narrowly defines as success (become a scholar, government official, lawyer, doctor), hard work at the expense of leisure, and obedience to authority. Non-Confucian societies, like Indonesia, emphasise more of the community, of having quality family time, of being satisfied with enough rather than more, of savouring life rather than moving at 100 miles per hour. What is unsaid are social attitudes that accompany this. In many of the latter societies, people have time to smile and banter in chatter. I am always taken by how easy it is to strike up a conversation with a stranger in Indonesia as compared to Singapore, and how everyone seems to be polite and make time for each other. More recently, many have come to cite other macro factors to explain the growing unhappiness. After all Singapore was not always like this. Increasing inequality, a feature that has been made more pronounced since the onset of globalisation, is one reason. Singapore's gini coefficient is one of the highest in the world while median salaries have stagnated for over a decade. (Relative wealth rather than absolute wealth is what really matters.) Skyrocketing housing prices and the high cost of living have put the aspirations of the average citizen out of reach. The lack of social mobility - the ability of the lower class to break out of their lot - is a deep problem.

Added to this is the physical sense of overcrowding, something that clearly alters the sense of calm. One has to rush, queue, ballot, squeeze and share when they previously did not have to. The backlash against immigration is not unique to Singapore. In Hong Kong, another overcrowded territory, there is resentment against Chinese mainlanders - for their lack of sophistication, their contempt for sanitary regulations, the stampeding inflow of mainland mothers seeking to give birth in Hong Kong, thus swamping hospitals largely to secure residency permits for their offspring, and for driving up property prices. The backlash is clearly a symptom and not a cause. At the final reckoning, there is truth in both as to the cause of unhappiness. But to me the bigger lesson is that we need to look way beyond GDP/Capita as an indicator of how well we are doing as a nation.