How to Promote Happiness

I found an interesting post in a famous American blog, Freakonomics Blog, "The secret of Happiness". Today I'll introduce it and my thought about it to you. Here's the excerpt:

Among the most intriguing happiness theories I've come across,... asserts that the citizens of Denmark are happier than their European counterparts, even though they rank high in the kind of things that are typically affiliated with a low happiness rank, like bad weather, bad food, and high alcohol consumption. So what’s their secret?

Low expectations. ... If you’re a big guy, you expect to be on the top all the time and you’re disappointed when things don’t go well. But when you’re down at the bottom like us, you hang on, you don’t expect much, and once in a while you win, and it’s that much better.”

This theory makes sense to me, just as it makes sense that people who earn a few thousand dollars more than their colleagues say they are happier than if they were earning more money but less than their colleagues. As with many things in life, relative happiness may be far more important, or at least measurable, than absolute happiness.

This is a very interesting post. When I saw this, I wondered if the government could promote the people's happiness by using the policy tools. How can it do that? Is this a ridiculous imagination, isn't it?

Happiness is, in my view, thought to be greatly related to an economic gap between the poor and the rich, as once John Kenneth Galbraith, an American economic thinker, wrote in the book, "The Affluent Society". Some politicians in Japan say that the most serious economic problem we now face is an increasing economic gap. Certainly many people dislike to find their income lower than their neighbors and tend to think that an economic gap is a problematic issue.

But this wouldn't be always the problem that harms our social life.(Some economic researches report that a widespread economic gap would cause a decreasing economic growth and our welfare, however.*1)

I wouldn't like to conclude here that an increasing gap leads to lower economic growth and it is the most serious problem, because this view depends greatly on either how the economic model will be built or what people value more in their society. If our policymakers were worried about how happy we were, they might try to decrease an income gap among us by manipulating the tax system as long as our happiness was more related to an income gap. However, if our wise policymakers found out that happiness was not related to an income gap but, for example, low expectations, they might try not to remedy the gap but to force the people to get satisfied with their present social life by controlling the minds as once conducted in most Socialist countries.

When I hear the voices that our policymakers should try to remedy the income gap, for what should they do? For our happiness? It is very unclear, I think. If it is for happiness, should they remedy the gap? After all, can the policy promote our happiness?

*1 A quotation from the Wikipedia:
Robert Barro wrote a paper arguing that inequality reduces growth in poor countries and promotes growth in rich ones. A number of other researchers have derived conflicting results, some concluding there is a negative effect of inequality on growth and others a positive. Patrizio Pagano's research suggested that inequality had a negative effect on growth while growth increased inequality.