In collaboration with

MICA (P) 031/07/2012

InternatIonal Weekly

Saturday, april 27, 2013

Copyright 2013 The New York Times

a Welfare reckoning For Danes

By SUZANNE DALEY

ANDREW RAE

An Inside Look at Happy

By ELIZABETH WEIL

SONjA LYUBOMIRSkY SAYS you have a happiness set point, partly encoded in your genes. If something good happens, your sense of happiness rises; if something bad happens, it falls. But either way, before too long, your mood will creep back to its set point because of a powerful and perverse phenomenon referred to in science as hedonic adaptation. You know, people get used to things. With her 2007 book, The How of
Happiness, and this years followup, The Myths of Happiness, Dr. Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, secured her place among happiness-industry stalwarts, from M. Scott Peck with The Road Less Traveled to Martin E. P. Seligman and Learned Optimism to Daniel Gilbert and his best-selling Stumbling on Happiness. Dr. Lyubomirskys findings can be provocative and, at times, counterintuitive. Renters are happier than homeowners, she says. Interrupting positive experiences makes them more enjoyable. Acts

of kindness make people feel happier, but not if they are compelled to perform the same act too frequently. (Bring your lover breakfast in bed one day, and it feels great. Bring it every day, and it feels like a chore.) Dr. Lyubomirsky may seem like an unlikely mood guru. I really hate all the smiley faces and rainbows and kittens, she said. She doesnt often count her blessings or write gratitude letters, even though her research suggests they make people happier. For years, worried that the study of how to increase happiness would sound too lightweight, she focused instead on categorizing characteristics of happy and un-

happy people with clinical, almost anthropological detachment. But everyone kept asking: How does it work? How can you make yourself happier? So Dr. Lyubomirsky finally turned her research toward those questions. She has found that unhappy people compare a lot and care about the results. They tend to feel better when they get poor evaluations but learn others did worse than when they get excellent evaluations but learn others did better. In one experiment, she asked two volunteers at a time to use hand puppets to teach a lesson

COPENHAGEN It began as a stunt to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is. It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-yearold single mother, given the pseudonym Carina in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the countrys full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16. Her story proved a turning point in a debate among Danes about whether their beloved welfare state, perhaps Europes most generous, had become too rich, undermining the countrys work ethic. Now Denmark is at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been suffering under austerity, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating. But Denmarks long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions people without jobs now outnumber those with them. Some of that is a result of a depressed economy. But many experts say a more basic problem is the proportion of Danes who are not participating in the work force at all. Before the crisis there was a sense that there was always going to be more and more, said Bjarke Moller, the editor in chief of publications for Mandag Morgen, a research group in Copenhagen. But that is not true anymore. There are a lot of pressures on us right now. We need to be an agile society to survive. The Danish model of government is close to a religion here, and it has produced a population that claims to be among the happiest in the world. Denmark has among the highest marginal income-tax rates in the world, with the top bracket of 56.5 percent applied to incomes of more than about $80,000. But in exchange, the Danes get a cradleto-grave safety net that includes free health care, a free university education

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