Is the improved economy really making us happier?

With Christmas coming there seems to be a return to consumerism – that’s all we need to make us happy. But, are we missing the trick? asks Fergus Finlay

So, are you happy? Optimistic, even? And if you are, why? Is it all about economics, the sign of an upturn, the hope of a better – or even more stable, medium-term future? A little more in the bank balance, a little more certainty in the job, the possibility of trading in the car for a newer model, maybe even the chance of a bit of a splurge in the shops for Christmas?

According to the news, these are the things that should be turning us all on. The headline in one newspaper this weekend was “A New Dawn”, and the story outlined the results of an opinion poll indicating that we are all much more optimistic about the future than we have been since the start of the recession.

The other day the Society of the Irish Motor Industry issued new statistics that show that new car registrations are up 30% over this time last year. More than 120,000 new cars have taken to the roads so far this year – that’s the highest number since, you guessed it, 2008.

Intriguingly, in the midst of those figures you’ll discover that the highest selling car in Ireland, so far this year and even in October, is the Volkswagen Golf. The county that saw the biggest increase in sales this year is, of all places, Leitrim, and the most popular car colour is black. As my grand-daughter Katie might say, “what’s that all about, granddad?”.

And yesterday Retail Ireland published its monitor for November, with the awkward title of “Retail’s Rebound Gathers Pace”. €2,450 – that’s what they’re expecting every Irish household to spend in the shops this Christmas – a considerable increase on last year.

“So,” they ask, “what is really feeding retail’s recovery?” And their answer is “a much improved sense of positivity and confidence among consumers and an injection of greater levels of disposable income into the economy. For seven long years, consumers replaced spending with saving. This trend is slowly reversing as enhanced optimism encourages consumers to return to a normal spending versus saving ratio.”

So, as Bill Clinton’s advisers used to say, it’s the economy, stupid. Never mind the fact (and it is a fact) that there are thousands of households throughout Ireland who never managed to replace spending with saving, but instead have struggled for years to pay for the basics, like food for their children and heating for their homes. Never mind the fact that there are thousands of families who can’t afford to keep their old bangers on the road, never mind invest in a nice new Volkswagen Golf (with accurate emission readings, hopefully).

Never mind all that. It’s the economy that’s making us happy. The new dawn, the brave new world, looks an awful lot like the old dawn, doesn’t it? A return to consumerism – that’s all we need to make us happy.

But I wonder. Are we missing a trick? As I’m writing this, I’m reading a fascinating new report, called “The Future of Ireland”. It’s published by OMD, a media-buying company, and it’s based on research carried out by Amárach, one of the country’s most reputable market research companies. You’ll find it on the helpfully named website futureofireland.ie. There’s a health warning, of course – this report, like the others, is interested in the views and attitudes of consumers. But it digs a bit deeper.

Half of us, for example, believe that the recession had at least one upside, in that it taught us to value family and community more than we did. Friends matter to us, and many of us don’t even make much of a distinction between family and friends. A majority of us still want to live in Ireland – with most of us still seeing ourselves as Irish rather than European - and we’re proud of our achievements as an independent country.

But it’s the issue of what would make us happy that I found most intriguing. Another one of our leading research companies, Behaviour and Attitudes, recently launched its own study of our attitudes. They found a majority of us think that while the economy is improving, we may be heading in the wrong direction.

The happiness question posed by the Amárach researchers for the Future of Ireland report might give us a bit of an answer to that nagging feeling.

What makes us happy? Not, it transpires, the economy, or a new car, or the chance to splash the cash at Christmas. In terms of five key ingredients for happiness, we have chosen five things at the top of a list. (The ability to become rich, and the free market, are both, incidentally, at the bottom of the list.) The five top ingredients for happiness are – free universal healthcare, work/life balance, freedom of choice, democracy, and free universal education.

Hello? Tax cuts don’t feature, and neither do concepts like “less government”. These five ingredients (which are the things we wish for) suggest that as Irish as we feel, we’d rather live in Scandinavia than in Florida. The earlier Behaviour and Attitudes research suggests that we see ourselves as more left-leaning in political terms, and these aspirations certainly support that proposition.

Personally, I don’t see how it’s possible to argue against it. A country built on the notion that everyone has access to the health care they need, and that they can rely on it, coupled with a much stronger senses of an accountable political system, and genuine access to education as a right for every young person – that’s the kind of country I’d love to see. And hopefully the publication of the Future of Ireland research might start that kind of conversation.

The big question, though, is this. Do we have to have this conversation with ourselves, or is there even the remotest possibility we could have it with the political system?

There’s a general election in the offing. From now to Christmas we’re going to be bombarded with messages encouraging us to spend, spend, spend. From Christmas on, all the messaging from the political system – from the left and the right – will be about how much more we can benefit from the economic recovery. How much better off we’ll be, how much more money will be in our pockets, how much bigger and brighter the future will be.

It won’t be about the things we need to fix, and how we might set about it. It will be about “trust us, and you can get back to being materialistic consumers”. But do we really want to go back there again – spending like there’s no tomorrow, and then promising ourselves again (in the next bust) that next time it’ll be different?

Maybe, just maybe, if we started a different conversation, we could all figure out how to communicate a different sense of what happiness means to our political leaders. Maybe we could build something that will genuinely last, and genuinely change things for the better. Reports like The Future of Ireland hint, at least, that politics is out of synch with what we really want. If we could get our leaders to read it, that would be a start.