Why are we so interested in measuring happiness?
William Davies is the author of The Limits of Neoliberalism. His writing has appeared in New Left Review, Prospect, the Financial Times, and Open Democracy. His website www.potlatch.org.uk was featured in the New York Times. He teaches at Goldsmiths, London.
Deeply researched and pithily argued, Davies's work is a welcome
corrective to the glut of semi-scientific happiness books that have
become so popular in business and management circles, and which
rarely, if ever, acknowledge the larger ideological goals of
workplace well-being.
*New York Magazine*
When the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested that
maximising happiness was the job of government, he inspired a quest
to measure happiness that continues today. Until recently, the only
effective tool for that-as the political scientist Will Davies
explains in a forceful new book, The Happiness Industry-has been
money.
*Observer*
As Davies implies in this readable, disturbing book, being
depressed by the human condition will no longer be socially
acceptable, or even an option. The state or big business will soon
see to it!
*Independent*
When did happiness itself become a liability? When the market
figured out that making us content is the first stage in
manufacturing our consent. In this accessible, fact-filled history
of measured happiness, William Davies shows us how metrics of
well-being were systematically disconnected from meaning and
community, and in the process transformed from the very core of
human power into an access panel to our desires and behavior. I
can't listen to that damned 'Happy' song anymore without thinking
about whom my supposed happiness really serves, and what they're
willing to do to make sure I stay that way.
*Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything
Happens Now*
In a heady mixture of psychology, economics, sociology, and
philosophy, this book reveals the misguided nature of the currently
popular intellectual project to make people happier and improve
society through 'scientific' understanding-and manipulation-of
human beings. With many governments and corporations hell-bent on
control promoting it aggressively, this project is increasingly
depriving our societies of true social bonds, democratic
participation, critical thinking, and even happiness itself. An
eye-opening, head-spinning, and mind-expanding book.
*Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge, author of 23 Things
They Don't Tell You about Capitalism*
Rich, lucid and arresting.
*Literary Review*
A brilliant, and sometimes eerie, dissection of our times.
*Vice*
William Davies argues that our happiness fixation may have more to
do with the interests of corporations and governments than personal
fulfillment.
*Fortune*
An interesting contribution to the growing genre of happiness
studies.
*Times Higher Education*
Davies, explaining the evolution of the science of happiness from
the French Revolution to the present, argues it essentially serves
the interests of the powerful elite. This challenging book will
appeal to academics and students of various disciplines.
*Booklist*
Skillfully written intellectual entertainment-prime fodder for
postmodern psychologists and New-Age thinkers alike.
*Kirkus*
Davies's concern is to show that by making us more resilient and
more productive, the happiness industry tricks us into settling for
too little.
*London Review of Books*
How 'managing our happiness' is becoming an increasingly lucrative
and insidious industry.
*New Humanist*
The Happiness Industry is a thought-provoking and daring
intervention into the crowded field of neoliberal political economy
. Its bold theses and elegant historical foundation provides
political economists with much new material to consider.
*Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics*
William Davies uses scientific data, commercial reports and studies
into well-being and happiness to ascertain that a once innocent
emotion is now being transformed into a marketing tool-and it is
people who are paying the price. The Happiness Industry . is a
fascinating yet slightly uncomfortable read that confirms a
creeping suspicion you might have had already-that your shopping
receipts know you better than you know yourself.
*Monocle*
The language of good feeling and scientific utopianism are a cover
for an older, more insidious goal: a single index of human
optimization that would reduce all human experience to qualities
that can be diagnosed, tracked, graphed and, ultimately,
controlled.
*Harper’s*
This is a brilliant and lucidly written indictment of the ideology
of happiness and its accompanying horrors of mindfulness and
well-being. Davies convincingly shows how the happiness industry is
the new front line of capitalism, which has succeeded in exposing
the inner recesses of the self to techniques of measurement,
surveillance and control.
*Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless*
William Davies reveals the tricks that corporates use to try to
keep us happy while treating us as losers. Informed, revealing,
scary and hopeful, The Happiness Industry connects economics and
management science to psychology and psychiatry to explain why so
much feels (and is) so wrong.
*Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%*
Davies has added a valuable critique, and a fantastic read, to the
current literature on happiness.
*Marx & Philosophy Review of Books*
Although the book draws on scientific knowledge, it remains a
popular book aimed at an interested general population and should
be read as such. ... It is a fascinating exploration and
well-grounded argument of how and why people are cashing in on the
'happiness industry'.
*The Humorous Times--Winter 2017*
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