Inside Vancouver
Sad City - continued
By Charles Montgomery published Sep 2, 2008
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Ours is one of the most beautiful, vibrant, and livable cities in the world. Why aren’t we happy?
You’ll be forgiven for being skeptical about their line of research. Happiness has been derided by cynics and appropriated by the self-help crowd. It feels too soft and squishy for scientific enquiry. It’s hard to define. It’s subjective. It’s been considered so difficult to measure that, since the nineteenth century, economists simply use purchasing power as a proxy for it.
But in the last few decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have found it’s easier to measure happiness than economists once thought. Just ask people. Get them to rate how satisfied they are with life on a scale of 1 to 10. It turns out that answers correspond quite closely to levels of electrical activity in the parts of the brain associated with good feelings. High scorers smile more and sleep better. They’re healthier. And Helliwell has found that reported happiness figures correlate with national suicide rates and other measures of well-being.
What makes people happy? Mainly, it turns out, family and social connections. Meaningful work. Community. Health.
Freedom. Wealth is part of the mix, but general happiness has flat-lined even as national income in the Western world has skyrocketed since the end of the Second World War.
Self-reported happiness reflects all the varied ingredients of a good life. That’s why the study on Canadian cities was so annoying. None of Canada’s biggest, richest cities were among the happiest. Toronto and Edmonton were near the back of the pack. Vancouver trailed behind them. And for all its boom and bluster, Calgary brought up the rear. The happy charts were topped by Canada’s small Nowheresville cities: St. John, New Brunswick, whooped us all. How is it that the places that attract us, the cities that cost us so much to call home, are emotional tar pits?
CHRIS BARRINGTON-LEIGH, the doctoral student in economics who led the urban happiness study, is a cautious man. He says the difference between Canadian cities was small: a point or two on a 10-point scale. And he frets that the data he gleaned from the 2003 census was too mushy. But he’s certain that urban form influences well-being. So I invited him on a field trip to Vancouver’s latest purported happiness factory, the condo showroom at Millennium Water on Southeast False Creek.
