Ripples and non-rival goods.

Last month, Jack Gray gave a presentation on happiness.

The upshot is that happiness increases with income, but more or less plateaus beyond an annual income of about $20,000. That is, once you've got your basic needs met (food, shelter etc) it makes very little difference to your happiness whether you make $30,000 or $3 million. It's a robust and reliable finding.

It's an interesting public policy thought-starter - what's the point in tax breaks at the top end when the best we could do for the nation is ensure everyone had their basic needs met?

Another interesting nugget was a finding that happiness levels are largely stable throughout one's life. Regardless of whether you win the lottery, become a quadriplegic, or keep ambling along at a steady state, you can expect that you'll revert to your own approximate happiness level. The two exceptions to this are unemployment and mental illness. Again - very interesting for public policy decisions. We're right to be focussed on keeping unemployment down. We're wrong to be lax in how we measure it (if it's a security thing, then a casualised labour force is not a good thing). And we're absolutely wrong to be limiting mental health services at the expense of other things.

In fact key factors in happiness were meaning in life (spiritual, vocational or otherwise) ; doing something (being busy: absorbed) - interesting for increasingly passive leisure time; human / social contacts (at a time when work-life balance is famously impossible to achieve) and keeping up with the Joneses.

This last was a sorry finding. But the speaker made the useful point that keeping up with the Joneses doesn't have to mean a wider plasma screen TV. He called it "non-rival goods" but I didn't like the idea that it had to be goods at all. In a different time, place, context, status was how many grandkids you had, how often you did the flowers for the church, or how good your marrows were. There are many aspects of this status at play in knowledge-based contexts (how up to date you are on Australian Idol; how credible your thoughts on the Bennelong electorate; how convincing your parenting philosophy) but even here many of these follow a path laid down for us by commercial interests (Idol advertisers, opinion leaders, parenting publications).

I can see the utility in replacing non-rival for rival goods. If human nature is competitive, much better for sustainability to compete towards a low-consumption rather than a high-consumption goal. But I also would like to interrogate this feeling I have that the competition itself is somehow less than constructive. That feeling proud we didn't heat the house this winter; or smug that our children eat their crusts is a less than productive use of psychic energy. Maybe one of the reasons is that pride keeps me from communicating it fully (don't wanna brag), and limits my ability to set a different agenda (as a "Jones" that others think of keeping up with). When in reality communicating this stuff could be sharing rather than bragging.

I spoke to an old friend today; he mentioned another friend had been down to visit him, and wanted to go op-shopping because he was compacting, thanks to me. I did a bit of a double take. I know this guy, but mostly at a distance; we've met no more than a handful of times, and yet he has been quietly compacting, thanks to my conversations with his partner many months ago.

At the end of a long, hard, head-aching, mental mettle-breaking week, score one to me.