The Happiness Industry : How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being

Resumen del libro

When Jeremy Bentham proposed that government should run for the greatest benefit of the greatest number, he posed two problems: what is happiness and how can we measure it? With the rise of positive psychology, freakonimics, behavioural economics, endless TED talks, the happiness manifesto, the Happiness Index, the tyranny of customer service, the emergence of the quantified self movement, we have become a culture obsessed with measuring our supposed satisfaction.

In anecdotes that include the Buddhist monk who lectured the business leaders of the world at Davos, why the Nike Fuel band makes us more worried about our fitness, how parts of our city are being rebuilt in response to scientific studies of oxytocin levels in our brain, and what a survey from Radisson hotels that proves that 62% of us believe that well-being is a luxury worth more than work or a good relationship really tells us about the way we measure ourselves, and continually find ourselves wanting.

The pursuit of happiness only makes us sad and the rise in depression and anxiety proves it.

Biografía del autor

William Davies is a sociologist and policy analyst. His writing has appeared in The New Left Review, Prospect, the Financial Times, Political Quarterly, the Daily Beast. He is an associate editor of Renewal and of openDemocracy. The BBC describes him as one of the UK's leading thinkers on e-democracy and he has appeared on radio often. His website www.potlatch.co.uk was featured in the New York Times Idea for the Day series. He is currently the assistant professor, University of Warwick. William Davies es autor de "The limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and The Logic of Competition" (2014). Colabora en New Left Review, Prospect y Financial Times. Es profesor en Goldsmiths, University of London. Sociólogo, analista de economía y política.