Life

Wealth, happiness and Christianity

The modern world presents a simplistic path to human progress based primarily on wealth and consumption. Recent research highlights the limitations of such an approach, writes Brian Wilson

The Rumbling Hole: The waterfall flows down from Divis Mountain joining with the Colin River in Colin Glen Forest Park in west Belfast. Canadian social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn conducted a study in which walkers were invited to stop and enjoy the sight of a waterfall - people who earned more money spent less time savouring the natural beauty, she found. Picture by Mal McCann
The Rumbling Hole: The waterfall flows down from Divis Mountain joining with the Colin River in Colin Glen Forest Park in west Belfast. Canadian social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn conducted a study in which walkers were invited to stop and enjoy the sight The Rumbling Hole: The waterfall flows down from Divis Mountain joining with the Colin River in Colin Glen Forest Park in west Belfast. Canadian social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn conducted a study in which walkers were invited to stop and enjoy the sight of a waterfall - people who earned more money spent less time savouring the natural beauty, she found. Picture by Mal McCann

SAINT Francis de Sales noted, "If you are poor, you are in good company. Our Dear Lord, Our Lady, the Apostles, numberless saints, both men and women, were poor, and although they might have been rich, refused to be so."

The Christian message holds that poverty can be a path towards God and ultimate happiness. Growing evidence supports the Christian understanding that the pursuit of wealth as a path for human flourishing is deeply flawed.

Here I will outline why the Christian message remains vital.

Economic indicators such as income per person have become widely used to measure the well-being of citizens. Elizabeth Dunn, a Canadian social psychologist, has performed detailed studies on the relationship between wealth and happiness.

Her results were intriguing. She noted that once individuals earned over £50,000, additional income had no effect on happiness. Given the lengths that individuals go to in order to earn even slightly more money, this fact is worth pondering.

In one of her studies, Dunn invited outdoor walkers to stop and enjoy the sight of a waterfall. She noted that the people who earned more money spent less time savouring the natural beauty. Contrary to what many would expect, additional income seemed to impede people's happiness.

In a second study, Dunn wanted to understand how people can "squeeze the most happiness out of their money" and gave £10 to each student in two separate groups at the start of a day.

One group was told to spend the money on themselves. The other was told to spend the money on others. In the evening the students returned and were asked to evaluate their level of happiness.

Surveys showed that the group who spent the money on others were consistently found to be happier than those who spent it on themselves. This goes against the prevailing mindset in modern society that greed is good.

The Christian faithful understand that to give of themselves to others is to cooperate with God. St Augustine expressed this well when he said, "O Lord, you express your own joy through ours."

Moving from the individual to the society, the United States is the world's richest country, owning 32 per cent of global wealth. Yet whilst the country's wealth has steadily grown in recent years, researchers have made the concerning observation that that life expectancy at birth fell year-on-year for the American population each year between 2014 and 2017.

The last time a three-year downturn in life expectancy happened in the United States was more than a century ago, during the 1918 flu pandemic. What was the cause of this concerning finding?

Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton - a married couple, both economics professors in Princeton University - set out to find the answer. They found that during this time middle-aged white Americans saw a huge increase in "deaths from despair", a term they use to describe the growing number of fatalities from alcoholism, drug overdoses or suicide being recorded in the United States.

The professors found that in 2017 there were 157,000 "deaths from despair" nationwide, the equivalent of "three fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling out of the sky every day for a year".

The figure is roughly equal to deaths from Alzheimer's disease or stroke, which attract such widespread media attention. They also made the stark observation that deaths from despair were much more common among those Americans who had not graduated from college and earning relatively low incomes.

However, the researchers concluded, "It is impossible to explain despair through declining material advantage, much more important for despair is the decline of family, community and religion."

The authors argue that with poor economic prospects, weak family ties and the absence of religious commitments which once gave meaning to life, despair sets in.

In such an environment, a bottle of alcohol, an extra prescription of opioids or a loaded gun are dangerous temptations. To prevent further "deaths from despair", leaders worldwide would benefit from taking note of the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century: "To believe in God means to see that life has meaning."

Catholic social teaching, rooted in Scripture, provides good guidelines for forming well-functioning societies. Three pillars of this teaching are dignity, solidarity and the common good.

Dignity is derived from the belief that each person is made in the image and likeness of God and thereby merits treatment with love and respect. Solidarity arises from recognising that each of us is connected to each other through our divine origin, spurring us to stand side by side with our brothers and sisters during life's challenges. The common good stems from seeing that the earth and its resources are gifts from God, to be used in ways ensuring no one is excluded. Joyful, well-functioning societies are best cultivated by nurturing these principles through a vibrant Christian faith.

The modern world presents a simplistic path to human progress based primarily on wealth and consumption. Recent research highlights the limitations of such an approach.

The huge increase in global wealth in recent decades has brought great benefits to society. Yet the pursuit of economic expansion has left many people rejected and feeling worthless. May we take the words of Pope Francis to heart: "I ask you to ensure humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it."

Dr Brian Wilson grew up in Ballymena, Co Antrim, completed undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Imperial College London and holds a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Oxford.