The Inefficiency of American Happiness

I think I may have found my lfe's work, courtesy of a talented, insightful and mild-mannered professor of a geat metropolitan Southwest university, whose mother and father, by dint of incredible coincidence, were also my mother and father. Small world. So here it is, the Basic Answer to Everything. What I could never figure out was how the United States continued to lead the world in gross domestic product (GDP, "the world's largest economy") while seeming to be, how to put this, so fundamentally retarded on virtually every relevant parameter of a productive and worthwhile existence.

The key to it all is here, thanks to Professor Waldenswimmer (the family name or nom de blogue), a simple graphing of happiness on the y axis, as measured by a researcher named Veerhoven at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, as against the x axis measurement of energy use per capita, translated to metabolic equivalents. (To enlarge, hit ctrl + on your keyboard; if I place a large picture, it tends to go out of frame on Blogspot.)

The United States, as you can see, keeps the same company in terms of energy use (and satisfaction with life, for that matter) it keeps on such matters as capital punishment: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, other enlightened principalities and tyrannies. Denmark, as always, is #1. Those people are so happy all the time they must be doing something illegal, all the time. Iceland is an outlier, but that's understandable. The entire island is a geothermal power plant and energy use does not entail or imply, as it does in the United States, a culture of waste and inefficiency. Energy is cheap, clean and renewable and they can use it or lose it.

The happiness/energy chart clears up for me how the United States, which comprises only about 4% of the world's population, could nevertheless use about 25% of the world's daily supply of refined oil and account for 20% of all greenhouse gases. We use energy like it's going out of style, which it should be but isn't. And the return on all that energy use? About 18th in the world now in educational achievement, way down on the list in basic health parameters (infant mortality, obesity, incidence of diabetes [for people born after 2000, 30% will suffer adult onset diabetes]), yet we spend about about twice as much for health care as other industrialized (and happy) countries typically do per capita.

The graphic at the top depicts the basic components of GDP (colored arrows). Consumer and government spending, plus industrial investment in new capital and equipment, minus our trade deficit (we have a negative result when you subtract imports from exports). So, given our profligate waste of money on unnecessary energy expenses (unnecessary in the sense that such use is not positively correlated to increased satisfaction with life) and our insanely out of control government spending (which factors into GDP as well), it is small wonder that our GDP looks so large and seems so "powerful." In the case of government spending, we are now at the point that about half the money spent by the federal government (which will run a deficit this year of about $2 trillion) is borrowed, largely from abroad. Yet if we count government spending on a dollar-for-dollar basis as part of GDP, then of course it masks the fact that the USA does not actually have the money and makes our economy look far more prosperous than it really is.

Similar factors are at work with energy use. The actual importation of all that oil (about 14 million barrels per day, out of a total use of 20 million barrels) drags GDP down; it is a main factor in the trade deficit. But GDP is driven upwards again by Americans buying all that gasoline, which they use to operate the 250 million vehicles in the country, which on average get about 17 miles per gallon. And of course all those cars are bought with credit, increasingly in default. (The auto market died when the line of credit and refi markets died.) There are more vehicles in the USA than there are licensed drivers, and about half of the world's automobiles are located in the United States. It is small wonder that the epitome of American travel and commuting is one person in one large car on a crowded freeway.

So what do we wind up with? Bike trails, as in Holland? High speed rail, as throughout Europe and Japan? Salsa dancing, as in Colombia? No, with decrepit highways and bridges, a dilapidated rail network, a cratering airline industry, rusting autos, and a corrupt Congress bought off with the lucre of high finance.

So just one other point on the Happiness Scale: I don't trust the data point for the USA. I don't believe we really clock in at 7.0 on a 10-point scale. More likely we look at life at about the eye-level of those in Minsk. I think the relatively high number is the result of the self-reinforcing "externality" of American Exceptionalism, the narcissistic trance which makes it so difficult for Americans to see the way we are really living: a nation of very fat people, in very big cars, driving down crowded, potholed freeways, looking at the other cars.