Let's 'reform' lack of satisfaction at work

Has it ever occurred to you that, in all our economic striving, most of us – almost all our business people, economists and politicians, but also many normal people – are missing the point?

It occurred to me years ago, and I've thought about it often, but reading a little book by one of my gurus, Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore​ College in the US, has revved me up.

In my job I have to focus mainly on whatever issues everybody else is getting excited about. I've written a lot lately about the budget deficit, mainly because I see the Coalition swinging from exaggerating the size and urgency of the problem while in opposition, to virtually ignoring it now it's in government.

They had one big ill-considered and ill-fated attempt to fix the problem in their first budget, but now they don't even want to think about it.

Of course, getting the budget back to surplus is really just a housekeeping measure. It doesn't advance our cause in any positive sense, it just stops problems building up for the future.

No, the more positive efforts to improve our lot have focused on the need for "reform". The economists have noticed that the rate of productivity improvement has slowed and, since improving our productivity is the main way we keep our material standard of living rising, they're casting around for something we could do to improve matters.

When economic-types look for things to improve, their first thought is to "reform" taxation in a way that does more to encourage people to "work, save and invest".

Sorry, but all this is missing the point. Schwartz's little book is called Why We Work, and he asks us to reconsider the most basic question in economic life: why do we work?

To most people that's a stupid question. We work to make money, which we then use to keep body and soul together and buy the other things we need to give us a happy or satisfying life.

Next question: do we enjoy our work? Answer: sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some people do most of the time; most people don't.

The basic economic model assumes that people don't enjoy work; they do it only for the money. And, except perhaps to the individual, whether they do or they don't isn't of great consequence.

Most employers organise work in ways designed to maximise their employees' productivity – their productiveness. If their workers happen to enjoy their jobs, that's their good luck. If they don't, that's not something a boss needs to worry about.

Schwartz's argument is that we've allowed money – and the economists' way of thinking about work, which goes back to Adam Smith in 1776 – to get us muddled between means and ends.

Money is merely a means, not an end in itself. The end money is meant to be a means to is life satisfaction. But if satisfaction is the object of the exercise, why on earth would we organise the economy on the basis that whether or not people get satisfaction from their jobs doesn't matter?

Why fixate on earning money to buy satisfaction when we could be doing much more to gain satisfaction while we earn?

When you remember how much of our lives we spend working, think what a fabulous "reform" it would be if more of us got more satisfaction from our work.

If we got more satisfaction from our work, economists and politicians wouldn't have to worry quite so much about ensuring our money income kept growing strongly so we could keep attempting to buy more satisfaction. (Tip: the satisfaction you get from enjoying your job and doing it well is more powerful than the satisfaction you get from buying more stuff.)

And if bosses got more satisfaction from their own jobs, maybe they wouldn't be so obsessed by achieving ever faster-growing profits so as to justify ever-bigger bonuses.

You'd think that, with all the status and executive assistants to wait on them and people to boss about, bosses would be rolling in job satisfaction.

But when I see how obsessed they are with pay rises and bonuses, it makes me wonder if they actually hate their jobs more than most of their employees do.

Of all the company's workers, they're the ones showing most sign of only doing it for the money.

By now, I know, many managers will be thinking, if I made making sure my workers had a good time at work an objective, their productivity would suffer.

That's certainly why many jobs have been designed in the soul-destroying way they have been, and the mentality that informs the way many managers manage. Treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen.

But consider the reverse possibility. There's growing evidence that workers who gain satisfaction from their jobs try harder and think more about how they could do their jobs better. Is that so hard to believe?

I'm convinced greater effort to make jobs more satisfying could leave most of us better off with, at worst, no loss of efficiency.

How do employers go about making jobs more satisfying? How can someone with a deadly job make it more emotionally rewarding?

These questions have been well studied by industrial psychologists and Schwartz has lots of useful things to say. But I'll leave that for another day.

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Material success is coming at a social price

While there's been much worry of late that the economy isn't growing fast enough to get unemployment down, it remains true that our economic performance since the global financial crisis has been the envy of most other rich countries.

But it's old news that, while economic growth matters for employment – especially with our immigration-fuelled population growth – gross domestic product is a quite inadequate measure of the nation's wellbeing.

No doubt it was such criticism that, in 2002, prompted the Bureau of Statistics to introduce a four-yearly "general social survey" of about 13,000 households to give us more information on how Australians are faring from a personal and social perspective.

The bureau has now released the results of its fourth survey, for 2014. So what is this more humanistic second guess telling us about whether we're making progress?

On the face of it, we're doing fine. Look deeper, however, and cracks are apparent.

The survey measured our "subjective wellbeing" by asking people to assess their overall satisfaction with life – not how they feel at the moment, or how they feel about particular aspects of their life – on a scale of nought to 10.

Our average answer was 7.6, which is significantly higher than the average of 6.6 for all the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It was also up on what we said four years ago.

But the most useful thing to note is the categories of people whose ratings were well below the nationwide average: people with a disability (7.2), one-parent families with children (7.0), the unemployed (6.8) and people with a mental health problem, 6.6. Governments wanting to raise the nation's wellbeing now know where to start.

And when the bureau delved deeper, areas of slippage became apparent. One important factor affecting us that's ignored in the calculation of GDP – and in the thinking of most economists, politicians and business people – has been dubbed "social capital".

Social capital is seen as a resource available to both individuals and communities, arising from such things as networks of mutual support, reciprocity and trust. You can break it down into more measurable components, such as community support, social participation, trust and trustworthiness, the size of people's networks and people's ability to have some control over issues important to them.

There's plenty of research showing these things are strongly linked to the wellbeing of individuals and communities. But the survey reveals all is not well with various aspects of our social capital.

One indicator of how much we support each other is the amount of voluntary work we do for organisations. This has declined for the first time since the bureau began measuring it in 1995.

By 2010, the proportion of people aged over 18 who were volunteering had reached 36 per cent. But by last year it had fallen back to 31 per cent. There's also been a decline in the proportion of people providing informal help to neighbours and the like.

Voluntary work not only helps the people who are helped, of course, it also helps increase the wellbeing of the helpers. Not a good sign.

On social participation, the survey shows people are now less likely to be involved in social groups such as sport or physical recreation, arts or heritage groups and religious groups.

Civic participation – involvement in a union, professional association, political party, environmental or animal welfare group, human or civil rights group, or even a body corporate or tenants' association – is also down.

Of course, as the bureau notes, the way people meet and interact is changing. Some people suggest that young people in particular prefer to engage in politics by means of online activism – joining online advocacy groups or using social media to collect and disseminate information.

Other ways people support each other have been stable. In 2014, the proportion of people caring for someone with a disability, illness or old age was 19 per cent, little changed from previous years.

The proportion of people providing support to relatives living outside the carer's home, 31 per cent, was also little changed. This is likely to reflect the ageing of the population.

Last year nearly everyone – 95 per cent – felt able to get support from outside their home in a time of crisis, unchanged from earlier years. Similarly, weekly electronic contact with family and friends by telephone, text message or video link remained high at 92 per cent.

By contrast, face-to-face contact fell from 79 per cent to 76 per cent.

And people were less likely than they were in 2010 to feel able to have a say within their community all or most of the time – 25 per cent compared with 29 per cent.

There's been no change in the proportion of people agreeing that most people can be trusted – 54 per cent – but, to me, that seems a lot lower than it should be.

On the question of work-life balance, Australians are feeling time-poor, with 45 per cent of women and 36 per cent of men saying they were always or often pressed for time. This is higher than for other rich countries.

We may be doing better in the GDP stakes than most other advanced countries are, but we seem to be paying a high social price for our greater material success.

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Jobs and wellbeing are inescapably linked

Anyone who's sure they know what's happening in the economy is either a liar or a fool. Last week the Bureau of Statistics' national accounts told us things weren't too flash in the economy up to the end of March. This week its employment figures told us things were looking quite a bit brighter in the labour market up to the end of May.

The jobs figures are good news – which is why the media didn't shout about them - but also puzzling news. The two key economic indicators – for the increase in production of goods and services, and for the increase in employment – don't fit together.

I wrote last week that real gross domestic product grew by only 2.3 per cent over the year to March, whereas it needs to grow by about 3 per cent just to stop unemployment rising.

That general rule remains true, but it's contradicted by this week's jobs figures. Let's step back and look at the movement in the figures over the year to May, and let's get a clearer picture by using the "trend" (or smoothed seasonally adjusted) estimates.

They show that total employment grew over the 12 months by more than 200,000 people, with a bit more than half those jobs being full-time. That's an annual increase of 1.75 per cent.

Over the same period, the size of the labour force – that is, the number of people either in work or actively seeking it - grew by 1.8 per cent.

So employment grew at essentially the same rate that the labour force did, meaning the unemployment rate in May last year was 6 per cent and in May this year is also 6 per cent – something the production figures imply shouldn't have happened.

Which is good, if puzzling, news. The best – and even more puzzling – news is that between last May and this May the unemployment rate rose to 6.2 per cent by last August and stayed there for the seven months to February, before falling back to 6 per cent in May.

Get it? These numbers make it look very much as though unemployment has peaked and is now falling back a fraction – which I'd have to say may be too good to be true. It's certainly no guarantee that unemployment won't resume its upward climb if, as seems likely, production continues to grow at a below-average rate.

Remember that the demand for labour is "derived demand" – it's derived from the growth in the demand for goods and services. As businesses increase their production of goods and services in response to the public's greater demand for them, those businesses need to hire more workers to help increase their production.

This is one of the biggest reasons economists (and journalists like me) obsess so much about the quarterly figures for the growth in real GDP. They're the best indication we've got of what's likely to happen to unemployment in coming months (and I, for one, care a lot more about unemployment than about economic growth, as such).

When the two indicators are telling us different stories – which isn't all that uncommon – economists have to don their overalls and climb inside the numbers to see what's going on, who's right and who's wrong. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, someone asked me this week why there was so much focus on GDP when it was such a poor indicator of our wellbeing.  I've just given you the answer: if you care about unemployment you have to care about GDP.

But economic growth and our overall wellbeing are quite different things, and every economist will tell you that whereas GDP is (usually) a reasonably accurate measure to use in managing the economy, it's not, and was never designed to be, a good measure of our wellbeing.

This is why, some years ago, Fairfax Media commissioned Dr Nicholas Gruen, chief of Lateral Economics, to construct a better measure of wellbeing, the Fairfax-Lateral Economics wellbeing index.

The index is calculated quarterly, with its results published on the Saturday following the release of the quarterly national accounts. (Sorry, at present the background to the index is between websites.)

The beauty of our wellbeing index is that it's built on GDP, modifying it to turn it into a broader measure of Australians' wellbeing, while leaving it directly comparable to GDP. Last week's figures showed that while real GDP grew by 0.9 per cent in the March quarter, our measure of wellbeing fell by 0.4 per cent.

As I wrote last weekend, GDP is only one of the bottom lines that can be derived from the Bureau of Statistics' national accounts. Many economists agree that the broadest and most appropriate bottom line available for Australian households is "real net national disposable income" (nicknamed "rinndy").

The national accounts showed that whereas real GDP grew by 0.9 per cent, rinndy grew by only 0.2 per cent, mainly because falling export prices have reduced the international purchasing power of our incomes.

The wellbeing index takes rinndy and adjusts it for various important influences over our wellbeing not  taken account of in the national accounts: the change in human capital (the value of our "know how"), the depletion of natural capital (the using up of non-renewable resources, less resources added through exploration), the change in the inequality of income, the change in our health, and the change in work satisfaction (the costs of unemployment, under-employment and overwork).

But the change that did most to turn a rise in rinndy of 0.2 per cent into a fall in wellbeing of 0.4 per cent was a sharp rise in long-term unemployment and the consequent increased cost of "skills atrophy" – the longer you're unemployed, the more your skills are lost, to yourself and to the rest of us.

If you care about wellbeing, you have to care about employment.

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At present GDP is more misleading that usual

I could attempt to explain to you why the Bureau of Statistics is having such embarrassing trouble with its monthly estimate of employment, but I won't bother. It's horribly complicated and at a level of statistical intricacy no normal person needs to worry about.

What this week's labour force figures now tell us is that, though the rate of unemployment has been slowly drifting up since mid-2011 - when it was 5 per cent - it seems to have steadied this year and, using the smoothed figures, has stayed stuck at 6 per cent for the past three months.

This is reasonably consistent with what we know about other labour-market indicators, such as job advertisements and vacancies, claims for unemployment benefits and employers' answers to questions about hiring in the National Australia Bank's survey of business confidence.

It also fits roughly with what the national accounts have been telling us about the strength of growth in the economy. We know that when the economy is growing at its trend rate of about 3 per cent a year, this should be sufficient to hold the rate of unemployment steady.

The accounts told us real gross domestic product grew by 3.4 per cent over the year to March, and by 3.1 per cent over the year to June.

But now let me tell you something that, while a bit technical, is much more worth knowing than the gruesome details of the bureau's problem with the labour force survey.

One of our smartest business economists, Saul Eslake, of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has reminded us that GDP is only one of various summary indicators of overall economic activity provided by the national accounts. And the economy's peculiar circumstances over the past decade and for some years to come mean GDP is not the least misleading of the various measures.

Eslake says real GDP measures the volume (quantity) of goods and services produced within a country's borders during a particular period. (Actually, it doesn't include the many goods and services produced within households, which never change hands in a market.)

To estimate real GDP the bureau takes the nominal, dollar value of the goods and services produced, then "deflates" this figure by the prices of those goods and services relative to what those prices were in the base period.

We commonly take the value of the goods and services we produce during a period to be equivalent to the nation's income during that period. This easy assumption works for most developed economies most of the time.

But Eslake reminds us that "for an economy like Australia's, the prices of whose exports are much more volatile than those of other 'advanced' economies, abstracting from swings in the prices of exports (and imports) obscures a significant source of fluctuations in real incomes".

We've experienced a series of sharp swings in our "terms of trade" - export prices relative to import prices - over the past decade of the resources boom, which was interrupted by the global financial crisis in 2008-09. For the past three years, of course, mining commodity prices have been falling.

Trouble is, real GDP doesn't capture the effects of these swings. So the values of our production and our income have parted company, as they do every time our terms of trade change significantly. An improvement in our terms of trade causes our income to grow faster than our production, whereas a deterioration has the opposite effect.

This matters because of the chicken-and-egg relationship between production and income: we use the income we earn from our part in the production process to buy things and thus induce more production.

So if our real income slows or falls, soon enough this dampens our production.

However, the national accounts include a measure of overall economic activity that does capture the effects of movements in our terms of trade: real gross domestic income, GDI. It grew a lot faster than real GDP for most of the time between 2002 and 2011, but since then has grown much more slowly than real GDP (a big reason for our slowly rising unemployment).

Next Eslake says that as the resources boom moves into its third and final phase - with mining investment winding down and exports ramping up - real GDP growth will be an even less useful guide to what's happening to domestic income and employment.

This is because maybe 80 per cent of the income generated by resources exports will be paid to the foreigners who own most of our mining companies and who financed most of the new investment.

It's also because the depreciation of Australia's greatly enlarged stock of capital equipment and structures as a result of all the mining investment spending will now absorb a greater share of our gross income.

(A separate issue Eslake doesn't mention is that the highly capital-intensive nature of mining means the increased production of mineral exports will create far fewer jobs than you'd normally expect.)

If you've ever wondered about the difference between gross national product and gross domestic product it's that the former excludes all the income earned on Australian production that's owed to the foreign suppliers of our debt and equity financial capital, making it a more appropriate measure for us given our huge foreign debt and foreign investment in our companies.

If you've ever wondered what the "gross" in GDP, GNP, GNI etc means, it's short for "before allowing for the depreciation of our stock of physical capital".

So gross national income (GNI) is a better measure than gross domestic income (GDI), and net national disposable income (NNDI) is a better measure than GNI.

Which, by the way, explains why real NNDI is used as the base for all the further non-national-accounts-based modifications included in Fairfax Media's attempt to calculate a broader measure of economic welfare, the Fairfax-Lateral Economics wellbeing index, released each quarter soon after the publication of GDP.

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Why we care about morality - apparently

The good thing about holidays is getting time to read books. I' ll look at all the museos, oratorios, cappellas and duomos in Italy provided I can go back to my book when day is done. On this trip one book I read was Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene, a young professor of psychology at Harvard.

One of the hottest areas of psychology these days is moral psychology - the science of moral cognition - which seeks to explain why we have moral sentiments and what use they are to us. It' s pretty coldly scientific and evolutionary, which may be disconcerting to readers of a religious disposition.

According to Greene and his confreres - another leading thinker in the area is Jonathan Haight, author of The Righteous Mind, which I' ve written about before - humans are fairly selfish individuals, but we are also highly social animals who like to be part of groups.

Groups, however, require co-operative behaviour, so we evolved moral attitudes to enable us to get along together in groups.

Biologists (and economists) have long stressed the importance of competition between us - survival of the fittest and all that - but it s not hard to see that humans' domination of the planet arises from our unmatched ability to co-operate with each other to overcome problems.

So humans are about competition and co-operation. Economists have schooled us to think of markets as all about competition - between sellers, between buyers and between buyers and sellers - but psychologists see markets as a prime example of human co-operation.

Co-operation through markets allows us to use specialisation - I produce what I' m good at, you do the same and we use the medium of money to exchange the things we ve produced - to increase our combined efficiency in production, leaving us all better off.

Studies have shown that people' s performance in well-known psychology games giving them a choice between selfish or altruistic responses can differ markedly between cultures. Turns out that people from cultures with more developed market systems tend to be less selfish and more co-operative.

So to these scientists, morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of co-operation within groups.

But why do we want to co-operate within groups? So our group can compete more effectively against other groups.

" Our moral machinery evolved to strike a biologically advantageous balance between selfishness (Me) and within-group co-operation (Us), without concern for people who are more likely to be competitors than allies (Them), " Greene says. This moral machinery includes our capacities for empathy, vengefulness, honour, guilt, embarrassment and righteous indignation, he adds.

The fact is that each of us belongs to a whole host of groups: our family, neighbourhood, workplace, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sporting interest, political party and more.

The groups we belong to are the tribes we belong to. We feel a great loyalty to our groups, and greatly favour their interests over those of rival groups. This group selfishness and tendency to see the world as Us versus Them is tribalism.

So, much of the conflict we see around us - both within our country and, as we' ve become more conscious of in recent days, between countries and the groups within them - arises from tribalism.

Much of the conflict between tribes is simple self-interest - I favour my interests ahead of yours, and see them much more clearly than I see yours - but there are also genuine differences in values and disagreements about the proper terms of co-operation. One major source of disagreement in political life is between individual and collective responsibility.

Some disagreement arises from tribes' differing allegiances to what Greene calls " proper nouns" - gods, leaders, holy scriptures and holy places.

Obviously, tribally based morality gets us only so far. What Greene seeks is a "meta-morality" , which can help reduce conflict between tribes rather than just within them. To this end he reaches back to an old idea now out of favour with philosophers: utilitarianism.

(This is of relevance to economists because, though they 've spent the past 80 years trying to play it down, utilitarianism forms part of the bedrock on which the conventional economic model is built.)

According to Greene, utilitarianism answers two basic questions: what really matters and who really matters. What matters most is the quality of our experience. Economists call this " utility" and the rest of us call it "happiness" .

Who matters most is all of us, equally - otherwise known as the Golden Rule.

Thus Greene summarises utilitarianism as " happiness is what matters and everyone' s happiness counts the same. This doesn 't mean that everyone gets to be equally happy, but it does means than no one' s happiness is inherently more valuable than anyone else' s ."

He claims this meta-morality involves a moral system that can acknowledge moral trade-offs and adjudicate among them, and can do so in a way that makes sense to members of all tribes.

It s a nice thought. Somehow I think it will be a while before we measure up to that ideal. But it s always good to have a vision of what we should be aiming for and how we can move towards it.

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Digital revolution transforms productivity debate

A second former econocrat has joined former secretary of the Prime Minister's department Dr Mike Keating in seeking to lift the tone of the economic debate.

"We are spending too much effort debating how and how quickly we should bring the Commonwealth budget back into balance," Dr Ric Simes said in a speech to the Australian Business Economists this week.

"We need to elevate the economic debate from the level of catchcries about debt and deficits, or about productivity or even about the use of cost-benefit analyses. We need some deeper analyses being brought to the surface."

Simes, now a director of Deloitte Access Economics, formerly of Treasury and economic adviser to Paul Keating as prime minister, wants to see a more sensible discussion about productivity.
Productivity is obviously important and policy should indeed be focused on lifting it.

"But we do need to be careful about what this may mean in a particular circumstance," he said. One problem is that productivity is being used as a catchcry for myriad causes, often unjustifiably.

Simes agreed with Mike Keating's trenchant observation that "business associations, some leading employers and their camp followers in the media are insisting that future reforms must focus on alleged labour market rigidities and reductions in taxation, as if these were the most important influences on productivity".

And while "there is scope for improved labour relations to make a modest contribution to improved productivity ... the main responsibility for improvements in that regard lie with employers themselves," Keating has written.

"The best thing that employers and their trade associations could do is to stop passing the buck to everyone else for their own failings, and get on with making their workplaces more productive using the existing freedoms that they undoubtedly have," Keating concludes.

Simes adds that this is exactly what most businesses try to do. For his evidence, keep reading.

Simes' second problem with how "productivity" is being used in the debate concerns its measurement. "Productivity is simply a less than perfect measure of economic wellbeing, and having the public debate focus so much on what the Bureau of Statistics reports as productivity can be unhelpful."

Indeed, Professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, had called productivity an "unhelpful concept", mainly because of problems with the way the contributions of labour and capital were measured in its calculation.

Simes agreed with Quiggin that we'd be better off using a term that was closely related to productivity, "technological progress" - that is, the introduction of technological innovations such as new products and improved production technologies.

Rhetoric - the choice of terms - did matter, Simes said, and had we been using the term technological progress instead of productivity, the debate wouldn't have been so open to distortion by vested interests.

"Tax, or industrial relations, or fiscal policy, can and should be refined, but they are not at the heart of why measured productivity weakened after 2000," he said.

But the measurement problem went further. "I think we have a fundamental problem in that our measures of gross domestic product or productivity are becoming less reliable proxies for economic welfare."

If instead of looking at productivity statistics we stand back and look at the way societies and businesses are changing, we find some profound changes under way, particularly the digital revolution.

We see consumers forcing retailers and media companies to transform. His own research had found that, without telework, only 14 per cent of new mums said they would return to work with their old employer, but 61 per cent said they would if telework was available.

His research had found how companies' information technology policies on staff use of social media at work and BYOD - bring your own device - were of growing importance in attracting young and talented employees.

He'd found that businesses able to create a "collaborative" working culture - including through use of digital technologies - succeeded in growing faster than otherwise.

What has this to do with productivity? First, most of the change we were seeing was being driven by individuals, whether they be consumers, workers, students or patients. To a trained economist, this should suggest that economic welfare had probably risen - and risen a lot.

It was hard not to conclude that individuals making deliberate decisions to do something new were adding to their own welfare, and to society's.

But, second, if this isn't showing up in our measures of welfare - such as GDP or productivity - then maybe there was something wrong with those measures. It seemed to Simes that "productivity, as measured, misses many, if not most, of the gains to consumer and social welfare that digital technology is delivering".

It didn't capture the benefits from improved convenience when we no longer had to queue for ages to renew a licence or at our bank branch. Nor the convenience of being able to search for a needed service in a fraction of the time it took before the internet.

It didn't capture the benefits of much greater choice. The Amazon books site, for instance, took costs out of the supply chain (thus reducing prices to consumers) but also provided much greater choice of books in a convenient manner.

Studies by Erik Brynjolfsson and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had estimated that the easy access to a greater choice of books generated seven to 10 times the consumer welfare that the more efficient supply chain generated (the only bit that would make it into measured productivity).

He wasn't saying we should include the benefits of convenience and choice in our measurement of GDP - that wouldn't work.

No. "What I am arguing is that we need to be careful to base policy decisions on a deeper understanding of our objectives and not be driven by simplistic rhetoric," he said.

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Yes, there is more to life than happiness

Fed up with all the wrangling and speculation over who should be leading the Labor Party? Want something more substantial? How about the meaning of life - that weighty enough for you?

The question has been an object of contemplation by clerics and philosophers throughout the ages, of course, but in more recent times many psychologists and even a few economists have taken to studying it.

Psychologists' traditional focus has been on the abnormal - on relieving misery, helping people suffering from depression, alcoholism, schizophrenia, trauma and the like.

But for at least the past 30 years some psychologists and economists have been researching the nature of happiness. A spate of books has been written on the subject (including one by yours truly).

Then, about a decade ago, there sprang up among psychologists a new school known as "positive psychology", dedicated to helping the normal live more satisfying lives. The practitioners of positive psychology seemed to take over the happiness business.

The person most responsible for starting the positive psychology movement is Professor Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman regularly works in Australia, and will speak at the Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney next week, subtitled Life, Death and Everything. But is happiness all there is to the meaning of life? A lot of people doubt it. The spate of happiness books is now prompting a flow of anti-happiness books - including one by our own (eminently sensible) Hugh Mackay.

I think a lot of the problem lies with the word happiness. It's an eye-catching, emotive word beloved of book publishers and headline writers. But what does it actually mean? Different things to different people.

The critics interpret it very narrowly, as being perpetually in an upbeat, ho-ho-ho mood. And perhaps being a Pollyanna - looking on the bright side of everything and refusing to acknowledge problems.

If that's what happiness means it deserves to be ripped into by the critics. It's neither possible nor desirable to live like Dr Pangloss, and you could do yourself a mischief trying to.

Seligman points out that such an ideal favours those with an extroverted personality, disadvantaging the half of the population who are less expressive and more introverted.

Mackay argues that nature equipped us with the capacity to feel negative emotions - pain, sorrow, fear, even anger - for good reason.

But I've always used happiness to mean something much broader and more substantial. The seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain is mere hedonism, and that's life without meaning.

Most of the academic study of happiness relies on surveys that ask people to rate their satisfaction with their lives on a scale of, say, one to 10. That's a bit broader, but recent research suggests people's answers to such a question are too greatly influenced by how they were feeling at the time they were asked.

Seligman has been giving the question much thought and the result of his cogitation is outlined in his latest book, Flourish. His objective is to guide the positive psychology movement away from happiness as its goal to something more encompassing, which he dubs "wellbeing".

Wellbeing, he argues, has five elements, of which only the first, "positive emotion", covers the narrow conception of happiness. He calls this "the pleasant life".

His second element is "engagement". Living the engaged life means regularly being in a state of "flow", where you become so absorbed in what you're doing you lose sense of time and consciousness of yourself.

It can involve your work or a hobby, but it requires an equal match between the challenge you face and your ability to meet that challenge. People in a state of flow realise they were happy only in retrospect.

Seligman's third element is "meaning". The meaningful life involves "belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self," he says. This is where other people first enter the picture.

"Today it is accepted without dissent that connections to other people and relationships are what give meaning and purpose to life," he says.

The fourth element is "accomplishment" - something Seligman added to his list only after a student told him his theory of what humans choose had a huge hole in it: "It omits success and mastery. People try to achieve just for winning's own sake."

Well, that's certainly the way it appears, though a leading economist researcher in this area, Andrew Oswald, of the University of Warwick, would argue that people want to win not for its own sake, but to increase their social status.

Billionaires scrabbling for their next billion aren't motivated by greed. They just want to demonstrate - to themselves and others - how good they are at playing the money game.

Anyway, Seligman now accepts that people pursue success, accomplishment, winning, achievement and mastery for their own sakes. He stresses, however, that his objective is to describe what people actually do to get wellbeing.

"Adding this element in no way endorses the achieving life or suggests that you should divert your own path to wellbeing to win more often," he says.

His fifth element is "positive relationships". When another founder of positive psychology was asked to say what it was about in two words or fewer, he replied "other people". Seligman says "other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up".

No doubt, but that sounds a bit self-centred. For relationships to be "positive" they have to be two-way; you have to give as well as get. Whatever you call it - happiness, wellbeing, flourishing - it won't work if it doesn't have relationships at its core.

That's what we keep forgetting.

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