Chapter 4 measuring happiness

I find the quote at the beginning of the chapter very intriguing, as I should, being that of Ernest Hemingway; whom stated that "happiness in intelligent people, is the rarest thing I know." 

I think I know what he means by that. However, I've known some highly intelligent people; whom don't necessarily lead the type of lives that are stereotypical of what one would consider "a happy American life," yet I believe that some of those people would report as being happy, by their own standards.

Although some people, such as my parents, claim to be happy alone; they enjoy their own company, and find their own-selves to be highly entertaining. Lol.

Anyways in this chapter Haybron focuses on the problem with measuring happiness. He discusses how we tend to measure it of other people by evaluating what we see on the outside. 

But then goes on to discuss how it has been discovered that happiness is more of an internal measure taken by the individual themselves.

And then further discusses how even that measure can be a skewed measure, as people doing self evaluations of their happiness, and to lean more towards the positive when reporting their own happiness. 

And so, he begins to ask "are people as happy as they say they are?" He says that numbers measured in the studies and world poll on happiness, that indicates that 94% of Americans claim to be happy, are preposterous. 

Haybron then provides quantitative reasoning or his opinion, by providing data from other surveys; conducted on, for instance, depression and anxiety; and loneliness and stress, within the United States. And also surveys, which were conducted on children (as well as college age young adults,) in the United States, reported having contemplated or attempted suicide, and or reported as having eating disorders. 

Haybron also, discusses the 1% of Americans that are incarcerated; and the 3%, being under the supervision of the criminal Justice system; and how those figures alone discredit the possibility that only 6% of all Americans are unhappy.

He ends the chapter by saying that "people might tend to overstate their happiness for two different reasons: one being positivity biases affecting the way that we think about ourselves," and says that "we tend to have overly rosy views on ourselves and our futures, a phenomenon known as positive illusions" (which I referred to above, and he defines as "leaning towards the positive side of things.") And the second reason that he gives, being that "we lack clear standards of what it means to be happy." He basically says that not having clear definition of what it means to be happy allows people to lie about their happiness without actually lying. This is kind of like saying that without laws people are more likely to break basic moral codes of ethics, in a way. I mean without a true definition of happiness, people aren't accountable, if you will; for skewing their answers towards the positives, if they don't have a valid definition to go off of.