Promoting Greater Human Wellbeing: Interacting the Happiness Hypothesis and Religion

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Modern capitalist societies have been astonishingly successful in promoting economic growth with all that means for increasing standards of living. These achievements are now beginning to be shared by leading emerging economies. Yet research across nations and disciplines is now regularly suggesting that this increasing prosperity has not been accompanied by increasing happiness or wellbeing. Indeed, the opposite has often been the case in terms of major growth in crime, mental illness, and family breakdowns, and declining trust in neighbourhoods and volunteering. This predicament of increasing wealth but not increasing happiness is often referred to as the paradox of prosperity.The happiness hypothesis is a key entrypoint into these debates, is of growing significance, and involves research from such disciplines as economics, economic history, psychology and sociology. Essentially, it recognises that increasing individual annual incomes above $20,000 p.a. is not commensurate with increasing happiness at all. Above that sum, other existing features of happiness become far more important, including personal relationships, family life and friendships, shared trust in neighbourhoods, and questions of morality and philosophy or purpose of life (including religion). The cumulative effect of all these features propels this whole debate into the centre of religious traditions and experiences. Yet the actual contribution of religion to this debate is under-researched, even though the current secular research clearly recognises the importance of religious wellbeing for happiness.The proposal will therefore seek to develop the religious contribution to the happiness hypothesis by bringing together a network of scholars and reflective practitioners, principally British, but including Swedish and US. They will engage with and debate the key features and indices revealed by the existing happiness research (including the nature and importance of work, income, mental health and spirituality, spiritual capital and globalisation, values and virtues, ethics and justice, inequalities, fair trade, religious finance as Muslim tradition). The network will therefore seek to elaborate the nature and extent of religion's contributions to such features and indices, including the nature and extent of any added value provided by religion. These emerging findings will be tested in relation to mainstream economics, and by exploring appropriate measurement systems. The research network would seek to continue beyond the life of this proposal through further research applications which would build on these initial findings.