Thread: So I actually took the time to read that Happiness article people were tweeting about today and was profiled in The Times. Its...bizarre
Before I comment I want to be clear - I'm not a data historian. But I do work on the history of fear to some extent. I'm also fascinated by how people interact with the past, think about it, study it, and represent it outside of the discipline of academic History.
So - the article offers a macro view of wellbeing in four countries - UK, USA, Germany and Italy 1820-2009 [when their data set ends]. That data set is Google Books, which apparently represents a solid 6 percent of published material. Wellbeing defined as life satisfaction.
Wellbeing is measured by key word analysis - with words valued as positive or negative. This creates graphs that can be plotted against GDP, for instance. This gives the outputs discussed in the newspaper coverage - UK and US wellbeing declines postwar, Ger and Ita not so much.
One thing I will point out - the authors are aware in places of the limitations of their approach. Something that didn't make it into the Times coverage or the twitterstorm that followed.
BUT that awareness is always countered. There's a little qualification at the end [pg4] that 'in all cases there is a need for what historians call a ''close read'' of the historical data.' Countered, 'nonetheless', by assertion the data-set's value is hard to 'overstate'.
But is it? I'm flummoxed by how you'd use this grand overview as a historian. I mean, the graphs are tempting if you don't think about the context. To stay in my own period lane for a moment - there is no overall dip around the 1880s-1910s.
I think about all those agonized Edwardian texts about the 'Condition of England'. All that agony about tariff reform, poverty, reform, industrial competency, national efficiency...did that not matter in the grand scheme? My mind boggles...
But then I think about those texts - how they were constructed. The admixture of despair, and anger, and hope, and aspiration. Can that possibly be caught up here with these tools?
More telling is the page 2-3 discussion of big political moments [TM]. Each country gets a couple where the authors feel MAJOR EVENTS may have affected their results dramatically. All get WWI and WW2. Italy gets 1848 and Risorgamento too, Germany 1871 instead and 1989.
This is the fascinating bit for the public historian - and the most depressing for the interdisciplinary one. Its the Chart-Toppers approach to history. Grabbing at well-known historical moments to show the responsiveness of the dataset. But it falls flat.
So much of it rests on general knowledge levels of history. Take the USA example - there's a high of Wellbeing in the 1920s before a dip in the 1930s. Perfectly explained by the Roaring 20s to Great Depression narrative the authors point out. Except...
Does that work? The more we know about the 1920s in America the more we know about a divided and uncertain society. Its cuts to the heart of criticism others have made about representation here - one suspects the wellbeing of black Americans in this period would look different.
But perhaps more importantly it speaks to the depressing lack of engagement with the discipline of history. I counted just three footnotes that could be described as ''history'' based. Just three. For a four nation 200 year study. That's madness.
Its that easy glide through the big moments of history without stopping to think. Stopping to consider. The more I think about it the more that, more than anything, is what the problem is here. Why should the unification of Italy explain a dip in ''wellbeing'' however defined?
Indeed the lack of definitions throughout this short paper should alarm scholars. There's a temptation to reach for easy references. Modern values that can help explain levels of education and ''democracy'' in all four countries. But again no sense of how these really relate.
For me, that's the biggest and most depressing problem here. The sheer uselessness of a piece of funded research that cannot enhance scholarship because it never engaged with said scholarship to begin with. That should terrify those of us engaged in interdisciplinary work.
Thank you for reading my gin-fuelled rant. /end
