The Happiness Industry How the Government and Big Business Sold Us WellBeing

<b>“Deeply researched and pithily argued.” —<i>New York Magazine</i></b><br> <b> </b><br> <b>“A brilliant, and sometimes eerie, dissection” of ‘the science of happiness’ and the modern-day commercialization of our most private emotions (<i>Vice</i>)</b><br> <br> <b><i>Why are we so obsessed with measuring happiness?</i></b><br>  <br> In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being.<br>  <br> Here, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why <i>Freakonomics</i> tells us less about the way people behave than expected, <i>The Happiness Industry </i>is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Davies shows that the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism.