Watch out: television makes us unhappy

TV damages society in two ways: it makes people more violent and makes them less satisfied with what they have

It is celebrity celebration time, is it not? The papers are full of who is likely to get this or that Oscar next week and who won the frock fight at the Baftas. Then it was photofest at the Brits, or was it London fashion week, or both? There is the much-hyped end of Friends. And now it is Posh in "Sixties' sexpot" Julie Christie mode, or so The Sun says, so it must be right.

Throughout the year there is the constant background noise from the celebs and their publicists, but periodically, like now, the volume goes up and we have the full screaming blast of the publicity machine. It is done, I suppose, because that is what we want: what we enjoy reading in the mags or watching on the box. But actually it makes us miserable.

One of the huge puzzles of the age is that those of us who are lucky enough to live in the rich developed world have objectively a better life than ever before in human history... yet we are no happier than we were a generation or more ago. The advance is not just in terms of the things we own. It is in the way we live, for in every developed country we are, on average, better educated and healthier than our forebears. We have more leisure and more information; we travel more and have greater job opportunities. And we have greater freedom to make our own choices about lifestyle without feeling the opprobrium of a more conservative, socially repressive society.

But we really are no happier than our parents. You can measure happiness in many ways. You can ask people how they feel and the answers are not too discouraging. Here in Britain some 36 per cent of people say they are very happy and a further 57 per cent sat they are pretty happy, figures, by the way, that are very close to those of the United States.

You can ask what makes people happy: the unsurprising conclusion is that top of the league come sex and socialising, and bottom work and commuting. We apparently gradually become happier as the day goes on - gruff in the morning and cheerful in the evening - though I'm not sure we need an economist to tell us that. And of course you can look at other measures, such as clinical depression and, the ultimate indicator of unhappiness, suicide rates. People who commit suicide are very unhappy indeed.

Put all these together and people in the US are slightly less happy than they were in the 1950s, while on the sketchy data that is available, we seem to be about the same. What's up - and why should the cult of celebrity be to blame?

Against this increase in physical and financial welfare, there seem to be several linked adverse social forces. One is increased crime; another broken families (people who are married are happiest and have the best health); and another the rise in depression, alcoholism and drug abuse.

Why should they have risen so much over the past 50 years? You cannot blame economic growth in general, for during the longest previous period of sustained growth, 1850-1914, alcoholism and crime both fell. So what is new? And a sizeable part of the answer, according to some hugely interesting work by Professor Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, is television.

Lord Layard (he is now a Labour peer) has pulled together what economists know about happiness in a book that will be published later this year, and comes to some startling conclusions. Among these is the malign effect of television.

Watching television damages the happiness of society in two ways. It makes people more violent; and it makes them less satisfied with what they have.

The impact on violence has been well documented. You can measure how children become more aggressive the more time they spend watching the box. When in 1999 television was introduced into what must have been the only TV-free country in the world, Bhutan, there was a surge in violent crime, fraud and drug taking. Much the same effect took place in a town in Canada (identified in the economic literature simply as Notel), which got television only in 1973.

But when television first came in the 1940s and 1950s, there was no such effect. Why? Well, television then mirrored the level of violence in society. Now it grossly inflates it. It also shows higher levels of family breakdown. People see other people behaving badly to each other on television and they assume that behaviour is normal - or at least become desensitised to it.

TV also makes people less happy with what they have, for they see a world that exaggerates wealth. Two-thirds of Americans are in blue-collar or service jobs, but only 10 per cent of TV characters are. In the early 1980s, nearly half of all soap opera characters were millionaires. The more people watch TV, the more they over-estimate the wealth of other people and the lower they rate their own income relative to these people. Since happiness is largely determined by relative, not absolute, wealth, the more TV people watch the more unhappy they are liable to become.

That is based on US evidence. The balance of British TV is of course slightly different, in that our soaps tend to do grit rather than dosh. Or at least they used, to since Footballers' Wives manages to combine bad behaviour and glitz in industrial quantities.

In any case we watch a lot of US-made programmes, so the negative impact on happiness is likely to be much the same. In both countries there is the adulation of the celebrity, of glitz, of physical attraction. Apparently women feel less happy about their own bodies after looking at pictures of models, while men feel less good about their wives. So the more beautiful people you see on the box or in the glossy mags, the more miserable you are likely to feel about yourself and your partner. Oh dear.

So what is to be done? There is the radical step of not watching television - a couple of my colleagues here on the Indie don't have them. That is an interesting sign of the times, but it is rather turning one's back on one of the most important influences on society. Besides a lot of us do go to the theatre and to movies, and it would be a shame not to catch the changing twists and fortunes of the entertainment industries and of the extraordinary, talented people who run them. It would be a shame not to be able to compare Victoria Beckham with Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, as The Sun says we must.

Lord Layard would suggest a number of practical policy measures. We should try to tame the rat race, using the tax system to encourage people to take more leisure rather than more cash. We should curb advertising and ban adverts that target young children, as Norway and Sweden do now. We should use the state's resources to guarantee greater income stability and security in old age. It should certainly put more resources into helping the mentally ill. And perhaps most important of all, we should educate children not just about self-knowledge and self-control but also the desire to serve - to fulfil an overall purpose wider than ourselves.

If we were able to propose that sort of social agenda, we could then enjoy the Oscars and the fashion shows for what they are - a celebration of industries and people that are wonderfully talented and bring fun to our lives - rather than some sort of gold standard to which we must aspire.