Olivia: Gallup estimates that unhappy employees cost the US economy half a trillion dollars a year. Jackson: Half a trillion? With a T? That can't be right. Olivia: It is. That’s not a typo. $500 billion in lost productivity, sick days, and burnout. It turns out your bad mood is very, very expensive—and big business has a plan to fix it, whether you like it or not. Jackson: Wow. Okay, that's a heck of an opening. Where does a number like that even come from? Olivia: That staggering figure is the entry point into the world of William Davies's book, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. Jackson: The Happiness Industry. That title alone sounds a little dystopian. Olivia: It is! And Davies is the perfect person to write this critique. He's a political economist, not a self-help guru. So he's not asking 'how can we be happier?' He's asking a much more dangerous question: 'Who profits when we're told to be happier?' Jackson: I like that. It’s a completely different angle. Olivia: Exactly. To understand how your mood ended up on a corporate balance sheet, we have to go back to a London coffee shop in the 1760s, with a very strange and brilliant man named Jeremy Bentham.

Jackson: Jeremy Bentham. I vaguely remember him from a philosophy class. Something about utilitarianism? Olivia: The very same. But Davies paints a much more vivid picture. Bentham was a child prodigy, bullied and miserable, who became obsessed with a single, radical idea he stumbled upon while reading. The line was: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the great standard by which everything... must finally be determined." Jackson: That sounds pretty good, actually. What’s wrong with wanting the most happiness for the most people? Olivia: Nothing, in theory. But Bentham was a man of systems. He didn't just want it to be a nice phrase; he wanted to turn it into a science. He envisioned what he called a "felicific calculus." Jackson: A 'felicific calculus'? That sounds like something from a sci-fi movie. What is it? Olivia: It’s a bit like a moral spreadsheet. He believed you could take any action, any law, and literally calculate its value by adding up all the units of pleasure it would create and subtracting all the units of pain. The final score would tell you, objectively, if it was a good or bad thing to do. Jackson: Hold on. How on earth do you assign a number to a feeling? My 'pleasure' from a good cup of coffee is totally different from your 'pleasure' of reading a good book. It seems impossible. Olivia: You've hit on the exact problem that haunted Bentham his entire life! He knew it was the weak link. He toyed with proxies. Could money be a measure? He thought maybe, but a dollar means more to a poor person than a rich one. What about heart rate? Maybe, but that measures excitement, not necessarily joy. He never solved it, but he created the ambition. He planted the idea that human emotion should be measurable, that it could be detached from the person and looked at like an object. Jackson: So he opened a Pandora's box he couldn't close. Olivia: Precisely. And that ambition is alive and well today. Davies gives this incredible example from the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2013. They set up cameras around the festival grounds, armed with software that was taught to recognize and track human smiles. Jackson: You’re kidding me. Why? Olivia: To measure the "value" the festival was creating. To turn the subjective experience of enjoyment into a hard metric they could put in a report. This is Bentham's dream, or nightmare, come to life! A computer deciding your value based on the angle of your lips. Jackson: That's absurd! So if I'm just thinking deeply about a talk I just heard, I'm a less valuable festival-goer? My thoughtful frown is a liability to their bottom line! Olivia: Your thoughtful frown is a data point indicating low ROI. And that’s the danger. The system can only measure the simplest, most visible signs of happiness, so it starts demanding we all perform that simple version of it.

Jackson: Okay, so Bentham and his followers create this obsession with measuring feelings. But how does that leap from a weird literary festival experiment to a half-trillion-dollar industry? Olivia: Exactly! And once you decide you can measure feelings, the next logical step is to manage them for a purpose. That's where we get the modern 'Happiness Industry,' and its first major laboratory was the workplace. Jackson: This feels very relevant to my Monday mornings. Olivia: It is. In the early 20th century, you had management theories like Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management," which treated workers like cogs in a machine. The goal was physical efficiency. But then came a series of famous experiments called the Hawthorne Studies in the 1920s. Jackson: I think I’ve heard of the Hawthorne Effect. Olivia: That’s the one. Researchers went into a factory to test if changing the lighting would improve productivity. And it did. But then, just to check, they dimmed the lights back down... and productivity went up again. They were baffled. Jackson: What was going on? Olivia: After interviewing the workers, they realized the secret ingredient wasn't the lights. It was the attention. For the first time, someone was asking these factory workers what they thought, how they felt. They felt seen, they felt like part of a group, and that psychological boost made them work harder. Jackson: Ah, so that's the origin of the 'employee engagement' survey! It's not just about feedback; it's a tool to make us feel seen so we work harder. It’s a psychological lever. Olivia: It's the birth of the "psychosomatic worker," as Davies calls it. The idea that a manager's job isn't just to manage your tasks, but to manage your mind and your mood for the sake of the company's profit. This is why we have a $500 billion problem of "disengagement." It's the cost of workers who don't feel that psychological connection. Jackson: And now that logic has escaped the factory and gone digital. Olivia: It has gone nuclear. The digital world is the ultimate realization of this. And Davies uses the most powerful example: the 2014 Facebook mood manipulation experiment. Jackson: I remember the outrage about that, but I forget the details. Olivia: The details are chilling. For one week, Facebook, in collaboration with university researchers, secretly altered the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users. One group was shown more posts with positive emotional words, and another group was shown more posts with negative ones. Jackson: And they did this without anyone's consent? Olivia: It was buried in the terms of service. They wanted to see if emotions were contagious online. And they were. The people who saw more positive posts started using more positive words in their own updates, and the people exposed to more negativity became more negative themselves. Jackson: Wait, they deliberately tried to make people sadder, just to see if they could? That's not research; that's a form of psychological assault on an industrial scale. Olivia: It's the ultimate expression of the book's argument. An anonymous, algorithmic system, tweaking the emotional state of hundreds of thousands of people, not for their benefit, but for the sake of collecting data. It treats human beings as completely passive, programmable objects.

Jackson: So this is the 'Happiness Industry.' It started with a philosopher's well-intentioned but flawed idea, and it's ended with global corporations running psychological experiments on us without our knowledge. That's a terrifying arc. Olivia: And that's the journey Davies maps out. From Bentham's abstract idea in a coffee shop to Facebook's global laboratory. The book argues this isn't an accident; it's the logical endpoint of trying to turn human feeling into data. Once a feeling becomes a number, it becomes something to be optimized, managed, and exploited. Jackson: This is all pretty bleak. If chasing happiness is a trap set by corporations, what's the alternative? Just be miserable in protest? Olivia: That’s the million-dollar, or rather, half-trillion-dollar question. And Davies has a powerful answer. He says the solution isn't to look further inward, but to finally look outward. Jackson: What does that mean? Olivia: It means instead of asking, 'How can I fix my feelings of stress and anxiety?', we should be asking, 'What in my environment is causing these feelings? Why is my workplace so precarious? Why does our economy create so much inequality that leads to depression?' He argues that the constant push for mindfulness and individual resilience is a political tool that distracts us from demanding change in the systems that are making us unhappy in the first place. Jackson: So the most radical act isn't downloading a meditation app... Olivia: The most radical act might be organizing for better working conditions. The book suggests that true well-being comes not from individual optimization, but from building a society that is less stressful, more equitable, and more humane to begin with. It's about reclaiming happiness as a collective political project, not a private data point. Jackson: That really flips the script. It makes you think about all the 'wellness' solutions we're sold. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you feel empowered or managed by them? Find us on our socials and let us know. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.