There is no perfect parenting method, just as there is no perfect parent and no perfect kid. We all try our best. But let’s take a look now at the benefits of the path of elephant mums and dads – parents who nurture and encourage their children, and believe that, if a child knows that they are loved – and not because of their marks in school – that love will give them the strength to find and follow their own way towards happiness.
I was fortunate enough to be raised by elephants. Had it not been for my parents’ encouragement to do what makes me happy – and them letting me know that I was loved, wherever life would take me – I am not sure I would have had the courage to start a journey in which failure was a likely outcome but which instead has brought me happiness and taken me on adventures around the world.
On one of these adventures, I met a violinist who had been raised by a tiger mum. In third grade, I was put in the corner in music class by a substitute teacher who thought I was deliberately trying to ruin the singing lesson. I wasn’t. I just have no musical sense whatsoever. No tiger mum could have changed that. In any case, the violinist and I were both speaking at an event in London, and we got talking about how differently we had been raised. ‘When I was a kid, my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up,’ she told me.
‘I want to be happy,’ she had answered. ‘Don’t be foolish,’ her mother had replied. ‘That is not a real ambition.’ That day in London, she played the violin. It was the most impressive display of musical skills I had ever heard.
I am sure her mother was happy. I hope she was, too.
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MILE-HIGH HIERARCHY
In countries with more economic equality, the percentage of people agreeing that ‘most people can be trusted’ is higher.
The same goes for individual US states – the more economically equal the state is, the more people trust each other. If we trust each other, we feel safe and have less to worry about – and we tend to see others as cooperators rather than competitors.
Trust levels are not static and, in countries like the UK and the US, they have fallen. For half a century, wealth has increased in the US, but inequality has soared, causing trust to go into free fall.
Inequality leads to mistrust, competition, resentment and anger. It is on the rise globally and, while we used to experience an ‘elevator effect’, rich and poor rising and falling as one, poorer people now feel left behind. And with growing inequality, more and more people will feel left out, scared and angry.
The maladies of inequality are nicely summed up in The Spirit Level – Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard G. Wilkinson, professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, and Kate Picket, professor of epidemiology in the department of health sciences at the University of York. A high level of inequality reduces empathy, trust and both physical and mental health and leads to more violence, higher crime rates, more obesity and teenage births.
However, I think one of the most interesting studies to disembark the cabin recently (2015) is one by Katherine DeCelles and Michael Norton which examined instances of ‘air rage’.
Air rage is unruly or violent behaviour on the part of a passenger caused by physiological and psychological stresses associated with air travel. It includes acting in a threatening manner to the staff, removing your trousers and sitting in your boxers for the entire flight…one person even tried to choke the passenger in front of him because that person had leaned his seat back.
What the two professors (from Harvard Business School and the University of Toronto, respectively) examined was not only whether, for instance, the size of the individual seats or delays correlated with air rage, but also the class structure in these microcosms of society – in other words, inequality.
They found that physical inequality – the presence of a first-class cabin – on an aeroplane is associated with more frequent air rage back in economy class. Passengers in economy class were almost four times more likely to choke the guy in front of them if they were on a plane with a first-class section. In fact, according to the authors of the study, the presence of first-class has the same or an even bigger effect on the odds of air rage as a nine-and-a-half-hour flight delay.
But it is not only the economy passengers that are behaving badly. When people from a higher social class are more aware of their upper-class status, they are more likely to engage in antisocial behaviour, to be less compassionate and to feel that they are entitled. Or, to use the scientific term for individuals engaging in antisocial behaviour: ‘assholes’.
In addition – and here is where I think it gets fascinating – the study found that the economy passengers who had to walk through first class to get to their seat were more likely to express air rage.
Broadly speaking, you can board from the front, the middle or the back of the plane – and only boarding from the front will send you through the section where you can witness what you get in first class. Seeing the free champagne, the fully reclining seats and the smug smiles on the faces of the first-class passengers made people travelling in economy two times more likely to put their hands around somebody’s throat.
Other factors, such as the size of the individual seats, seem not to matter. The study demonstrates the importance of considering not just the design of aeroplanes, offices and stadiums in understanding and preventing antisocial behaviour but also the design of our societies when it comes to inequality.
In many ways, the UK is a pioneer in the well-being field. For one thing, the Annual Population Survey asks 160,000 people every year four well-being questions such as ‘Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?’, ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’, ‘Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?’ and ‘Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?’ That gives nerds like me a good opportunity to understand what can explain why some people voted to leave the EU and why some people wanted to remain in the Brexit referendum.
According to the New Economic Foundation, happiness inequality was a strong predictor of an area voting to leave the EU. The biggest happiness gaps were found in places like Blaenau Gwent in the Welsh valleys, where an overwhelming majority voted to leave, while the lowest inequality in well-being turned out to be in places like Cheshire East and Falkirk, which were vastly in favour of remaining. On average, in the twenty most unequal places in Britain in terms of well-being, 57 per cent of voters wanted to leave, while in the twenty most equal places, only 43 per cent voted to leave.
Three months before the Brexit vote, the World Happiness Report pointed out that inequality in well-being has a stronger negative impact on well-being than income inequalities and, as the New Economic Foundation pointed out, income inequality was not at all associated with voting to leave but well-being inequality was. This supports the case that our subjective feelings about our life and the comparisons we make of it with that of others are a better predictor of whether people are dissatisfied and feeling left behind. We get angry when we are faced with inequality – and we are not alone: in fact, we are wired to react to inequality and injustice.
Inequality in Well-being
LET THEM EAT GRAPES
If I had to do something other than my job, I would opt for Frans de Waal’s job. He’s a primatologist and studies the social behaviour of monkeys.
His book Chimpanzee Politics argued that the roots of politics are older than humanity (although it seems that, in recent years, human politicians have become more likely to throw faeces at each other). However, his work also argues that we might be physically wired to react strongly to inequality.