Unhappy? Don’t blame IT gadgets

If you’re feeling sad and lonely, cutting back on IT gadgets won’t help

Do consumers really need all the IT with which they surround themselves? I ask the question because more and more experts have now concluded that material possessions are no guarantee of happiness. Meanwhile, the government-backed Energy Saving Trust is worried that the growth of set-top boxes in the home, along with that of other devices, is likely to worsen climate change (Rise of the machines, 3 July). Can we go on the way we’ve been going on?

At the London School of Economics, professor Richard Layard is one of the leaders of the international happiness industry. He advises New Labour to recruit 10,000 therapists to combat depression (that’ll actually save money, he says). At the same time Conservative leader David Cameron, taking a leaf from Princeton professors who have promised us a ‘national well-being account’ later this year, says that it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general well-being.

Well: maybe I don’t need three generations of laptops in the home – it’s certainly quite a lot of clutter, and not that easy to hook up into a LAN, either. Maybe keeping up with the Joneses in IT can never bring us happiness. But maybe, too, we need to remember a little history before we rush to agree.

In his famous book The affluent society (1958), the late John Kenneth Galbraith, a popular American economist, argued that much consumer need was simply contrived by suppliers. As we grow richer, he wrote, ‘wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied’. Galbraith christened our reputed failure ever to be satiated by new goods as the ‘Dependence Effect’.

Nearly 50 years after Galbraith, the idea that more production brings about more dependent, profligate and always-unfulfilled consumption is today taken as a brilliant discovery. But in keeping with today’s misanthropic culture, people are supposed not so much to be dependent on mobile phones, computer games and plasma screens as addicted to them. This thesis is particularly applied to teenagers, but is extended to geeky adults, too.

I find the whole line of argument about happiness and addiction not just out of date, but deeply mistaken, and deeply condescending, too.

First, to say that living standards have risen but happiness has not does not mean that the former has resulted in the latter. That is a classic error: to see causation in correlation. Would we actually be happier with fewer bits of IT around us? I doubt it.

Second, the idea that the masses are always competing with each other to gain a merely transient buzz from the fruits of a trip to PC World – this says more about those who promulgate it than it does about the facts. Yes, the working class is usually ahead of the middle class in buying machines (take TVs, or VCRs, for example). But it’s just a bit too easy for a middle class person to upbraid poorer people for their sins – for their allegedly narcotic obsession with materialism and their corresponding failure to seek salvation in the spiritual world.

If we must use the metaphors of medical psychology, I’d say that today’s know-alls and Greens are themselves fixated on imposing their IT-lite world on the rest of us. Now that really is a problem… and not just for the IT industry, either.