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Happy talk: what did we know about joy, and when did we know it?

Article Excerpt
THE HAPPINESS MYTH Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong By Jennifer Michael Hecht HarperSanFrancisco $24.95

DANCING IN THE STREETS A History of Collective Joy By Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books $26

The happiness industrial complex is experiencing an unprecedented boom these days, and, were I a financial adviser, I would strongly recommend investing in happiness futures. Not because jollity itself is booming (moroseness continues to show very strong fundamentals), but because the outlook for ancillary markets--the sales of pickaxes to happiness prospectors--is exceedingly bullish.

Here's one imperfect gauge: 16,531 books were listed recently on Amazon.com with the words happiness or happy in their titles. Many of these are self-help books (The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being), but happiness is making its way into other fields as well, including business (What Happy Companies Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Company for the Better) and even the occult arts (SunShines: The Astrology of Being Happy).

The Web is, of course, rife with discussions, reports, and personal testimony about happiness, and it serves as a lively souk for hawkers of various nostrums and regimens for boosting our well-being. One Web site I stumbled upon, called The Happiness Show, offers 138 half-hour episodes, viewable free online. In many of these, two pleasant, middle-aged men, George and Lionel, discuss happiness from a Wayne's World-style set adorned with smiley-face decorations. As they talk, they smile. A lot. It's disturbingly mesmerizing.

But the site also reports some troubling news: Americans are, on average, only 69 percent happy. This puts us only slightly ahead of the world population, which is 65 percent happy. The Happiness Show also features a global happiness index, one of many circulating these days. The happiest nation on earth by this...