The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies
As soon as much more, reviewing behavior will certainly constantly provide helpful perks for you. You may not require to invest sometimes to check out the publication The Happiness Industry: How The Government And Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, By William Davies Merely set aside numerous times in our spare or totally free times while having meal or in your workplace to read. This The Happiness Industry: How The Government And Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, By William Davies will show you brand-new point that you could do now. It will certainly aid you to enhance the high quality of your life. Event it is simply an enjoyable publication The Happiness Industry: How The Government And Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, By William Davies, you could be happier and much more enjoyable to enjoy reading.
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies
Best PDF Ebook The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies
In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. In this brilliant dissection of our times, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why Freakonomics tells us less about the way people behave than expected, The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Davies shows that the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism.
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies- Amazon Sales Rank: #395510 in Books
- Brand: Davies, William
- Published on: 2015-05-12
- Released on: 2015-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.54" h x 1.18" w x 5.77" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review “Deeply researched and pithily argued, Davies’s work is a welcome corrective to the glut of semi-scientific happiness books that have become so popular in business and management circles, and which rarely, if ever, acknowledge the larger ideological goals of workplace well-being.”—New York Magazine “Davies’s concern is to show that by making us more resilient and more productive, the happiness industry tricks us into settling for too little.” —Katrina Forrester, London Review of Books“Skillfully written intellectual entertainment—prime fodder for postmodern psychologists and New-Age thinkers alike.” —Kirkus Reviews “Davies, explaining the evolution of the science of happiness from the French Revolution to the present, argues it essentially serves the interests of the powerful elite. This challenging book will appeal to academics and students of various disciplines.”—Booklist “William Davies argues that our happiness fixation may have more to do with the interests of corporations and governments than personal fulfillment.”—Fortune“A brilliant, and sometimes eerie, dissection of our times.” —Vice “Rich, lucid and arresting”—John Gray, Literary Review “A thought-provoking and daring intervention into the crowded field of neoliberal political economy … Its bold theses and elegant historical foundation provides political economists with much new material to consider.”—Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics “How ‘managing our happiness’ is becoming an increasingly lucrative and insidious industry.”—New Humanist“An interesting contribution to the growing genre of happiness studies.” —THE “This is a brilliant and lucidly written indictment of the ideology of happiness and its accompanying horrors of mindfulness and well-being. Davies convincingly shows how the happiness industry is the new front line of capitalism, which has succeeded in exposing the inner recesses of the self to techniques of measurement, surveillance and control.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless “William Davies reveals the tricks that corporates use to try to keep us happy while treating us as losers. Informed, revealing, scary and hopeful, The Happiness Industry connects economics and management science to psychology and psychiatry to explain why so much feels (and is) so wrong.” —Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%“When did happiness itself become a liability? When the market figured out that making us content is the first stage in manufacturing our consent. In this accessible, fact-filled history of measured happiness, William Davies shows us how metrics of well-being were systematically disconnected from meaning and community, and in the process transformed from the very core of human power into an access panel to our desires and behavior. I can’t listen to that damned ‘Happy’ song anymore without thinking about whom my supposed happiness really serves, and what they’re willing to do to make sure I stay that way.”—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now“In a heady mixture of psychology, economics, sociology, and philosophy, this book reveals the misguided nature of the currently popular intellectual project to make people happier and improve society through ‘scientific’ understanding—and manipulation—of human beings … An eye-opening, head-spinning, and mind-expanding book.” —Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge, author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism
About the Author William Davies is the author of The Limits of Neoliberalism. His writing has appeared in New Left Review, Prospect, the Financial Times, and Open Democracy. His website www.potlatch.co.uk was featured in the New York Times. He teaches at Goldsmiths, London.
Where to Download The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies
Most helpful customer reviews
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful. "Rendering their decisions predictable" By David Wineberg This is a remarkable tour through the painful evolution of behavioral economics, management consulting, advertising and psychiatry. It fills us with the realization that happiness has always been a factor (not necessarily respected, appreciated or understood) in numerous fields. Now suddenly, it is front and center as giant corporations focus on it, the better to get more out of employees and customers. Happiness has made it to the front burner of multinationals. Look out.Rather than deal with the causes, happiness consultants actually advise companies to find the unhappiest 10%, and lay them off for being unhappy, somehow inspiring everyone else to become “super engaged.” Get happy or get out.It has come to the point where capitalism itself is under review: can measures of happiness replace market pricing as the main measure of the economy? Davies cites the Davos conference, where the who’s who of capitalism now actively pursues this approach.Over a third of Westerners suffer from some sort of mental health problem, he says, usually undiagnosed. It leads to inactivity, non productivity, lower government revenues and higher costs as the unhappy tap government services. It may already reduce GDP by 3-4%. Now a far greater cost than crime, it’s expected to double in the next 20 years. It currently costs the American economy half a trillion dollars.There is an undercurrent of cynicism throughout The Happiness Industry, as Davies relates crackpot theories and crackpot theorists. Then he comes clean with force: “Once social relationships can be viewed as medical and biological properties of the human body, they can become dragged into the limitless pursuit of self optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism.” He says disempowerment is at the bottom of stress, anxiety, frustration and mental problems. Not knowing if you have adequate income or even work is the most stressful condition in society. And it is now a way of life. By promoting happiness, companies deflect these anxieties without addressing them. It is a power play over employees and customers. Companies want everyone’s decisions to be predictable, so they frame everything to maximize that, creating a new normal for both happiness as a state of being, and for data collection.The book takes a very dark turn, as happiness requires a surveillance society to work properly. How happy were you yesterday, Davies asks? We can tell you exactly by your tweets, facebook posts, texts, pins and instagrams. Also your health-recording wristband. “They” no longer care what people say in surveys; raw data is far more trustworthy.It is a fascinating turnaround for happiness, and well worth understanding, because it’s coming to company near and dear to you.David Wineberg
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Tackles an important subject and provides very good insights. It's well written and even funny By T Stojanovic Tackles an important subject and provides very good insights. It's well written and even funny. I have a degree in psychology and I have always suspected that what the author writes about was going on across corporate-sponsored psychology departments. The book is a good complement to Naomi Klein's books. I really enjoyed it and it inspired me.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful. A Gimlet Eyed View of the Capitalism of Happiness By Mary Marcus, Los Angeles Will Davies is brilliant. The chapter on The Psychosomatic Worker alone--is worth the price of the hardback. I was fascinated, appalled,totally hooked from beginning to end. A real intellectual tour de force.
See all 13 customer reviews... The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William DaviesThe Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies PDF
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies iBooks
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies ePub
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies rtf
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies AZW
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, by William Davies Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar