fortune---or to the successes and jackpots of good fortune. Suh, Diener & Fujita, at Illinois, have
shown that both positive and negative events that have been experienced within recent weeks
will increase or decrease subjective well-being above or below the subject’s “set-point” or typical
value. However, if the time interval is six months or more, even marked highs or lows, uppers or
downers, will have dissipated. This undoubtedly explains the findings reported by David Myers
and Ed Diener in 1995, that well-being is only negligibly correlated with income, social status,
marital status, and the like, findings that we were able to replicate with our Registry twins.
More recently, we correlated the IQ scores of 241 of Bouchard’s reared-apart twins with their
scores on Tellegen’s Well-Being scale, getting a value of only .06. The publication in 1995 of
Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, created a firestorm of controversy (in which many of
the most ardent participants seem never to have actually read the book) because it presented lots
of data showing that people with money, status, and position tend to have higher IQs on the
average than the people who work for or wait on them and that IQ is strongly heritable. I can’t
help wondering if the angst and alarm engendered by these findings would not have been
mitigated if the debaters had read Myers and Deiner. After all, the problem with accepting The
CuU Curve’s conclusions is that it seems so unfair that the bosses and the other rich got where
they are in part because they were better endowed with hereditary smarts. Yet, now we know
that, although the bosses and their pals may be richer and smarter than the rest of us, they aren ‘t
any happier.
Myers & Diener’s findings are not so surprising once we think the matter through. As
Jeremy Bentham pointed out almost two centuries ago, “Nature has placed mankind under the
government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.” But if either the pain or the pleasure
were to endure, then Nature would have lost her carrot & stick method of getting us to do her
bidding. We should just sit immobile, either paralyzed by gloom or entranced in beatitude, and
we would not get Nature’s work done.