Striving for Carrots

Happiness is a state of well-being and contentment that should be found at home, at the work place, and within one’s self. This would make available an individual’s basic rights stated in the Declaration of Independence of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” William Greider’s “Work Rules” and Jon Gertner’s “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness” exemplify their own ideas on how culture could become happier. Jon Gertner’s essay explains the underlying truth behind happiness and the mistakes societies make on its journey because they never really know what they want. He argues that political journalists for example like William Greider try to predict forms of happiness. William Greider makes a case about a moral economy with a collective group of workers in society that govern their own company because he wants to present a happier workplace environment for Americans. He feels the Constitution has lost its value by forming a “master-slave” relationship between a boss and worker by making workers suspending their control to the boss. By relating Greider’s argument to Gertner, we realize it is a problem because how do you plan a way to make society happier, when people never really know what will make them happy? Greider’s essay presents that workers are not happy because they can not govern their own work, but that is not possible because happiness is a very broad feeling that most people do not understand. A moral economy can have a decent sense of right and wrong in a worker-owned workplace or in the normal nation wide work place. It is impossible to predict which economic model will satisfy its workers in a society with individuals who are guilty of “miswanting” forms of happiness .

By attending an American school system, all students played roles on “Occupation Day” or some holiday celebrating different professions, as the careers they would like to have when they grew up. The typical ones were lawyers, doctors, writers, teachers, or actors. I do not remember an elementary student every answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “A janitor, or maybe a seamstress”. Since our youngest years we were taught what jobs hold honor and prestige and indirectly taught what occupations we should not sought after. Was society worried about the amount of happiness a certain occupation might give us, or the amount of salary we might make? William Greider’s ideal moral