The Evaluative Worthlessness of Happiness
I’ve been dipping into the literature on the measurement of happiness, and the most stunning thing about happiness is that it is so incredibly robust. It seems that there is almost nothing one can do to significantly and permanently alter one’s natural temperamental disposition to happiness. Most people in most places are pretty happy. Income means very little. People who suffer horrifying disfigurements and disabilities usually bounce right back to their happiness “set-point.” The Minnesota twins studies show that hedonic tone is to a large degree genetic. It seems that even people in prison aren’t a whole lot less happy than people not in prison. Freedom and democracy mean something, but not that much. If you’re on good terms with your family, have close friends and meaningful work, you’re probably doing about as well as you’re going to do.
All this implies that any form of happiness-consequentialism is pretty much useless as anything more than a very brute standard of evaluation. I have yet to fully process what this really means. (It does mean that the Objectivist subjective-happiness-as-barometer-of objective-life-success view is plain false.) I do think this pushes me to a more Scanlonian view according to which our reasons for action are not even close to exhausted by considerations of “well-being.” If being more free, more healthy, and so forth do not cash out in terms of happiness, then so much the worse for cashing out value in terms of happiness.
Additionally, I think the methodological implications of the happiness research on measurement problems in economics have yet to be digested. Consider the concluding paragraph of Krugman’s excellent essay “Viagra and the Wealth of Nations“:
In other words, as soon as you try to think seriously about how to measure Viagra’s effect on the nation’s wealth, you realize what a dubious enterprise such comparisons are. I have nothing against calculating real G.D.P. as accurately as possible; we need that number for all kinds of purposes. But the rather vulgar case of Viagra reminds us that, in the end, economics is not about wealth — it’s about the pursuit of happiness.
Krugman seems to be saying that “problem of Viagra” is not simply a problem for calculating the effects new innovations have on material wealth, but a problem for determining the effects of innovation on happiness (which is what wealth really amounts to). But if we take the happiness research seriously, almost nothing has much effect on anyone’s long-term happiness. So if we are to say what makes it better to have Viagra than to not have Viagra (or whatever), then we’re going to have to say something about our reasons to value more possibilities, more choices, and enhanced abilities. But what we have to say is not going to be much about happiness. That is to say, “wealth” isn’t a measure of happiness, either. My intuition about what wealth is: a garden of forking paths leading to multitudes of possible lives.
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Happiness
Will wonders about whether or not people are truly engaged in a pursuit of happiness. He begins his course of thought by observing (through literature and stu…
Perhaps going in the other direction, and counting the moments or periods of misery. Someone in Guatemala or 12th century England mat be as generally happy as a present-day middle-class American, but have more and intense episodes of unhappiness.
“innovation on happiness (which is what wealth really amounts to).”
Can’t really buy this, since a question I have been thinking about is whether an Egyptian pyramid worker of a Gothic Cathedral builder was really less happy than we were. In other words, has 4000 years of technological progress really brought happiness? I do see a difference, however, between individual wealth and social technology, tho according to your study, the difference isn’t that significant as to happiness.
If happiness is genetic, could we be becoming happier or less happy over the last few millenia, as we have been getting taller?
Bob, about your last thought, I think its an intriguing hypothesis and surely possible. If happiness is a kind of chemical equilibrium, and changes in diet have changed our chemistry (which accounts for our getting taller), then there is an definite possibility that changes in diet have made us happier (or sadder), too.
what about length of time? If we can assume a baseline happiness that is seemingly robust, so much so that meaningul changes changes do not occur to the long-term equilibrium even due to exogneous shocks, then the only thing that increase total utility is living longer.
One might not be any happier, per se, but they are equally happy over a longer time-horizon. Thus any policy that can extend life in the aggregate would ostensibly appear to be one that increases happiness.
This could be used as justification for wealth-increasing policies insofar as increased wealth can lead to longer lives, or as wealthier societies tend to live longer (as it has been historically).
This does not, of course, address whether individuals change their happiness “set point” based on their expected life expectancy. They may in fact compensate as their life expectancy goes up or down, or rather peoples may compensate as their life expectancy as a society goes up.
Will, how is happiness typically measured? If it’s based on self-reporting, I’m not sure that tells you a whole lot. After all, if I’m asked how happy I am, my first question is going to be “compared to what?” I’m probably going to answer by comparing my current mental state to past mental states. I would ask “am I happier than usual?” In that sense, it’s inevitable that people will return to an “average” level of happiness over time. Even if I were moved to a higher level of happiness on some “objective” scale, after a while I would start to take that new level for granted and report my happiness level as average again.
Tim, Mostly, it’s done by questionaires and surveys. Some ask one question like “How satisfied are you with life as a whole.” Others ask a whole battery of questions about your own tendency to become elated when good things happen, sad when bad hings happen, and more. It seems that people don’t much lie; surveys of friends and family about how happy their friends and family members seem tend to corroborate self-reports. Some studies have been done where people are given beepers that are buzzed randomly, at which point people must write down how they’re feeling just then. These seem to track other forms of self-report rather well. There are some objective physiological correlations to happiness: stress (cortisol) levels, and so forth. These tend to back up the self-reports. I’m skeptical of the methodology, too, but less so now that I’ve read more about it.
Philosophical point about introspection: you can’t really compare your current subjective state with past states. You can compare your current state with your memory of your past state, but our memories about past states are extremely unreliable. If you’re happy now, your assessment of past states will be much nicer than if you’re sad now. So, basically, current state blinds us to what past states where really like at that point in time.
About your last point: isn’t that really just the same as saying that you don’t feel any different? Or, is there any sense of talking about an “objective” scale of a subjective phenomena if two points on that scale turn out to be subjectively indiscernible?
It’s a serious problem. How can I let my a priori defense of hedonic consequentialism be refuted by something as silly as the empirical facts. And yet the facts are so . . . inconvenient. The siren song of preference-satisfaction utilitarianism beckons, and yet seems to be plainly incoherent.
They overlook the possibility that wealth and technology could lead to the development of better happy pills, or some techniques that will be able to alter people’s baseline level of happiness. What about that, eh? Personally it scares me. A whole nation of sickening happiness and joy 24 hours/7 days a week. I say nuts to that!
As a product of our evolved minds, happiness is surely an evolved mental facility itself. Presumably we experience happiness as a way for our genes to direct us to do stuff that the genes want us to do. Sex springs to mind instantly, but all other triggers for happiness should also be suspected as evolutionarily relevant.
Looked at the point of view of the genes: it is not necessary for us to have “permanent” happiness changes to motivate us; a simply happy moment (or a happy hour or two, or day) is plenty motivational. You’re unhappy because you have no friends; well, you go out and make one. You’re happy for a little while over your new buddy, but then you drop back to your baseline. The point is, the friend remains; thus the evolutionary function of friend-making (whatever it is, if it is still operative) is served.
More mathematically, consider a graph of happiness level over time. It’s not the area under the curve we are optimizing (that’s basically constant according to what you’re saying). Rather we are trying to create upspikes and desperately trying to avoid the downspikes.
I don’t agree that this changes much of our reasons for acting. Sure, if it were possible to do something that would make me permanently more happy, I might do that (people marry, have kids…). [Would you do it if it were a “false” happiness, a wire installed in the pleasure center of your brain?] But mostly I do things for short term happiness, knowing it is so, and this is the vast majority of my action. I buy lunch and eat it - this makes me temporarily happy, but I know I won’t even remember it a week from now.
Just a couple of thoughts on the measurement of happiness. If I’m feeling depressed, I tend to see my whole life as a failure. On the other hand, when I’m not feeling depressed, my life doesn’t look too bad. So am I happy or not, as a whole? I probably wouldn’t answer any questionnaires while being depressed, so I suppose I would go down as a happy person, even though that wouldn’t be the whole truth. Because of this, I can’t put much weight on what people say about their happiness.
Also, people can seem a lot happier than they actually are. Somebody I knew committed suicide last year, but she always gave the impression of being a very positive, happy-go-lucky person, even to her closest friends and family. When she died, nobody had any idea why she did it. But something tells me that she wasn’t quite as happy as she seemed. After this I can’t be but very skeptical about judging people’s happiness by their outward behaviour.
Of course, these are just single cases but I would imagine that they’re far from unique until I’m given strong evidence to the contrary.
It is important to remember that although it is very difficult to alter one’s baseline happiness, it is not impossible. Most changes in income do little to alter happiness, but genuine famine and starvation will. Disfiguiring accidents do not alter happiness, but genocide and war do.
The lesson, I think, is not that hedonic consequentialism is wrong, but merely that we need to focus our effots more intensely on the things that really cause suffering.
Along those lines, I’ve been teachin “Luxury Fever” by the economist Robert Frank. His basic claim is that conspicuous consumption does nothing to increase the overall happiness of a group of people, but various forms of inconspicuous consuption (like more time off work) do.
Rob, I mostly agree. There’s no doubt that the utility of income can be great if one is really poor, and that social instability cause unhappiness. My point is that once you get to a more or less free, stable, wealthy society, the evaluative usefulness of hedonic consequentialism has been sapped. It provides almost no guidance between competing policies or political programs.
I want Frank’s claim to be true. My hunch is that we’d be better off economically, as well as in terms of happiness if people worked less and played more. But from what I’m reading, I can’t tell whether it is true.
Will,
I tend to agree with Tim about self-report measures of happiness or subjective well-being. The corroboration checks you mention have been applied in only a tiny percentage of the studies that used the self-report measures; the degree of convergence with physiological measures has been challenged by some knowledgeable people (e.g., Jerome Kagan); and so on.
Doesn’t self-reported happiness fall prey to a lot of the same distortions as self-reported self-esteem? In many societies, including our own, high self-esteem is considered better than low self-esteem, and apart from cultural norms, some people may be “defending against” feelings of low self-esteem–or just plain kidding themselves. If you give the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale to a bunch of Clemson students, the average score will be around 70 out 90–which looks like very high self-esteem. Yet some of these students don’t act as though they think all that highly of either their competence or their worth.
The measurement problems are really tough. Self-esteem researchers are starting to introduce procedures that get around social desirability and various defenses; I suspect that those who study happiness or subjective well-being need to be doing similar things.
I also rather doubt that happiness is a single dimenson, just as I doubt that utility is a single dimension, but that’s fodder for another discussion.
Robert
Will,
You refer to Objectivism as having a “subjective-happiness-as-barometer-of-objective-life-success-view.” (Hey, isn’t it a lot easier to say that kind of thing in German?)
But Rand’s point of view wasn’t strictly consequentialist. Note those qualifiers like “happiness is the purpose, not the standard” and “man’s life qua man.”
These days, the people with the big investment in who is an Objectivist and who isn’t seem to be tilting toward a duty ethic, albeit with context-dependent rules. I think they are also tilting toward an a priori mode of argument that pushes to the side empirical evidence about happiness, or any other outcomes in life.
In any form of eudaimonism, you’re going to encounter arguments of the form “So-and-so claims to be happy, but here is evidence that maybe he isn’t.” It gets dangerous when the eudaimonist starts resorting to “So-and-so claims to be happy, but he is obviously isn’t living by Rand’s ethic, or Aristotle’s, or the Stoics’, or whoever’s, *so he can’t be happy.* What more do you need to know?”
Of course we need to know more. And good social science–the kind that will enable us to know more, social science that manages a balance between theory development and empirical work–is really hard to do.
Robert Campbell
Robert,
I’m pretty skeptical of self-reports, but what I was reading made it seem not as bad as I thought. But I am perfeclty willing to believe that it is as bad as I thought. Can you point me to the Kagan discussion?
Will,
See Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas (Harvard University Press, 1998), particularly the discussion of fear and anxiety, pp. 15-38.
Something or other in Kagan’s book will rile just about anybody, but he asks good questions.
Robert
Will,
See Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas (Harvard University Press, 1998), particularly the discussion of fear and anxiety, pp. 15-38.
Something or other in Kagan’s book will rile just about anybody, but he asks good questions.
Robert
Will writes: “I do think this pushes me to a more Scanlonian view according to which our reasons for action are not even close to exhausted by considerations of “well-being.” If being more free, more healthy, and so forth do not cash out in terms of happiness, then so much the worse for cashing out value in terms of happiness.”
I agree that the impact of this research, if it’s true, is huge. The good thing about happiness is that it seems like happiness-facts can ultimately ground claims about what is right, wrong, virtuous, vicious, etc. But if we have reasons to do things that do not get grounded in facts about happiness - especially if we say we have reasons to be more free, more healthy, etc. - the most unifying explanation of these reasons will probably be some kind of group-subjectivism, e.g., “That’s just the way WE feel, after thinking about it. We LIKE freedom, we reflectively endorse it.” Isn’t this gross? Doesn’t it turn all of ethics into a gooey war of rhetoric, just like Dick Rorty says? How else could we account for our attempts to convince outback bushmen and government-worshipping Germans to try out our ways?
Will, I noticed you’re reading some of the “Positive Psychology” stuff. Paradox of Choice was a great book. From my understanding of that book, and Seligman’s stuff, they use the word happiness almost more like a verb than a noun (i.e., happiness is more of an action than a feeling).
With this view, happiness is almost more like an undercurrent that runs through a person’s life than a surface feeling of joy. Looking at it this way, someone whose life consists solely of entertainment might seem happier on the surface, but since they don’t take the actions of happiness, they might not really be as happy as the person who works competently, loves well, etc., even if that person seems uptight or serious on the surface.
Taking Happiness Research Seriously
Will Wilkinson surveys the literature on happiness research, and comes to this conclusion:
It seems that there is almost nothing one can do to significantly and permanently alter one’s natural temperamental disposition to happiness.
[…]
If you…
It seems that there is almost nothing one can do to significantly and permanently alter one’s natural temperamental disposition to happiness.
I don’t understand why this statement is meaningful. Its like saying there is nothing one can do to alter one’s natural disposition to be a certain height, or have a certain skin tone, or any of the other things which genes have an effect on. But one can choose to get more or less sun, one can be malnourished and short or take HGH and be taller.
Of course we can’t change our dispositions. That’s what a disposition is. But we can change all the other things that go into the formula, along with disposition, to determine the end result.
hey, i was just wondering, amongst all of this, it is said that be having friends one is content, and that you have so to speak a burst of happiness through this new found friendship, but how about all those stories about hermits. could they truly be happy even though they say they are?
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