A Total Failure According to Its Own Standards? Give Me a Dozen!
In an astoundingly shallow review of several books on happiness, Carol Tavris drops this humdinger in her discussion of Layard’s statist impulses:
Professor Layard takes [active government promotion of happiness] further, proposing that government should make the happiness of its citizens a primary goal, the heart of its public and economic policy, using laws and taxes to reward cooperation in pursuit of a common good, make work life more compatible with family life, help the poor, reduce rates of mental illness, subsidize activities that promote “community life”, reduce commuting time, eliminate high unemployment, prohibit commercial advertising to children (as Sweden does) . . . . If the thermostat theory is right, none of this will raise the overall happiness level of the population, and some temperamentally grouchy people will complain that they miss the traffic, but who cares? Sign me up. [emphasis added]
Got that? Even if the entire justification offered for all this state action is completely and totally undermined by the empirical evidence, Tavris wants to sign up for it anyway. Why? No doubt because Layard’s interpretation of happiness “science” coveniently, nay miraculously, maps onto her existing political commitments, and it’s nice to have another arrow in the rhetorical quiver.
Worse, because Tavris thinks all this is worth doing even if no one is made any happier, she presumably thinks that all this frighteningly anti-liberal social engineering would work, thereby providing real benefits according to some other evaluative standard, leaving only the terminally grouchy to complain about the lack of things to complain about. This is precisely the kind of fantastically ignorant faith in technocracy that makes the sunny pseudoscientific authoritarianism of the neo-Benthamites so dangerous.
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She does not say that Layard’s theory fails by its own standards. She does not even say that Layard himself subscribes to the “thermostat view”. Her own view, moreover, seems to be “positivist psychology” requires using a measurable concept of happiness and that, to the extent you really buy that, there is evidence that people’s happiness level does not change dramatically through their lifetimes.
If there is any fault in that paragraph you cite, it would seem to be her assumption that thermostats (pace the theory) would hold steady AT THE SAME LEVEL after what you style “frighteningly ill-liberal social engineering”. From all we know about the thermostat theory based on her review, it seems a likely possibility that they would hold steady at a higher (or lower) level depending on the quality of the legislation.
And I suspect that none of us (Will, I, or Ms. Tavris) are especially partial to the philosophical (as opposed to operative scientific) view of happiness that characterizes it as a hedonic states subject to thermostatic measurment. (Also note that thermostats measure, but the function she descrbes seems to be more regulatory — i.e. anti-manic/depressive — in nature.)
For someone with a modernized Aristotilian view of happiness, in which H has a lot to do with one’s activity in his or her polity, the analysis in her article seems appealing (not shallow) even if you disagree with the “statist” particulars.
Apparently the Kingdom of Bhutan is taking this very seriously. They have a measure called GNH (Gross National Happiness) which replaces GNP. Of course, they actually have no way to measure it yet. Entertaining article in Technology Review:
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/08/issue/feature_wise.asp