Happiness & Public Policy

Randolph M. Nesse, “Natural Selection and the Elusiveness of Hapiness“, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 2004, p. 1333-1347. [pdf]

ABSTRACT. The quest for happiness has expanded from a focus on relieving suffering to also considering how to promote happiness. However, both approaches have yet to be conducted in an evolutionary framework based on the situations that shaped the capacities for happiness and sadness. Because of this, the emphasis has almost all been on the disadvantages of negative states and the benefits of positive states, to the nearly total neglect of ‘diagonal psychology’, which also considers the dangers of unwarranted positive states and the benefits of negative emotions in certain situations. The situations that arise in goal pursuit contain adaptive challenges that have shaped domain-general positive and negative emotions that were partially differentiated by natural selection to cope with the more specific situations that arise in the pursuit of different kinds of goals. In cultures where large social groups give rise to specialized and competitive social roles, depression may be common because regulation systems are pushed far beyond the bounds for which they were designed. Research on the evolutionary origins of the capacities for positive and negative emotions is urgently needed to provide a foundation for sensible decisions about the use of new mood-manipulating technologies.

This is the best paper I know of on happiness and evolution. I found Nesse more subtle and insightful than Buss in “The Evolution of Happiness” [pdf]. Both, I think, lay too much stress on environmental mismatch, and neither are sufficiently careful about what “happiness,” as opposed to positive affect and goal-conducive motivational states, really is. My mitigated connectionist/Hayekian tendencies lead me to worry less about mismatch, and lead me to worry more about the possibility that happiness, as we think of it in the west, is a culturally learned blend of basic affective states packaged together with certain objective life conditions (i.e., not a natural psychological kind.) But I think Nesse provides a very promising account of what positive emotions are for, in terms of adaptive function.

I found Nesse’s discussion of the “maladaptivity” of manic behavior especially interesting. Which leads Nesse to observe:

One of the main questions facing happiness research is whether most people would be better off if they experienced more positive affect, and if that proves to be the case, how it can be accounted for given that mood regulation mechanisms were shaped by natural selection. Much happiness research starts with the folk psychology notion that happiness is good for you and proceeds to demonstrate correlations between positive affect and a variety of other indicators of well-being including friendships, achievement, health and longevity.

Nesse goes on to point out that a few (of the far too few) longitudinal studies have shown that more positive affect is generally associated with other positive changes for individuals. But this poses a puzzle:

If positive affect is strongly heritable [as it appears to be] and improves function [as the longitudinal studies seem to indicate], and presumably reproduction, then why did natural selection not long ago shape a higher average level of positive affect? More directly, why are there so many very successful people with many friends and resources who remain in states of chronically low mood?

I think the answer is likely to be that what Nesse has in mind as “improved function” isn’t actually improved biologically proper function, but is rather improved function relative to an internal human normative standard, and so doesn’t reliably cash out in terms of inclusive fitness. Anyway, a very rich paper well worth reading.

Cato intern Jonathan Rick sends me this Washington Times article with news that Americans are slap happy, according to a Harris Poll conducted using the Eurobarometer questions. The new poll has it that Americans are happier than any other people in the world, except for the not-so-gloomy Danes.

The Times chooses to emphasizes high American sastisfaction and optimism relative to Europeans, at the expense of explicitly pointing out that European satisfaction and optimism are rising at a faster clip.

My favorite datum:

While 56 percent of Americans say things are better than in 2000, the number stands at 57 percent in Britain, 60 percent in Sweden and 63 percent in Ireland.

Compare:

The Irish economy, while quite small by EU standards, nonetheless outperformed all OECD countries in real GDP growth over the last six years by a wide margin.

[from Yahoo! Finance]

How did Ireland do it? Here’s Ben Powell:

The Celtic Tiger provides an excellent example of how real economic growth occurs - by utilizing market forces to free a flagging economy. After a stagnant 13 year period with less than two percent growth, Ireland took a more radical course of slashing expenditures, abolishing agencies and toppling tax rates and regulations. At the same time the government made credible commitments through EU treaties not to engage in deficit spending.

Ireland’s long history of free and open trade has also played a role in its recovery. However, only since freeing other aspects of its economy by lowering taxes, decreasing regulation, maintaining low inflation and providing a stable fiscal environment has Ireland been able to grow rapidly enough to surpass greater Europe’s standard of living.

A recipe for happiness?

Salvius in comments below supplies us with our quote of the day:

You can’t make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abcesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say ‘yes’.

– Terry Pratchett

In the comments at the Fly Bottle, FXKLM offers this topical Dibert strip.

[click picture for bigger image]

In what I believe is the first post to link to this here Happy and Public Policy blog, my Cato colleague Radley Balko gives his take on happiness:

There’s a bias against contentment in our wiring. In hunter-gatherer society — where much of our psychology was developed — contentment meant complacency, which likely meant starvation. Ambition, angst, and worry compelled us to seek more — more status, more food, more mates, more “stuff.” And so those of our ancestors who lacked contentment probably did better at getting those things, and therefore at living longer and reproducing, than those who didn’t. Meaning they passed ambition, angst, worry and other traits at odds with happiness through our ancestry to us.

Which means, I think, that in virtually any setting, we’re (a) fighting against a natural predisposition toward unhappiness, and (b) we’re likely to measure our own success by those who live around us, our peers, and not on what took place before we were born.

I think there’s a lot to be said for this view. Radley worries that self-reports are likely to be fairly useless due to the tendency of happiness to recur to a fairly stable baseline, such that objective improvements in the conditions of one’s life are unlikely to show up in self-assessments. Again, I largely agree. Yet I don’t think that the fact that the wealthiest, most free societies score highest in average self-reported happiness is an accident either. The surveys don’t tell us nothing. There are institutional settings in which the baseline seems to shift up and stay up. That’s worth pointing out.

I also agree with Radley that much of the policy-relevant happiness work seems to be motivated by an anti-market mindset. However, the striking thing about the data, as unreliable as they may be, is they reveals that liberal market societies are good for whatever it is “happiness” surveys are actually tracking. I think it’s important to understand what this data does and doesn’t tell us about human well-being. And It tells us less than a lot of people think, partly for reasons Radley suggests. The truth about someone’s well-being often cannot be revealed simply by asking them. And it’s important to think carefully and systematically about how political institutions and public policy effect human well-being, and to do a better job of understanding the causal mechanisms by which they do so, instead of just piling up mounatains of semi-useful correlations. Therefore, we blog!

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event

– Jorge Luis Borges

Ruut Veenhoven, “Why Social Policy Needs Subjective Indicators,” Social Indicators Research 58: 33–45, 2002 [pdf]

ABSTRACT. There are many qualms about subjective indicators, and some believe that social policy would be better for not using them. This paper consists of a review of these objections. It is argued that policy makers need subjective indicators, the main reasons being:

1. Social policy is never limited to merely material matters; it is also aimed at matters of mentality. These substantially subjective goals require subjective indicators.

2. Progress in material goals can not always be measured objectively. Subjective measurement is often better.

3. Inclusive measurement is problematic with objective substance. Current sum-scores make little sense. Using subjective satisfaction better indicates comprehensive quality.

4. Objective indicators do little to inform policy makers about public preferences. Since the political process also does not reflect public preferences too well, policy makers need additional information from opinion polls.

5. Policy makers must distinguish between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’. Needs are not observable as such, but their gratification materialises in the length and happiness of peoples’ lives. This final output criterion requires assessment of subjective appreciation of life-as-a-whole.

[Note: Papers of the Day are selected due to their relevance to my research, not because I agree with them.]

I finally received David G. Myers The American Paradox in the mail. Naturally, it begins, "We Americans embody a paradox." After quoting Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," that is. But what’s the "worst of times" about our times? Myers says, "There are those who wring their hands and just as rightly worry that our civilization could collapse on its decaying moral infrastructure." Just as rightly as whom? Those who claim, "We’ve never had it so good." And then we get data showing that, yes, things are as good as ever. Swell! And the evidence that "civilization could collapse on its decaying moral infrastructure?" Well, nothing. Pretty much.

Out of wedlock births are up (down recently, but up over decades). Crime. Violence in the media. "Rampant individualism." Materialism. Etc. But none of this begins to add up to the collapse of civilization. Indeed, we’ve just seen that we’re as rich and happy as ever. Hurray! No? The paradox, if there is any, is that none of this bad stuff has made us discernibly less happy. The inference ought to be that there is no threat to civilization. The moral infrastructure is sound. "Radical individualism" and "materialism" apparently leave us as happy as our grandparents in the imagined communitarian golden age. Our main political and economic institutions are remarkably robust, even as social institutitons evolve. And we’re just about as happy as people get. "Americans Watch TV More, Get Out Less, Are Exactly as Happy as Ever." Why don’t we see stories like that?

This is the nth book in this genre that I’ve read, and I simply no longer understand them. The more intimate I am with the data they present, the more inscrutable I find the overall arc of the arguments. The lesson they each show us is that we are better off in a multitude of different ways, worse off in a few others, and as happy as we’ve ever been. The troubled and disappointed tone has come to stupefy me. It simply doesn’t make sense, relative to common sense, or to the science, to think of individual happiness as an open-ended increasing sum, rather than as homeostatic, a kind of equilibrium state. So it’s just not a mystery why our wealth or anything isn’t making us a lot happier, because we’ve already arrived.

Assuming that it is possible to compare happiness across people (and I don’t really see why not), then there is a happiest person alive. That person is probably a genetic deviant, like the tallest person, the smartest person, or the fastest person. And, the thing is, they probably aren’t that much happier than many of us. I think we have to accept the possibility that many people who are alive today are about as happy as people get. We may be banging against the upper limits of our (non-reengineered) hedonic capacity. And that’s precisely why people are looking for something else or more, or whatnot.

Because happiness is just one of the good things that makes a life go well, not the thing that makes a life go well. Being happy is like having a good pair of shoes. They’ll take you lots of places. But you still need somewhere to go. And you still need pants.

More happiness stuff:

Rummel has posted this chart from Inglehart and Klingerman’s important paper showing the relationship between political freedom (as measured by Freedom House) and happiness. It’s very clear that freedom (as well having high GNP growth, and a non-communist past–highly interrelated attributes) is good for happiness. Rummel promises to sort out the colinearit problems.

Pete Boettke and Chris Coyne have posted a draft of a paper discussing a Austrian/Public Choice approach to the happiness lit. Chris points to his LibertyGuide review of Easterbrook’s book, and says something after my own heart:

There is one final point to be made regarding the underlying paradox which Easterbrook sets out to solve - perhaps there is no paradox at all. Most people would agree money and material things are not the equivalent of happiness. Given this, why would we expect to see a correlation between an increase in progress and an increase in happiness? It is not clear the claim has ever been that prosperity will lead to the removal of all uneasiness.

Right on.

So, you know all the paradox flogging books: The Progress Paradox, The American Paradox, The Paradox of Choice. Layard begins Happiness with “There is a paradox at the heart of our lives.”

Now, I’m increasingly baffled by the idea that there is anything paradoxical afoot. Many of these books refer to “Easterlin’s Paradox,” in honor of Richard Easterlin’s famous ‘74 paper showing that average self-reported happiness has not gone up as average income has gone up. Now, like I argued in my last post, this isn’t a paradox relative to orthodox economics, because happiness isn’t a concept in the theory of orthodox economics. There is a widespread folk theory, popular among economists, that says that desire satisfaction brings happiness, and that higher incomes brings more desire satisfaction, and so higher incomes ought to bring greater happiness. But the ideas of adaptation and social comparison most often used to explain the stability of the happiness trends are also part of popular folks theories, and, I think, much more plausible prior to rigorous investigation than the economist’s money–>happiness folk theory. Its pretty obvious from personal experience, not to mention from about the entirety of our literary tradition, that we tend to take what we have for granted, that we tend to measure ourselves against others we imagine to be our peers, the money alone won’t make you happy, that what we really need is each other, etc. So, the data show we’re wealthier and that we say we’re just as happy as we used to be. Where’s the paradox? There is no paradox.

But maybe there are explanations, other than the economist’s misguided folk theory, for the bullheaded insistence in describing as a “paradox” something that is in fact predictable and intuitive relative to intuitively plausible psychological principles.

In ages of yore there was a raging debate over whether capitalism or communism was best at delivering the goods. Capitalism now reigns as undisputed champ. But the conquest of scarcity under communism was also supposed to be psychologically transformative and liberatory. And so, yeah, capitalism delivers the goods. But are we transformed? No! We’re almost exactly the same, and that’s really disappointing. If you were expecting the era of material plenitude to free our minds for higher pursuits, and to enable deeper, more meaningful engagement with our fellow men, then capitalism may seem like a bust. We’re left yearning for something else.

So, we’re wealthier than ever, and have the extra freedom that entails. We’re at least as happy as ever. (Despite what you may read in the papers, the average isn’t flat, it’s just rising very slowly.) Indeed, we’re about as happy as people have ever been, as far as we can tell. Depression, like ADHD, is “on the rise” because simply because it is promiscuously defined and diagnosed. But there must be something wrong. Bowling alone? Ennervated by too many kinds of jam? Something. Because life’s just what it’s always been, only just a little better. And we were hoping for something more, well, dramatic.

I find it extremely frustrating that economists, who like to color themselves intellectually rigorous folk, insist on confusing people about the meaning of words. Here’s Robert Frank in Luxury Fever:

In economist’s parlance, it is customary to speak not of happiness, but of utility. The analogous construct in the psychological literature is subjective well-being, a composite measure of overall life satisfaction. For present purposes, little will be lost if we view both expressions as being roughly synonymous with satisfaction.

The problem is that is “customary” for economists to speak not of happiness, but of utility, in a most confusing and haphazard fashion. Conceptually, happiness has nothing to with utility in economics, nor does subjective well-being, or subjective satisfaction. Utility is way of representing an ordering of preferences. It simply isn’t a psychological concept, nor a value concept, nor does it imply either. A utility function is just a little machine in which you can put an ordering ofpreferences, a pair of alternatives, and have something that somebody decided to call a “utility” assigned to each alternative, the most preferred getting the greater utility.

If I prefer the presence of a mouse in Paul Krugman’s kitchen over the absence of a mouse, and there is a mouse in Paul Krugman’s kitchen, then my preference is "satisfied" and I “get” more utility from this state of affairs than the alternatives, even if it in no way enters into my life or experience. The world being such that my highest ranked preferences are semantically satisfied, and that I am “getting” as much utility as possible relative to my ordering, logically has nothing at all to do with my subjective well-being.

As Lionel Robbins put it, just as economics was systematically expunging the psychological from economics:

So far as we are concerned, our economic subjects can be pure egoists, pure altruists, pure ascetics, pure sensualists or – what is much more likely – bundles of all these impulses.

That is to say, economics makes no substantive assumptions about the contents of preferences. It cares only for the form of preferences, namely, that they be consistent.

So why does Robert Frank, and almost everyone else in the economics profession, insist on keeping us all in a state of confusion? Contra Frank in the preceding page of Luxury Fever, economists qua rigorous appliers of utility theory, don’t think that being wealthier ought to make you happier. They think that a bigger budget gets you a more preferred bundle of goods, and more preferred means, by definition, more utility. But since utility is a not a subjective psychological state (since semantic satisfaction is not), no one should be surprised that having more utility won’t make you more anything, subjectively. The world could be exactly the way you prefer it, and you could be miserable, because you could prefer to be miserable.

The “paradox” of our being wealthier, but no happier, is a paradox only relative to a substantive psychological theory, which is what utility theory isn’t. Bentham did think that money was a proxy for pleasure, and that pleasure constituted happiness. So this would be a paradox for Bentham. But Bentham’s vulgar psychological egoism and hedonism are, as Robbins more or less points out, simply not a part of economic theory. And the paradox emphatically isn’t one for a modern utility theorist. The “paradox” is just proof that utility and happiness are non-identical, which didn’t need to be proved anyway, since the only identities in an axiomatic theory are definitional.

[Update: What is “semantic satisfaction”? It is the “fit” between the content of a propositional attitude and the world. In the case of a belief, if the content of the belief matches the world, then its “satisfaction conditions” are met. In the case of a preference, if the world matches the content of the preference, then its satisfaction conditions are met. This is not the “I can’t get no satisfaction” sort of satisfaction. Which is why preference satisfaction talk compounds the confusion over utility. It need not be satisfying to have one’s preferences satisfied, and so one’s utility may have no utility for creating utility, or, in other words, may be of little use in bringing pleasure.]

It struck me this morning that Schwartz’s problem of managing “too much” freedom is kind of the opposite of the problem of managing too little freedom implicit in Admiral Stockdale’s Epictetian stoicism and Victor Frankl’s existential therapy. Or is it the same!? (If you don’t know, Stockdale was tortured for years by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war. Frankl was imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis.)

Stockdale tells us [pdf]:

Epictetus was telling his students that there can be no such thing as being the “victim” of another. You can only be a “victim” of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? “He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart… What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity… Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I’ll show you a Stoic.”

[If you haven’t read Stockdale’s amazing account of his torture and confinement, do it.]

Frankl writes:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

So here we have strategies for maintaining a sense of freedom — a psychological feeling of choice, control, agency, and self-efficacy — under conditions where the external menu of open alternatives is more or less blank. Both push us to consider what ultimately is and is not in our power. In the end, the only steadfast choices, the only ones that cannot be taken away, are choices about how to orient our minds, and about our attitude toward our situation. This implies that we can maintain a sense of freedom and openness, and the sense of responsibility and dignity that entails, even under conditions where we are not at liberty to act on most of our desires. The Stoic also implies that other freedoms, because they can be taken away, are not genuine freedoms, and so we should cultivate an attitude of indifference toward them. The only true freedom for the stoic is in virtue, and virtue is entirely a matter of what is genuinely up to us, and the only thing that is genuinely up to us is the maintenance of our composure.

Because the problem of two much choice is apparently the opposite of the problem of too little, I entertained the idea that what we need is to turn the stoic and/or existential attitude inside out. But now I’m not so sure. It seems to me that the problem of too much choice requires, in the first instance, a kind of withdrawal, detachment, and centering, and then a kind of selective re-engagement with the panoply of choices once we’ve achieved a firmer grasp of what one really cares about and is after in life.

It seems like a mistake to concentrate on the sheer quantity of choices rather than on the quality of the choices relative to the nature of the choosers. Chinese takeouts generally offer hamburgers, pizza, jalapeno poppers, etc., etc. The most celebrated restaurants often have tiny menus. If a friend offered to take me to either Lucky Dragon carryout or a Michelin 3 star, I would not regret my loss of the freedom to order curly fires with my wantons upon choosing the fancier joint. A single job you like is better than 1000 you don’t want.

If we were homogeneous in our natures, interests, talents, projects, and preferences, then it might be possible to trim the set of choices to a subset that is more manageable, and yet with all the best choices intact. But we are not homogeneous. So, even if the set of choices that is ideal for each of us, given our unique constitution and aims, is small, the fact of our variety will require the availability of a huge set of choices overall. Almost any reduction of the most inclusive set of choices reduces the quality of choices for someone, i.e., it restricts their freedom to choose something that is best for them.

The difficulty is that the plenitude of consumer culture, which offers the tantalizing possibility of a different ideal pattern of consumption for each of us, tends to drown out the whisper of what is best for each of us in the cacophony of variety. We are left searching through a junkyard for a handful of gems (though one man’s junk is another man’s gem), often without knowing what’s junk and what’s gems. But the problem is not quite that we have too much choice. If I need to get to Minnesota and don’t know how, the problem is not that there are just too many roads. The problem is that I don’t know which ones to take. It wouldn’t help me if there were fewer roads, none of which goes to my destination. But if I know the route, the number of other roads is irrelevant. Similarly, if I know what I am, know what I need, know what I like, and know what will make my unique life go uniquely well, then I can just tune out the stuff that is superfluous to me. Most of the choices will just psychologically fall away, fade into the background, because they are not for me.

So what we need is self-knowledge, and a procedure for identifying authenticity in desire, a kind of practical wisdom. It does not seem that public policy can do much about this for us. But a kind of Stoic indifference toward the hurly burly of market culture may be useful, helping us to stay disentangled from the lures of marketers, salespeople, and taste makers, and allow us to better focus and who we really are. A kind of existential therapy may also be useful, sensitizing us to reflexive modes of thought and action, our bad faith, our false consciousness, and our ability and responsibility to consciously define ourselves and make meaning in our lives.

So maybe the ways of thinking that make it possible to remain human in Nazi concentration camps and Hanoi prisons are also indispensable in carving authentic lives of customized meaning out of the otherwise disorienting surplus of alternatives. Maybe the way to maintain a sense of freedom when in chains is also a way to manage agoraphobic hyperventilation in the unbounded consumer paradise.

Schwartz also constantly mixes up objective opportunity and the representation of such: “. . . choice has negative features, and the negative features escalate as the number of choices increases.” No, the negative features escalate as the number of choices entertained, or represented to the self, increases.

It is very important for Schwartz that whatever negative consequences there may be here aren’t a simple function of the number of choices, but are rather a function of the individual’s psychology, otherwise all the advice he gives us (choose when to choose; satisfice more, maximize less; don’t dwell on foregone alternatives; be grateful; anticipate adaptation; be wary of social comparison; etc.) would be moot.

But if he lays too much weight on the point that whether or not there are negative consequences to more choice depends on how individuals psychologically manage their representation of the choices, their procedures for making them, and their attitudes toward choices already made, then it becomes fairly clear that the market, per se, isn’t harming anyone, or causing dissatisfaction by causing choices to proliferate. But Schwartz wouldn’t want that to be clear.

Like Layard’s argument that upward moves in the income distribution impose a negative externality on people beneath, Schwartz is more or less arguing that a high number of alternatives amounts to a negative externality of markets. But in both cases, the authors provide very useful and likely effective techniques of individual psychological management to immunize oneself against the negative effects of dimished comparative position or a vast array of choices. But this self-help advice directly implies that the market is not the causal origin of the imagined harm.

OK, am I being fair to Schwartz? There’s obviously a sense in which someone who gets married is less free. What sense is that?

First, what are our main options for the meaning of ‘freedom’ here?

(1) Freedom as objective opportunity/ability.

(2) Freedom as lack of coercively imposed constraint.

(3) Freedom as a lack of culturally (but non-coercively)imposed constraint.

(4) Freedom as a psychological sense of openness.

The only sense in which a person who gets married is unambiguously less free is (3). Part of the social function of marriage is to end the search for mates and to create a stable basis for raising children, and so sexual and emotion fidelity is generally expected of married people. Infidelity has real negative social costs, given the prevailing cultural dispensation, and so the prospect of facing those costs is generally a real constraint.

Now, (3) often leads to (4), but need not, for two reasons. One, I may not really care about the social costs. Suppose that this is because I have an “open marriage.” So I’m married, but the general social meaning of marriage carries less weight with me. Because it’s OK with my partner, I’m always on the prowl, and so I maintain (4), the sense of openness. Two, I may have no interest whatsoever in infidelity, just as I may have no interest in drinking a Tab cola. I want my wife, and no other, and so there is nothing that I want that is out of reach. If there was a social taboo against drinking Tab, my psychological sense of openness would be unaffected.

In comments below, R.J. Lehmann gives us this line from Larry David:

Who do you think has more freedom — the married man in America, or the single guy in Communist China? I gotta go with the Chinese guy. Yes, I can leave the country…but I can’t leave the house. He can leave the house, but he can’t leave the country. I’ll take his deal.

Part of the humor is, I guess, in the equivocation between senses of ‘freedom’. The Chinese guy is unfree in sense (2). He’ll got shot if he tries to leave. Larry David is unfree in sense (4). He feels a psychological lack of openness simply because of his internalization of his wife’s expectations. She’ll kvetch if he leaves. Obviously, however, there is no broader cultural norm dictating whether or not it is acceptable for him to leave the house. And there is no coercive sanction. And he is perfectly able to get up and walk out. The only unfreedom here is a consequence of Larry David’s neurotic relationship.

Now when Schwartz asks whether we have too much choice, what he is he asking? In part, I think he’s asking whether we have too much freedom in sense (4). In a market society, our objective opportunities proliferate, increasing freedom in sense (1). When I represent all those opportunities to myself, the sense of openness (4) can be overwhelming. Schwartz seems to me to be saying that if I have “thick” social ties, then the obligations and social constraint (unfreedom in sense (3)) that make those ties thick will narrow my sense of what is really open to me, reducing my sense of freedom in sense (4), but also relieving my sense of anxiety about the overwhelming scope of choice.

So, in this scenario, I will be less free, in senses (3) and (4), but better off. Notice that this leaves freedom in senses (1) and (2) unaffected.

However, Schwartz also seems to blame the anxiety of too much (4) on too much (1). Now, this wouldn’t be such a problem if less (3) helped us manage too much (4). But he also seems to think that too much (1) erodes our ability to maintain the thick relationships that lead to less (3). So we are left in a condition where we have a huge amount of objective opportunities. Some of these opportunities seduce us into dissolving our thick bonds. And then we are left with an overwhelming sense of openness, with no basis in convention or social obligation to help us to manage it.

What to do, then? Pull policy levers that reduce freedom in sense (2) in order to slow down the growth of (1) and to foster choices that lead to thicker relationships, thereby reducing (3) and the anxiety of (4).

Now, Schwartz is never clear about which sense of freedom he is employing at any given time. And he allows its meaning to float around, so that we encouraged to think that if too much freedom in sense (4) is troubling, then we shouldn’t be so adamant about preserving our freedom in sense (2). I object to the slide.

In The Paradox of Choice itself, Schwartz’s “What Can We Do?” section is full of individual psychological strategies for managing the sense of being overwhelmed by choice, and the sense of regret from all the trade-offs plenitude entails. This is all excellent advice. But elsewhere he is quick to offer political strategies for managing the woes of choice. In this TNR piece he tells us that his research justifies socking it to the rich.

if people already have more choices in life than they can handle, then adding wealth only exacerbates the problem. Conversely, it should be possible to make the rich better off by reducing their wealth . . .

The point is simply that we now know there is some significant subset of people likely to be made better off through heavier taxation, and that these people reside at the top end of the wealth distribution. Given that a concern for people’s welfare has traditionally been one of the chief moral objections to taxing wealth (at least among those sympathetic to redistribution in principle), a policy of heavier taxation for the very wealthy may be the only moral course of action.

The slide to reducing freedom from coercion from data about an overwhelming sense of psychological openness is really THAT quick.

Now, what I meant by counterposing Schwartz with Browne is a contrast in attitude toward the idea of an “encumbered self,” to use Michael Sandel’s term. I think this issue deserves its own post, since I think it may take me a bit of space to work out my inchoate thoughts. But my idea is that Schwartz and Browne represent a false choice about our attitude toward encumbrance.

The idea of encumbrance is that our identities are in part constituted by the nature of our relationships, our membership in communities, and the beliefs and commitments we inherit through these. Communitarian republicans, like Sandel, tend to celebrate the encumbered self, and to promote the idea that our membership in a nation state also carries with it thick obligations of solidarity. I sense, perhaps wrongly, that Schwartz is operating within this universe of thought. He seems sort of delighted in the cleverness of arguing that higher taxes would make the rich happier. His delight stems from the fact that he thinks they should feel obligated to pay high taxes anyway, out of a sense of solidaristic political obligation, and he’s happy to have another argument to that conclusion. He’s also delighted that the evidence points toward the benefits of thick relationships on well-being.

Browne is motivated by a kind of horror of encumbrance. Relationships, conventional systems of rules, communities, families, etc., that we didn’t voluntarily opt into are characterized as autonomy threatening “traps”. Self-liberation consists in extricating yourself from these traps and becoming a truly unencumbered self.

Now, it seems to me that the right view has got to be that many inherited encumbrances are in fact oppressively restrictive — many kinds of relationships are predatory, parasitic, and impede the development of our individual potential. Reading Stirner or Browne or Rand is so bracing largely because they make this so clear. But then again many “thick” relationships and obligations truly are identity constituting, and are necessary for the realization of ones goals and capacities. In which case the self isn’t encumbered, exactly, but simply enabled and fulfilled. What matters is the quality of our attachments, not whether or not to have them.

Part of my problem may be that my menu of the senses of ‘freedom’ is too short. I found C. Fred Alford’s account of Iris Murdoch’s notion of freedom as “seeing correctly clearly,” which requires both getting over your own narcissism as well as seeing past false social claims, pretty compelling. We are freed from our illusions, which opens us to authentic engagement with others.

There should be less now, so perhaps more later.

Looking again at Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, I’m struck by something Virginia Postrel picked up on in her Reason review, which is that Schwartz’s argument turns on a false opposition between freedom and commitment. I tripped up on the same passage Virginia noted:

In the context of this discussion of choice and autonomy, it is also important to note that, in many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy. Marriage, for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that curtails freedom of choice of sexual and even emotional partners.

To which Virginia sensibly responds:

So gays who cannot legally marry their partners are somehow freer than heterosexuals who can? There’s something deeply wrong with this understanding of choice. Freedom to choose must include the freedom to commit.

But I think there is something even more deeply wrong with Schwartz’s opposition of freedom and commitment than Virginia brings out. It is either trivial, or commits what I will call the “Stirnerite fallacy.”

Most of the time, Schwartz seems to be operating under a notion of freedom as opportunity or ability. In this sense, if a new variety of jam comes on the market, then my freedom has increased, because now I have the opportunity to buy it. Conversely, any reduction in my feasible set of alternatives is a reduction of freedom. But this is a completely formal notion devoid of any real content. If I set out 5:00 pm to drive from DC to Indiana, then, by the time I make it to Ohio, the possibility of arriving at New York City by midnight has dropped out of my set of alternatives. It trivially follows that my “commitment” to get to Indiana requires that I forgo some alternatives. But, even so, it doesn’t follow that my feasible set is now diminished. By the time I get to Indiana, there will be a large number of places I could get to by midnight that I couldn’t have reached in that time had I stayed in place in DC. Or, if I get a new job, in a different building, my options for lunch will have changed. I can no longer go to the place I liked around the corner from my old building (too far away). But there may be two places I really like around the corner from my new building.

Now, marriage… If become married, I expect to forgo some opportunities for romance and sex. But the reason I am committing is precisely because the commitment, like getting to Ohio in order to get to Indiana, is a necessary step to other exciting opportunities. If I am NOT married, then, in this trivial sense of freedom, I am not free to experience the benefits of marriage. Conceiving a child with my wife, for example, is not now in my set of opportunities. A good commitment is precisely one in which the door you close behind you leads to several more that open.

Of course, to bring the trivial formality of this idea of freedom to the fore, it’s also true that conceiving a child with my slave isn’t in my set of opportunities, given the fact that I cannot own a slave. And every time a state strikes down an archaic law, like a law that says you can’t bring a chicken into a saloon, people there will no longer be free to break the law by carrying chickens into saloons. However, as compensation, they will be free to legally carry chickens into saloons.

So, if freedom is just an increase in the size of the feasible set, then it simply doesn’t follow that commitment diminishes freedom in this sense. So why say that “social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy?”

This only makes sense, I think, if one commits the Stirnerite fallacy, which is the claim that any obligation whatsoever erodes freedom. The fallacy is named for Max Stirner, author of The Ego and It’s Own, who argued that even the rules of language and logic are intolerable constraints on the fully free self. If you make a promise today, and don’t want to keep it tomorrow, then DON’T! That would be self-enslavement!

Schwartz is the modus tollens to Harry Browne’s libertarian Stirnerist modus ponens. Both agree that if you assume an obligation, then you are unfree. Browne advises us to avoid falling into the “trap” of assuming obligations. Schwartz advises us to be wary of too much freedom. Schwartz tells us we’ll be less free if we’re married, but we’ll be miserable if we don’t forge this kind of deep social bond. Browne tells us to not get married.

But we can be smart, and just reject the common assumption and understand the assumption of obligation and commitment as an expression of freedom that can also enhance freedom. And thus we can resist the inference(a non-sequitur anyway) that if freedom in the Stirnerite sense is good or bad, then it’s good or bad for the political-economic system to offer us more or less of it.