Happiness & Public Policy

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!