Happiness & Public Policy

Via Joanna of Fey Accompli (who makes me happy daily), I find this article about the uses of dolphins in treating depression. As Joanna says, “Maybe Aetna should cover dolphin therapy…”!

Magisterial is not a word to be thrown around lightly, but I suspect it applies to Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. (I’ve only been through the first 100 pages, but I don’t imagine it’s going to get any less impressive.) Friedman includes an important discussion of the relation between the comparative character of the effect of income on well-being and economic growth. It was, for me, the source of a satisfying “Aha!” moment.

Friedman notes that the effect of income on well-being depends mainly on two different kinds of comparisons. First, we compare our present circumstances to our past circumstances. If we’re better off economically than we used to be, we feel better off. Second, we compare our circumstances to those of other people. If we’re doing better than our imagined peer group, we feel better; if worse, then worse.

Friedman’s insight is that these two forms of comparison in some ways substitute for one another. If almost everyone is continuously doing better than they were before, due to a steady rate of growth, the satisfaction from intra-personal comparison mitigates the tendency to compare ourselves to others. However, if economy stagnates, and most are no better off economically than they used to be, the tendency to compare ourselves to others is heightened. And this, Friedman argues, has deleterious political and social consequences.

Here is what he says:

By continually giving people a sense of living better than they or their families have in the not very distant past, sustained economic growth reduces the intensity of their desire to live better than one another. Economic growth satisfies the form of people’s aspirations for “more” that is possible for everyone to fulfill. . .

When an economy stagnates, however, the importance people attach to living better than others against whom they naturally compare themselves is more intense. The fact they cannot do so, or at least on average cannot, then takes on heightened importance in their eyes. The resulting frustration generates intolerance, ungenerosity, and resistance to greater openness to individual opportunity. . .

Mobility, either economic or social, is inherently threatening because it means the possibility of movement either up, or, more to the point, down, compared to the prevailing norms of the society as a whole. But when the average income for an economy is stagnant, people who allow others to get ahead of them are not only falling behind in relative terms but also losing ground compared to their own past living standard. They lose out from the perspective of both benchmarks. When an economy is growing, however, and per capita income is rising, those who fall behind compared to others can still be moving ahead–and if growth is sufficient, moving ahead solidly–by the standard of their own experience.

If Friedman is right about this, and I suspect he is, then this is an exceedingly important argument. A number of happiness-centric economists argue that because increasing wealth has little positive effect on happiness, due to adaptation and comparison, we shouldn’t worry about implementing policies that would reduce, or even stall, economic growth just as long those policies are increasing happiness. But if slowing or stalling growth itself heightens the negative effects of social comparison, we have a powerful argument against such policies on the very grounds that they are supposed to be justified.

I highly recommend this book.

This crisp New Yorker article by James Surowieki on the differences between American and Western European labor policies very pithily sums up the hazard of top-down policy to get folks to work less and relax more:

In the American model, then, you work more hours and use the money you make to pay for the things you can’t do because you’re working, and this creates a demand for service jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist. In Europe, those jobs don’t exist in anything like the same numbers; employment in services in Europe is fifteen per cent below what it is in the U.S. Service jobs are precisely the jobs that young people and women (two categories of Europeans who are severely underemployed) find it easiest to get, the jobs that immigrants here thrive on but that are often not available to immigrants in France. There are many explanations for the estimated forty-per-cent unemployment rate in the banlieues that have been the site of recent riots, but part of the problem is that voluntary leisure for some Europeans has helped lead to involuntary leisure for others. The less work that gets done, the less work there is to do. Helping some people get off the labor treadmill can keep many people from ever getting on the treadmill at all. [emphasis added]

Julia Annas, “Happiness as Achievement,” Daedelus, Spring 2004

Philosophers (and some psychologists, too) will finnd it unsurprising that if you rush to look for empirical measures of an unanalyzed ‘subjective’ phenomenon, the result will be confusion and banality. After all, what is it that the social scientists on the World Database of Happiness are actually measuring? Here is the heart of the problem. Is happiness really something subjective? Is it simply a matter of pleasure, a positive feeling? We can at least hope that it is not, and that we can come to conclusions better than the claim that what anyone needs to be happy is food and possibly meaning.

Annas, one of the world’s experts on the classical conception of human well-being, simply brutalizes the scientific pretensions of the happiness survey approach. The disdainful asides are great. Take footnote 1.

For an amusing example, see , where “scientists” claim to have solved “one of the greatest mysteries plaguing mankind” by actually giving us a mathematical formula: P + (5 x E) + (3 x H) = happiness, where P = personal characteristics, E = existence, and H = higherorder needs. You compute your formula by answering four questions.

Or this:

I have seen a survey that asks people to measure the happiness of their lives by assigning it a facefrom a spectrum with a very smiley face at one end and a very frowny face at the other. Suppose that you have just won the Nobel Prize; this surely merits the smiliest face. But suppose also that you have just lost your family in a car crash; this surely warrants the frowniest face. So, how happy are you? There is no coherent answer–unless you are supposed to combine these points by picking the indifferent face in the middle!

Annas’s point is that happiness is a global condition that applies to an entire life–an achievement in living–not a transitory feeling, nor even a feeling about how things are going. It is a way that things are going. Our own happiness is something we can be wrong about, and so unlikely to be something captured by a self-report.

An email exchange with Virginia Postrel prompted me to note for the first time that there’s a real problem in trying to use the happiness data and the depression data at the same time. Almost all the “paradox of prosperity” books cite happiness data that is supposed to show that we’re not getting much, if any, happier as we grow wealthier as a society. Alongside, they cite data purporting to show that depression is approaching epidemic proportions. But the happiness and the depression data contradict each other. You can’t in good conscience appeal to both.

The “paradox” books generally show a graph illustrating the stability of the percentage of people reporting that they are “very happy.” But they could also show a similar graph of the stability of people reporting that they are “not too happy” or “not at all happy” (depending on the survey). For example, Branchflower and Oswald, “Well-Being Over Time in Britain and the USA,” show that, in the US, the number of folks reporting that they are “not too happy” (on the three option surveu) dropped from 14% in the 1972-1976 period to 12% in the 1994-1998 period (which is up from the 1988-1993 low of 10%). Similarly, in Britain, the number reporting “not at all” and “not very” (on the four option survey) was 4% and 11% respectively in the 1972-1976 period, and 3% and 10% in the 1994-1998 period.

If depression rates have been rising stratospherically, how come the happiness surveys don’t track this fact at all, but instead show a small decline in the number of dissastified people? On its face, it looks like the happiness data contradicts the depression data. Indeed, the happiness data would seem to support the Horwitz-Wakefield hypothesis that the apparent increase in depression is almost entirely a function of the flaccidity of the diagnostic category.

One way of addressing the apparent contradiction, suggested by Virginia in her review of Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox, is to point out that depression and unhappiness are very different things. Virginia points to Julian Simon as an example of a happy person who stuggled with depression. It is indeed plausible that some genuinely depressed people, for whom life is otherwise going very well, will experience their depression as an external malady–an alien force unprompted by events–and so will nevertheless report that they are happy.

However, it seems at least as likely that the depression will cast a shadow over life, and negatively effect one’s assessment of how well things are going. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for depression to cause major problems in precisely those areas most important for the sense that one’s life is going well, such as work and love. So, if there was in fact a huge increase in depression, we should expect at least a significant fraction of those people to show up in the lowest category of self-reported happiness, even if many others are reporting that they are happy despite their depression.

Additionally, if an increasing number of people are simply functionally sad, as opposed to pathologically depressed, due to a death in the family, a bad break-up, or a lost job, you’d think that they’d show up in the happiness data. This is preciesly the sort of thing the happiness data is supposed to be measuring. It does, in fact, pick up the negative hedonic effects of higher employment rates, for example. There simply is no increase in subjective ill-being, as measured by the surveys.

Therefore, if you’re going to use the happiness data to show that we’re not getting happier as incomes rise, you can’t turn around and use dramatic depression data that, if accurate, ought to show up pretty dramatically in happiness data that, on the contrary, suggests a mild decline in the percentage of the depressed and sad. At the very least, you need some explanation of why this profound epidemic of depressive mental illness has, amazingly, absolutely no effect on the data from which you are drawing most of your conclusions.

I’m sort of amazed that this didn’t occur to me earlier. And I’m really amazed by the fact that the apparent inconsistency just doesn’t come up (I don’t think) in the “paradox” books. When you think about it, if there was really a widening plague of depression AND average happiness was stable, then you’d need need a growing cadre of really happy people to offset the growing legions of the depressed. But all the books make a show out of the fact that there isn’t a growing cadre of really happy people, and they all admit the average is stable. So you’d think the “rising depression” idea would raise a red flag or two.

I think it’s pretty clear that the depression data is junk. And that’s trouble for the “paradox” genre. If you’re unable to honestly say that we’re getting more miserable, you’re left with data that show that we’re slightly better off and no worse off than we’ve ever been, since we’ve been measuring this sort of thing, at least. And here’s a pretty hard argument to sell: We’re happy as ever. Therefore, radical interventions are required!

Here’s a nice article reviewing some of the highlights of happiness research from Katie Santich at the Orlando Sentinel. She dwells a bit on the “hispanic bonus” (latin americans, especially, are unaccountably happy) given the Orlando demographic, but it’s a nice overview. The best thing about it is an introduction to an interesting new (to me) thinker, Julie Norem, a psychologist at Wellesley who studies the upside of negativity.

And although years of study in cognitive therapy have shown there are ways people can increase resiliency, optimism and an emphasis on their strengths, not everyone needs it, Norem said, to accomplish greatness.

She cites the recently published “Lincoln’s Melancholy,” in which author Joshua Wolf Shenk convincingly argues that Abraham Lincoln struggled with major depression. It was perhaps, Shenk theorizes, Lincoln’s grim but accurate view of reality that moved him to want to change things for the better.

“One of the problems of putting happiness at the forefront,” Norem said, “is that, if you’re really focused on that, you can gloss over a lot of things that may not make you happy but are awfully important to understand or just learn about.”

Precisely.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has published an op-ed by moi about the way the overdiagnosis of depression leads to underestimation of how happy we are, and to books on the "paradox" of misery amid bounty. Check it out.

From Reuters:

Happiness rose along with per capita income until earners reached the highest bracket, at which point it dipped somewhat.

“It seems when people are satisfied with their income, other factors then matter more,” Tsutsui told Reuters.

I found this bit sort of funny:

Men tended to be a bit less happy than women, perhaps because Japan’s male-dominated society means they have bigger social responsibilities, Tsutsui said in a report on the survey.

And if women would have been a bit less happy? No doubt it would have been Japan’s male-dominated society.

From the NYT Arts section:

On Monday, people wept, at least one person fainted and the E.M.S. made a brief visit as Ms. Abramovic repeated her own “Lips of Thomas” from 1975, intermittently the series’ most incendiary work. The artist calmly carved a five-point star in her abdomen with a razor blade, one line every 45 minutes or so (which, over seven hours, meant repeat cuts). There were bouts of intense self-flagellation with a whip and shivering repose on a cross made of large blocks of ice. The piece was cluttered with unnecessary new additions, including a military cap from her father, who was a partisan general in Yugoslavia, and a flag fashioned from the white cloth she used to blot her cuts. Nonetheless, at midnight the audience refused to leave until it had delivered a 10-minute ovation.

Say what you will about your response to this kind of performance, the fact that this sort of thing goes on makes it clear that the value of pleasure and the disvalue of pain are quite contextual. The obvious interpretation is that Abramovic’s pain has value in the context of her artwork, and of her life as an artist. The people who gave her a 10-minute ovation likely see it that way, too. I know of no general theory of value so well-supported that it should give us a compelling reason to resist the obvious interpretation. This is the sort of data you build a general theory on. If your theory says the value of pleasure or pain is invariant, then your theory is false. If it says that the value of pain cannot be positive (or that the value of pleasure cannot be negative), your theory is false. In general we prefer pleasure over pain, and in general pleasure is more valuable than pain, of course. But I think it’s important to see that the value of pleasure and pain, and the value of the various emotions, varies with their role in a situation, and their function in the overall structure of a life.

[Thanks to Joanna for the link.]

The NYT’s article Tuesday on psychiatrist David Healy shows a putatively scientific profession with an apparently strong motive to avoid addressing important questions. Healy was the first to argue that some anti-depressents may increase the risk of suicide in some patients. This seems like the sort of claim that a scientific-medical community would want to fairly investigate. But Healy has become a pariah:

“People have called it the Healy effect,” said Dr. Jane Garland, chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Clinic at British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, who shares some of Dr. Healy’s concerns about drug risks. “If you even raise the same issues he does, you’re classified as being with David Healy and that makes people very reluctant to talk. He has become very isolated.”

Why are people reluctant to talk? What are other psychiatrists afraid of? The Times doesn’t really draw it out, and leaves us to guess. Here’s my guess.

The problem appears to be that Healy, one of the world’s top experts on anti-depressants, has testified against companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer. Companies forced to spend millions (billions?) navigating FDA’s insane drug approval maze, have perverse incentives to minimize the perception of their drug’s risk. Billions of dollars are at stake. So it’s easy to understand how pharma would see Healy as a “problem.” But why do others in the psychiatric profession consider this a topic too hot to touch? Simply because they fear that people who need anti-depressants will be scared away? Possibly. I think that this passage from the important Horwitz & Wakefield article gets to the core of it:

To obtain reimbursement for the treatment of such patients, the clinician must classify the individual within a DSM category of disorder, and depression is one of the more commonly used and easier ones to justify given the ubiquity of its symptoms. The result is a strange case of two “wrongs” seemingly making a “right”: The DSM provides flawed criteria that do not adequately distinguish disorder from nondisorder; the clinicians, knowingly or unknowingly, incorrectly classifies a normal individual as disordered (Why should the clinician question a diagnosis officially sanctioned by the DSM?); and the patient receives desired treatment for which the therapist is reimbursed.

Now, it should not be necessary to get a note from a medical guild member to be able to purchase anti-depressants. Even if you’re not really ill, but just sad, some Xanax just might be the pick up you need, and you should be able to get it. (It may actually interfere with normal coping mechanisms, so that’s the risk you take.) People want it. And doctors don’t see much wrong with people getting it if it could help them, whether or not they’re “sick.” So doctors write prescriptions for the stuff like its candy. Folks get what they want, and doctors get money from the insurance company. Everyone (except the insurance company and everyone who pays insurance premiums) wins! But if it comes to light that Prozac or whatever can make some patients suicidal, that throws a real kink in the cozy arrangement. It’s not just that some people, who may or may not need anti-depressants, will be scared off. Doctors, fearing liability if they prescribe to the wrong person, will be scared off from promiscuously offering prescriptions. But when that’s basically your bread and butter, the suicide risk is not a welcome development. And, really, the risk is surpassingly small. So why must Healy threatent to ruin the status quo for something so trivial.

Or maybe Healy’s just wrong on the evidence. I don’t know. But I suspect Healy is a pariah in larg is part due to the cluster%&!# of bad incentives created by the FDA, the medical guilds, the drug laws, and the liability laws.

Is there a problem in comparing one person’s utility to another’s?

Well, it depends on what you mean by utility, of course. If, as on the formal theory, utility is just a way of representating an ordinal ordering of preferences, and preferences are propositional attitudes only contingently related to qualitiative states of consciousness, then there’s a problem, sort of, in the sense that quantitative comparison doesn’t make any sense. It’s just ruled out by definition. (How it is that you do welfare economics anyway has been one of the main preoccupations of the modern economics profession.)

Now, if utility is a certain kind of feeling of pleasure, then interpersonal utility comparisons are no more problematic than intrapersonal utility comparisons. I feel better now that I did when I woke up. It’s a fact! And I can feel better than someone else does, obviously. If Bob is enjoying a massage, and Al is taking his CPA exam, then Bob is likely racking up more utility, in the substantive psychological sense of utility.

The tricky question has to do with the value of utility, in this sense of utility. If you’re a Benthamite, then utility just is value. But unless one’s moral sense has been corrupted, it is easy to see that Benthamism is false. The value of lots and lots things obviously swings quite free of utility-as-pleasure. So if we ask, “Whose mental state realizes more value, Bob’s or Al’s?,” it is not easy to say. It may not be possible to say. The fact that Bob is experiencing more utility is informative only if we know how valuable utility is. Perhaps Al, while he finds the CPA exam arduous and boring, also finds that he is well-prepared, and the test, although not at all pleasurable, is the occasion for the experience of competence and self-efficacy. Arguably, the experience of competence and self-efficacy is more valuable than the warm, transient pleasure of a good massage.

(Some of you will be tempted to confuse the fact Al is feeling something that is good [self-efficacy] with the idea that he feels good. Don’t do that. Imagine a different example where the performance of competence is physically and mentally excruciating. Maybe a great warrior in a struggle to the death with a fierce opponent. Titus Pullo in the arena against the gladiators in the latest episode of Rome, say. Gravely wounded, and at the brink of exhaustion, Pullo simply doesn’t “feel good,” if you’re speaking English [or Latin]. Nevertheless, there may be value in his experience of competence as a fighter.)

Of course, we should avoid talk of the plain old valuable and ask, “valuable to whom, for what?” Different people have different life plans, and different life plans have different requirements. As Aristotle noted, food is good for everyone, but how much food is good depends on what you’re up to. Milo the wrestler needs more food than the rest of us, owing to his vocation. Likewise, the value of utility-as-pleasure depends on our projects and goals.

For example, take this bit of a USA Today story about performance artist Criss Angel:

In the premiere, he lit himself on fire. This week, Angel flies suspended from a helicopter, hanging with four 8-gauge fish hooks stuck into his back. “You have to put them in the flesh just right. Too shallow and they will rip right out, too deep can be permanent muscle damage. It was excruciatingly painful, yet one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done.”

And I take it that Angel sees some of the beauty of it–some of the value of it–in the fact that it was excruciatingly painful. Same with David Blaine starving himself, or freezing himself in a block of ice. The pain is essential to the art. It could even be that Criss Angel dies with more dolors than hedons in the bank, due to the exquisite pain involved in his macabre calling, yet passes into the afterlife considering his life a brilliant, beautiful success.

So how does the value of Criss Angel’s excruciating pain compare with the value of somebody else’s pain? That’s the question that doesn’t make any sense. A lifeplan-relative theory of value makes the interpersonal comparison of the value of utility-as-pleasure impossible, since pleasure and pain doesn’t play the same role in everyone’s life plan, even if it is possible to compare who is having more or less pleasure or pain. We have not found the science, and we won’t.

Asians reliably report lower “happiness” on surveys than do Westerners, even after controlling for wealth and institutions. Are their lives worse? Is there something the matter with them? No. The value they place on whatever it is that happiness surveys track may just be different. The may be doing just as well relative to their lifeplans as we are, and maybe even better.

From the Times of London:

C&G’s annual Happiness Index suggests that hairdressers, beauticians and cooks or chefs are among the happiest people in Britain, while estate agents, civil servants and architects — who invariably earn more and who enjoy the cachet of being among the professional classes — are often the least content.

No word on policy analysts.

While money, status and job titles may initially quicken the pulse rate, long-term contentment at work comes from enjoying autonomy in what we do, good career progression and, in many cases, helping others through our work.

I am increasingly convinced that a sense of unfolding, growth, and progress is very important — the feeling that you’re getting better and going somewhere. I’d like to see a study that finds a way to measure something like an economy’s oppenness to advancement. This could be promotions within the firm, upward moves from switching into a higher responsibility job in a different firm, upward moves from starting a new business doing what you were doing before, but at a higher level, etc. My guess would be that the general demand for labor, and the flexibility of the labor market (ability to hire and fire, level of burden from labor regulation, etc.), would predict the pace of this kind of upward career mobility. And that, finally, economies with relatively rapid upward career mobility will have happier workers, other things equal.

From the BBC:

In an unusual three-month experiment, six specialists from a variety of disciplines worked to improve the happiness levels of a typical UK town.

The experts tried and tested 10 simple measures in the quest for happiness.

They found successful strategies included nurturing a plant, smiling at strangers and cutting television viewing by a half.

The ten tips?

* Plant something and nurture it
* Count your blessings - at least five - at the end of each day
* Take time to talk - have an hour-long conversation with a loved one each week
* Phone a friend whom you have not spoken to for a while and arrange to meet up
* Give yourself a treat every day and take the time to really enjoy it
* Have a good laugh at least once a day
* Get physical - exercise for half an hour three times a week
* Smile at and/or say hello to a stranger at least once each day
* Cut your TV viewing by half
* Spread some kindness - do a good turn for someone every day

Sounds good to me. I need to exercise more. And, I suppose, do more good turns. Otherwise, I think I’m doing alright by this list. You?

So long as we possess our own why regarding life, we can put up with almost any how.—Human beings do not seek happiness—only the Englishman does.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Coney Island of the Mind

Yeah, daddy-o!

Should the US take a cue from a third-world monarchy? Well, ABC’s puff piece on Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness schtick asks the question no one’s dying to have answered. Apparently Bhutan is an enviably simple world, a better place, where the benovolent king cares only about the happiness of his people (unless they’re Nepalese scum, or break the national dress code). Will they, like the United States–the happiest country in the world this side of Denmark!–be decimated by the introduction of television and greed.

As ABC solemnly concludes, “Gross national happiness is a bold idea, but now that Bhutan has let the world in, can it keep greed out? It’s definitely worth praying for.” You know, because when you’re living on less than $4.00 a day, there’s no way to go but down.

From Juan Non-Volokh, this humdinger:

BJØRNSKOV, et al, “The Bigger the Better? Evidence of the Effect of Government Size on Life Satisfaction around the World”

ABSTRACT: This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals’ quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters’ quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small.

Semi-rhetorical question: If this sort of result keeps coming out of the data, as the data improves, how fast will statists develop grave methodological worries about happiness research? And how fast will limited government types start seeing something in it?

From the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal:

Take a few moments to reflect with your children on things to be thankful for that we often take for granted. Would any of the following be found on your list?

* the ability to hug a child

* hugs from a child

* eight fingers and two thumbs that function correctly

* umbrellas

* eyes to see, ears to hear, sense of smell

* waffle irons

* washer and dryer

* hair ribbons

* running water

* electricity

* flashlights for when the lights go out

* reliable transportation

* paper clips, staplers, tape

I believe all these things would be on my list. But especially tape.

Dennis Prager writes:

The notion that happiness (or at least acting happy) is a debt we owe to all those in our lives and even to society at large is foreign to the vast majority of people. Yet, the more time I have devoted to writing and lecturing on this issue, the more I have come to realize that this is indeed the case. Ask anyone who was raised by an unhappy parent; ask anyone married to a chronically unhappy person; ask any worker whose co-worker is moody what their life is like and you will readily understand the moral obligation to be as happy as one can be.

I think this is a kind of funny way of talking. But it’s true that happy people are nicer to be around.

What do you make of this, Prager’s next and concluding paragraph?

Polls consistently show Republicans and religiously active Jews and Christians to be happier than Democrats and secular Americans. In light of the above, what does the preceding tell us about the good each group is likely to achieve?

Do you suppose Dennis Prager thinks secular Democrats have a moral obligation to become religious Republicans?

Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness website has a number of questionnaires and surveys worth taking, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. I discovered that my self-reported happiness is higher than about 2/3 of the people my age, educational level, region. I also discovered that my top “signature strength” is “creativity, ingenuity, and originality” followed closely by “judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness.” Apparently, I think I’m WAY more creative than most people. How about that?