Happiness & Public Policy

Speaking of Darrin McMahon, here’s a review of his Happiness: A History by philosopher Gordon Marino. I’m really looking forward to picking this up. I think historical works like this should help would-be social scientists to see that happiness is a cultural conception that has evolved a great deal over time, and continues to evolve. The cultural boundedness of happiness implies that it is not particularly scientific to pluck our current conception of happiness out of history, pickle it in a jar of formaldehyde, and pretend that happiness studies are plumbing the timeless essence of a universal natural psychological kind, which, it just happens, uniquely exemplifies moral value.

But let me gripe some about the review. About halfway through, Marino mentions “our own age of near-pandemic depression,” and then, later writes:

. . . McMahon seems convinced by recent studies indicating that we are each endowed with a kind of emotional set point. According to this view, most humans are existentially unflappable. Whether it be winning the lottery or losing our jobs, after an initial reaction we settle back down into the same old repertoire of moods. As the scientists of happiness have it, we are both amazingly resilient against tragedy and remarkably resistant to radically positive change. In a footnote, McMahon concedes that depression stands as an exception to this rule — and quite an exception it is, because, according to an article cited in “Happiness,” millions of people are on antidepressants. I have had my boat rocked a few times in life and I have watched a few others go over the falls, and my experience roils against the view that, emotionally speaking, nothing ever really changes, or at least not for long.

And millions of people take Vitamin C supplements indicating . . . what? A near-pandemic of scurvy? Again, I’ll point to my depression posts here, and here, my depression op-ed, and the Horwitz and Wakefield essay that got me on this kick.

In yesterday’s NYT, Darrin McMahon, an historian at Florida State, has some good advice about the pursuit of happiness: don’t pursue it. That’s a wortwhile lesson I associate mainly with Bishop Butler and Henry Sidgwick. However, despite the good advice to “just do it,” as it were, McMahon also repeats a happiness studies chestnut that deserves to die a brutal death. Or, at least, deserves to be confronted with enough skepticism that people will stop repeating it without further explanation or justification. Or a brutal death.

Sociologists like to point out that the percentage of those describing themselves as “happy” or “very happy” has remained virtually unchanged in Europe and the United States since such surveys were first conducted in the 1950’s. And yet, this January, like last year and next, the self-help industry will pour forth books promising to make us happier than we are today. The very demand for such books is a strong indication that they aren’t working.

Should that be a cause for concern? Some critics say it is. For example, economists like Lord Richard Layard and Daniel Kahneman have argued that the apparent stagnancy of happiness in modern societies should prompt policymakers to shift their priorities from the creation of wealth to the creation of good feelings, from boosting gross national product to increasing gross national happiness.

McMahon doesn’t say whether or not he is concerned, or sign on to the Kahneman/Layard program, but he does repeat the peculiar illogic by which one is tempted to move from the fact that self-report numbers are stable to the idea that we ought to shift priorities from creating to wealth to creating good feelings. I wish I’d stop seeing this sort of thing in the New York Times. So let us review the numerous reasons why the stability of happiness self-report surveys need not imply some kind of policy failure that needs correction.

FRAMING

The main explanations for the lack of increasing happiness are also explanations for the lack of talk about increasing happiness. So the self-report data may be reflecting the psychological processes that determine the avowal or self-ascription of subjective states, rather than reflecting the objective character of the subjective states themselves.

The main explanations for the “very happy” flatline are (a) adaptation and (b) social comparison. Now, if people don’t have a reliable “hedonometer,” which we can consult through introspection to discover the objective quality of our subjective experience, then we should expect that self-reports will be subject to habituation and comparison effects.

ADAPTATION. If you ask someone who has been wearing rose colored lenses for a week what color things appear, they will underestimate the objective rosy quality of their subjective experience, due to habituation. If you switch lenses the next week to an even more intense rose, the judgment of the rosiness of experience will likely stay pretty much the same. There is no reason to expect judgments of the hedonic quality of experience to much differ.

SOCIAL COMPARISON. The lack of a hedonometer requires a social rather than a private, internal standard for self-reports. When asked how happy one is, one will compare one’s narrative about one’s inner life, and one’s behavior, against a widely accepted cultural conception of what it means to feel and behave happily. If the entire population is becoming objectively happier over time, then cultural meaning of “very happy” will shift. Our talk about happiness is the result of comparing our representation of ourselves with our representation of the happiness scale, and our representation of where others lie on that scale. So even if people are getting objectively happier (whatever we take that to mean), we should expect self-reports to remain stable due to the shifting goalposts of the social meaning of happiness. It’s the same process by which people who make 150 large a year come to claim that they are middle class.

LIMIT AVERSION. This is closely related to what I’ll call “limit aversion.” Since there is no hedonometer, people have no way of telling whether there is an upper bound to happiness, or where the upper bound might be. So they don’t know if they are at the upper bound. Yet it is natural to believe that there are others who are happier, or to suppose that one might become happier still. So people who are at or near the upper bound may be hesitant to report that they are in the highest category of happiness. An illustrative anecdote: I’m pretty sure that, overall, I’m rather better off now than I was ten years ago. I know that I probably would have reported myself as “pretty happy” and not “very happy” then, and I would report that I’m “pretty happy” now, since I just don’t think I’m the happiest kind of person. And I suspect that I’ll feel the same way in another ten years, even if my well-being improves to the same degree. I know that I dislike the idea that my happiness level may have maxed out. I don’t suspect that others are that different.

UPPER BOUNDS

The idea that humans have some kind of happiness bank that could possibly have an ever-increasing balance is just silly.

However, the happiness bank assumption seems to be behind all the “paradox of prosperity” books, in which the authors pretend to find it alarming that the balance in our happiness accounts does not have a linear relationship to the balance in our bank accounts. Yet, as far as I can tell, no one has ever really defended the happiness bank hypothesis.

HOMEOSTATIC HAPPINESS. It turns out that no one really has a good account of what happiness really is. The best explanation of the nature of certain kinds of positive affect, which some somewhat vulgarly identify with happiness, is that it is a homeostatic mechanism designed to readjust after achieving a goal in order to keep us always wanting more. The prospect of happiness-as-pleasure is a Darwinian carrot that keeps us pulling hard in harness, and it just wouldn’t work if we stayed happy as clams when we got what we wanted. The homeostatic conception of happiness explains why hedonic adaptation may be adaptive. And it also suggests, to use the dumb analogy, that there may be something like a balance limit to our happiness accounts. Additionally, each person’s limit is likely a largely a function of their individual psychological disposition.

The fact that the wealthy liberal democracies are all toward the top in cross-country comparisons of average self-reported happiness, and that the “very happy” numbers aren’t rising, might indicate that these societies are close to as good as it gets—with a large proportion of their populations at their limit–not stalled and in need of a policy jump start.

And, back to something McMahon said, the fact that self-help happiness books continue to fly off the shelves does not really imply that that they do not work. It may tell us that self-help books are part of what have helped us achieve so much abiding happiness for lo these many decades. Or that people just like reading them. Given the simply embarrassing lack of longitudinal studies (it is, of course, hard to get tenure while waiting 20 years for the data to come in), for all we know people who read self-help books generally are happier, but they are offset in the aggregate by people miserably addicted to Us Weekly. If the happiness bank hypothesis was true, then a flat happiness trend line plus high self-help sales might speak volumes. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.

So, it may be that we are in fact getting happier, and that the surveys can’t track the shift, due to adaptation, social comparison, limit aversion, and other phenomena governing the self-reporting of subjective states. Or it may be that some form or other of market-based liberal democracy is pretty the best we can do from a policy perspective, happiness-wise. Many of the policies that Layard pefers, for example, are already in place in this or that Scandinavian social democracy. And the difference in happiness between these countries and other wealthy basically liberal market societies is trivial or non-existent.

I’ve obviously gone way off the McMahon hook. But let me take the occasion to share my own conclusions about happiness and policy so far:

• Many people in rich market liberal societies are getting happier and the surveys miss it.
• Many people in these societies are at or near their hedonic limits. (Note: I think it may be possible for some people to push the limits through the right combination of diet, exercise, meditation, counseling, adventure, simplification, etc. But there are many others for whom this kind of stuff is pretty much impossible without fundamentally altering the kind of person they are. And I think most people, once they hit a certain threshold, are happy enough that they could just care less about further maximizing the positive qualitative character of their background affect. Dharma just wasn’t that much better off than Greg, once he loosened up a little.)
• Even if everyone was maxed out, there would still be a distribution of people through all the survey categories due to individual psychological differences. A society in which everyone is as happy as they are likely to get is not a society in which everyone reports that they are “very happy.”
• There is very little policy-wise that will have a large impact happiness-wise in societies that are already have advanced market institutions and liberal-democratic political institutions.
• The people who are least likely to be maxed out, and most likely to benefit from upward hedonic mobility in any society, are the poorest people.
• The policy lever most likely to help poor people out is whatever lever maximizes GDP growth. So prioritizing the creation of good feelings requires prioritzing the creation of wealth.
• If a society has a class of people who appear economically stuck, such that they tend, generation after generation, to see little benefit from growth, even if benefits are otherwise widely distributed, try to unstick them by removing things like bad welfare policy, or labor policies that price low skilled workers out of the market. Often it is crucial to break down informal cultural norms that discourage the accumulation of human capital, but there’s not much liberal policy can do here.
• Since most people in rich societies are already pretty happy, people who care about happiness ought to worry less about marginal policy changes in the US and Europe and worry more about people who do not already live in rich societies. The best thing we can do for them is free trade, more hospitable immigration policies, and fiscal policies that maximizes world GDP growth.
• Races for positional goods shouldn’t concern us.
• Happiness as we tend to think of it is not a natural kind, but a culturally loaded syndrome of feeling and behavior. It is far from the only moral and political value, and shouldn’t be our sole standard for evaluating policy.

In conclusion . . . You don’t need to be a philosopher of science to know that theory is undetermined by data. But it appears that lots of happiness studies folk either don’t know, or need to be reminded. The most plausible interpretation can’t simply be read off the data, and, to my mind, the most plausible interpretation probably isn’t one that supports actively trying to design policy that prioritizes creating good feelings over creating wealth. An obvious surface reading of the data that requires no fancy framing effects rigmarole says that we are, as far as we can tell, at least as happy as we have ever been, which is very happy. Why prefer “we are getting no happier” over “we have been, and remain, extremely successful at creating happiness?” The main reason why, I take it, is that it’s impossible to use the happiness data to drum up demand for one’s favorite unpopular policies without framing it in a way that makes it look like there’s some kind of problem that needs to be fixed. If you say that data show that we’re just as happy as our grandparents in America’s nuclear family, bowling together, Leave it to Beaver golden age, we’ll never socialize medicine! Anyway, the point is: at the very least, you need to at least tryto eliminate the most plausible competing interpretations of the data before you move on to try to use happiness data to mount your favorite policy hobby horse. No. At the very least, you need to acknowledge that there are alternative interpretations. Until they do that, people trying to sell policy on the basis of happiness research don’t deserve to be taken very seriously.

It appears that happiness is a topic unfit for fact-checkers. You can apparently say whatever you like! For instance, Bae Myung-bok, the international affairs editor of Korea’s JoongAng Daily (which is apparently distributed by the IHT/NYT), writes:

Whenever I live or travel abroad, there is something I feel anew: That material possessions are not in proportion to happiness. When it comes to gross domestic product, Americans should be tens of times happier than the Vietnamese but this is not so, at least in my experience. On the contrary, Americans seem to lead harder lives and live in less comfort. Surveys also show that the happiness index of Bangladeshis is higher than that of people in advanced nations like the United States and European countries. Economic abundance is only one component of happiness.

It’s true: economic abundance is only one component of happiness; and material possessions are not proportionate to happiness. People who are ten times wealthier are not ten times happier. But, then again, no one has ever even suspected that that could be true.

Now, Vietnam. Kim Kahn, Ai Nu, Bich Lan, and Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese refugees who stayed in my family’s basement for a few months in Marshalltown, Iowa when I was a kid, would, I suspect, be quite surprised to discover that they had moved into a harder, less comfortable life. Say what you will about Marshalltown, Iowa, but “hard and uncomfortable” aren’t going to leap to mind. (You can live like a king in a large, well-appointed house with a big yard there on well less than the median American annual income. As an aside, this house—well-known in Marshalltown—really is a mansion, with 8 bedrooms 5.5 baths and about 9000 sq. ft. The same price—1/2 mil.—will get you maybe 2000 sq ft in a neighborhood just past the borderlands of gentrification in DC. Trade offs! Here is a more typical Marshalltown house, and price, in the neighborhood I grew up in. Mortgage much less then my half of the rent in a cheap house in DC. But boy do I digress.)

The last I heard of them (we’ve lost touch) they were doing quite well by Iowan and American standards, which means they were doing very well indeed. I recall asking them when I was a kid whether they wanted to go back to Viet Nam. They said they missed the rest of their family, but would rather bring them to the U.S. than move back. (I’m pretty sure they did succeed in bringing a number of family over.) So there’s a data point for you.

Now, Bangladesh . . . These surveys are available to anyone with an internet connection. For instance, here is some world values survey data. Here is the subjective well-being rankings of 82 societies. [doc] I’m not sure exactly how the scale works on this one, but the high score is 4.62 (that’s Puerto Rico! — Rico in happiness! The italics on the list denote the “Latin bonus.”). The low score is -2.40 (that’s Indonesia). The U.S. scores 3.47, comfortably in the “High” category. And Bangladesh? 0.54, on the low end of the “Medium-Low” category.

Clearly, the U.S. could bring up its happiness score a bit by finally making Puerto Rico a state. And look at Mexico! Here’s my public policy idea for maximizing average SWB in the U.S.: build a wide, wide bridge over the Rio Grande! Make it 12-lanes, one-way. So, clearly, the money isn’t everything. But Bangladesh, Mr. Myung-bok, doesn’t even come close. Consider yourself fact-checked.

Now, Myung-bok also discusses Friedman’s Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, and seems sympathetic to its point, which I’m glad to see. But he seems confused about the application. After observing that Vietnam’s high rate of growth seems to have done them good, he says:

But a high growth rate like that in Vietnam cannot be expected of a country like France that has already entered a stage of maturity. If this is the case, where should people in advanced countries look for happiness? I think they should find it in establishing fair game rules by removing social discrimination and expanding transparency.

Friedman’s thesis just is that goals like removing discrimination and expanding transparency are more socially and politically feasible when growth rates are healthy and steady. True, France is an already developed economy, and isn’t likely to see 7% annual growth rates. However, the French are in the bottom quarter of OECD countries growth-wise, and could certainly improve by following the lead of Ireland, cutting taxes, freeing up labor markets, repealing onerous regulations, etc. And, if Friedman is right, that’s what they need to do in order to ease the social unrest they’re experiencing.

Myung-bok writes, in conclusion:

If everyone in a society could accept that he or she did not lose in competition because of a difference in skin color, religion, race, gender, region or school, wouldn’t the sense of happiness in that society increase even if its economic growth were slow?

And the response is that this kind of acceptance is least likely when growth is slow, and it therefore seems to many that they are competing just to keep their portion of a shrinking pie. Tolerance for mobility from below—and for difference and equality—is greatest when people have a sense that things are getting better all the time and that there’s more than enough to go around.

This smug article in Glasgow’s Sunday Herald perfectly exemplifies the extremely shady way happiness research is put to use for political purposes, and why we must unfortunately keep a skeptical eye on those who brandish alleged data on happiness. Here’s the start:

THE most important item in the Cultural Commission’s report, which was buried unceremoniously last summer, informs us that the Greek government’s ambition is to reduce all measurement of public policy down to one indicator – does it make people happier?

By that index, much of what modern governments do is a failure. Concentrating on economic growth to the exclusion of almost everything else has only succeeded in making us more miserable. The evidence shows that though most of us have become richer in the last 30 years, we’ve also become unhappier.

This is just gobsmacking ignorance. The correlation between rate of growth and the number of people reporting themselves to be “very unhappy” is negative. It’s as easy as checking Nationmaster. The data is plain. Wealthier in general is happier. (The relationship is weak, sure. But a weak positive relationship isn’t no relationship, and definitely isn’t a negative one.)

As I reported in this post on the specious depression statistics, 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 survey) 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. So where’s the unhappier?

Say! How are the author’s neighbors in the Republic of Ireland doing? Ireland had a jawdropping 7.9% average rate of growth from 1994-2004. That’s 3.0% greater than the country with the the next highest growth, South Korea. (And 3% is itself a very healthy growth rate.) So, have the nouveau riche Irish become less happy? Nope. They’re pleased as punch with their pots o’ gold.

This Harris Poll, based on the Eurobarometer life satisfaction questions, shows the Irish near the top (of European countries, plus the US) in the percentage of the population reporting themselves Very Satisfied or Fairly Satsified. But perhaps more important, the high-growth Irish decisively lead in the percentage of the population who think that their life has improved in the last five years.

In contrast, the Germans, with the third worst growth among OECD countries over the last decade (1.5%), are gloomy. 84% of Germans say they are Very or Fairly Happy, compared to 93% of the Irish. 35% of Germans say their life got worse over the past five years, compared to just 11% of the Irish. 26% of Germans predict live will get worse in the next five years. Only 5% of the Irish think things will go downhill.

So, Richard Holloway, chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, I call bullshit. Bullshit, sir!

Oh, but wait. Shockingly, the chairman of the arts council wants us to know that more government money spent on something in particular will make us all happier. What do you think it is? One guess!

People are not just passive recipients of the happiness that art brings them – they are participants as well. Scotland is full of writers’ workshops and jazz clubs and dance classes and water colourists and fiddlers and pipers and brass bands and choral societies and drama groups and basket weavers and glass blowers and dry-stane-dykers . The doing of these things sees us at our best and most distinctively human and creative. More to the point, these are the activities that energise and fulfil us. They give us joy – the best therapy on Earth.

So why doesn’t government get it? Why doesn’t it realise that happy people are healthier, more caring – less trouble, in fact – and invest wholeheartedly in the happiness economy?

Hmm . . .

According to this article:

The figures from the European Commission on total spending on arts and culture in member states strongly suggest that Ireland is bottom of the class when it comes to [arts] spending in Europe. (Ireland’s per capita spending on the arts and culture in 2003 was only €23.15.)

Yet the happy, fast-growing Irish think life just keeps getting better all the time. How could that be!

Bullshit, sir.

More from the direction of causation annals. From the Independent:

Researchers from the universities of California, Missouri and Illinois examined connections between desirable characteristics, life success and well-being in more than 275,000 people.

They found that happy individuals were predisposed to seek out new goals in life, leading to success, which also reinforced their already positive emotions.

The psychologists addressed questions such as whether happy people were more successful than unhappy people, and whether happiness came before or after a perceived success.

Writing in Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association, they concluded that “chronically happy people” were generally more successful in many areas of life than less happy people.

The only mildly surprising thing here is that an unhappy marriage can be better, happiness-wise, than no marriage at all.

The bottom line, say the Cornell researchers, is that having a romantic relationship makes both men and women happier - and the stronger the relationship’s commitment, the greater the happiness and sense of well-being of the partners.

“Some commitment appears to be good, but more commitment appears to be even better,” said Claire Kamp Dush, a postdoctoral fellow with the Evolving Family Theme Project of the Institute for Social Sciences at Cornell and first author of one of the few studies to examine well-being across the relationship continuum. The study was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (22:5, 2005).

Interestingly, even those in relatively unhappy marriages appear to benefit from being married, Kamp Dush said, perhaps because they benefit from marriage’s stability, commitment and social status.

“Even when controlling for relationship happiness, being married is associated with higher self-esteem, greater life satisfaction, greater happiness and less distress, whereas people who are not in stable romantic relationships tend to report lower self-esteem, less life satisfaction, less happiness and more distress,” she explained.

I think this data supports the contention that refusal to recognize same-sex marriage constitutes a real harm to those people who would like to get legally married, but cannot.

Good name for an album. Also, supposed to be one of the key pieces of evidence providing objective corroboration for happiness self-reports. Duchenne smiles are “real” smiles, the ones you make when someone cracks a funny joke and your eyes wrinkle and everything, not phony prom picture smiles. Some research has shown that expressing Duchenne smiles is correlated with heightened activity in the font left part of the brain, which is associated with experiences of pleasure. And people who Duchenne smile more report that they are happier.

But what are we to make of this, from Paul Griffiths and Andrea Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion,” forthcoming in the Cambridge Handbook Of Situated Cognition, Robbins, P and Aydede, M (Eds):

One of the most important experimental paradigms for a situated perspective on emotion is the study of ‘audience effects’ – differences in emotional response to a constant stimulus which reflect differences in the expected recipient(s) of the emotion. Amongst the most dramatic effects are those obtained for the production of the so-called ‘Duchenne smile’ – the pattern of movement of mouth and eyes generally accepted as a pan-cultural expression of happiness (Ekman, 1972). Ten-pin bowlers are presumably happiest when they make a full strike, less happy when they knock down a few pins. However, bowlers rarely smile after making a full strike when facing away from their bowling companions and smile very often after knocking down a few pins when they face their companions (Kraut & Johnston, 1979). Spanish soccer fans show a similar pattern in their facial response to goals, and issue Duchenne smiles only when facing one another (Fernández-Dols & Ruiz-Belda, 1997). Fernández-Dols & Ruiz-Belda also demonstrate that at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, although Gold medalists produced many signs of emotion during the medal ceremony, they produced Duchenne smiles almost exclusively when interacting with the audience and officials.

These results suggest that smiles are not outpourings of happiness which are merely witnessed by other people, but rather affiliative gestures made by one person to another with respect to something good which has occurred. This fits the model of emotions as strategic moves in the context of a social transaction. Obviously, people do smile and produce other classical emotional expressions when they are alone, but studies suggest that they do so far less often than one might expect. Even such apparently reflexive displays as facial expressions produced in response to tastes and smells appear to be facilitated by an appropriate social setting and the same appears to be the case for pain expressions (Russell, Bachorowski, & Fernández-Dols, 2003). Furthermore, it would be a mistake to conclude that audience effects are absent when a physical audience is absent. Solitary subjects who mentally picture taking part in a social interaction produce more emotional facial signals than subjects who focus on the emotional stimulus without an imagined audience. Fridlund has described this as ‘implicit sociality’ and remarked that his experimental subjects display to the ‘audience in their heads’ (Fridlund, 1994; Fridlund et al., 1990).

If Duchenne smiles are subject to audience effects, and especially if they are strategic (which is not to say they are contrived or fake–one of the author’s main points is that emotions are there to strategically manage social interaction), we maybe we shouldn’t make that much of them.

If Griffiths is right, “being happy” may be a longstanding social strategy. Take a different example to get the idea or emotion as strategy. Ever met anyone who cries any time they don’t get their way, or who grows sullen whenever there is conflict. This is, in part, a way of managing other people. Similarly, someone who is “happy” may depend strategically on behaving happily (again, this is not faking it) in order to seem likable, to reduce social friction, or maybe as a way to mask latent malevolence or aggression. We should expect that people for whom happiness plays this kind of strategic social role to both earnestly smile more and to have a self-image as a happy person. This should show up on the happiness survey. And it is plausible that being “a happy person” would require the activation of the neural correlates of positive affect.

However, just as we wouldn’t want to say that the unsmiling Olympic champion is not happy, I don’t think we’d want to say that people for whom happiness is not so strategically central are not equally happy in some deeply important sense, even if they’re not so often getting that tickle in the left frontal lobe that goes along with the Duchenne smile.

The Griffith essay is full of good examples of strategic emotion. People get angrier when their anger can get them restitution. Embarrassment as a signal of one’s realization that one has violated a norm. I like the account of sulking:

Sulking is a behavioral strategy for seeking a better deal in a relationship – an emotional game of ‘chicken’ in which transactions that benefit both parties are rejected until appropriate concessions are obtained. The question confronting an agent deciding whether to become upset in this way is not whether they have been slighted simpliciter, but whether taking what has happened as a slight and withdrawing cooperation will give them leverage. Once again, this strategic appraisal of the situation may be realized by a relatively simple mental mechanism.

I’d very much like to see a strategic account of happiness. Maybe it will turn out that some of our gains in self-reported happiness come from increasingly widespread adoption of the “being happy” social management strategy. And it may be a very good thing to have a society where “being happy” is a good way of getting what you want, even if “being happy” isn’t the same thing as the sense of meaningful well-being we all hope for. Fun stuff!

Louis Rayo and Gary S. Becker, “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness,” Working Paper, University of Chicago.

Abstract. We model happiness as a measurement tool used to rank alternative actions. The quality of the measurement is enhanced by a happiness function that adapts to the available opportunities, a property favored by evolution. The optimal function is based on a time-varying reference point —or performance benchmark— that is updated in a statistically optimal way. Habits and peer comparisons arise as special cases of this process. This also results in a volatile level of happiness that continuously reverts to its long-term mean. Throughout, we draw a parallel with a problem of optimal incentives, which allows us to apply statistical insights from agency theory to the study of happiness.

This looks pretty promising. I’ll comment when I’ve read the paper.

Last night, I discovered a wonderful passage from Thomas Mann’s short story “Little Herr Friedemann,” in which the title character, crippled from infancy, reconciles himself to the fact that he will never know sensual love, but instead learns to take value in the full range of human emotion. Indeed, he becomes a connoisseur of feeling, sensitive to the subtle notes of value even in unhappiness.

Is not life in and for itself a good, regardless of whether we may call its content “happiness”? Johannes Freidemann felt that it was so, and he loved life. He, who had renounced the greatest joy it can bring us, taught himself with infinite, increidble care to take pleasure in what it still had to offer. A walk in the springtime in the parks surrounding the town; the fragrance of a flower; the song of a bird–might not one feel grateful for such things as these?

And that we need to be taught to enjoy, yes, that our education is always and only equal to our capacity for enjoyment–he knew that too, and he trained himself. Music he loved, and attended all the concerts that were given in the town. He came to play the violin not so badly himseld, no matter what a figure of fun he made when he did it; and took delight in every beautiful soft tone he succeeded in producing. Also, by much reading he came to possess a literary taste the like of which did not exist in the place. He kept up with the new books, even the foreign ones; he knew how to savor the seductive rhythym of a lyric or the ultimate flavour of a subtly told tale–yes, one might even call him a connoisseur.

He learned to understand that to everything belongs its own enjoyment and that it is absurd to distinguish between an experience which is “happy” and one which is not. With a right good will he accepted each emotion as it came, each mood, whether sad or gay. Even he cherished the unfulfilled desires, the longings. He loved them for their own sakes and told himself that with fulfillment the best of them would be past. The vague, sweet, painful yearnings and hope of quiet spring evenings–are they not richer in joy than all the fruition the summer can bring? Yes, he was a connoisseur our little Herr Friedemann.

It’s the last paragraph here that demands our attention. But it requires the preceeding to make full sense. For the point is that the capacity to take full enjoyment in–as opposed to experiencing a superficial, stereotyped positive reaction to–such obviously pleasant things as flowers and birdsong implies the capacity to take pleasure also in frustration and pain. Once our sentimental education attunes us the finer grain of experience, there is no facile distinction between the happy and unhappy.

And so suppose you gave a happiness survey to little Herr Friedemann. What would he say? Let’s look at the next paragraph:

But of course they did not know that, the people whom he met on the street, who bowed to him with the kindly, compassionate air he knew so well. They could not know that this unhappy cripple, strutting comically along in his light overcoat and shiny top hat–strange to say, he was a little vain–they could not know how tenderly he loved the mild flow of his life, charged with no great emotion, it is true, but full of a quiet and tranquil happiness which was his own creation.

So, Herr Friedemann is happy. But his happiness is not the aggregate of happy feelings, but is constitituted even by unhappiness, pain, and frustrated longing. How is this possible? All the flow of life is tranformed–created–into tranquil happiness by his attitude of tender love toward his complete experience. Perhaps the most precious thing is the alchemical education of sensibility that can turn emotional lead to gold. And so shouldn’t we note the flaw in a measurement instrument indifferent between gold seen through shallow waters and gold mined from depths where there is no gold?