Happiness & Public Policy

George Will has written a ridiculous but entertaining column on the finding that Republicans are happier then Democrats.

Nevertheless, normal conservatives — never mind the gladiators of talk radio; they are professionally angry — are less angry than liberals. Liberals have made this the era of surly automobile bumpers, millions of them, still defiantly adorned with Kerry-Edwards and even Gore-Lieberman bumper stickers, faded and frayed like flags preserved as relics of failed crusades. To preserve these mementos of dashed dreams, many liberals may be forgoing the pleasures of buying new cars — another delight sacrificed on the altar of liberalism.

I think that the content of the ideology has a small effect. And very few Democrats are raging, Nation-subscribing leftists (just ask the subscription department at the Nation.) I think there are likely some personality traits that predict both voting Republican and reporting higher life satisfaction.

And, hey! headline writer! The biconditional is utterly inapproriate.

I think Easterlin’s work on happiness across the life cycle is most revealing about the composition of life satisfaction over time. Indeed, I think it rather blows away the money won’t make you happy thesis. What Easterlin has done is construct a “synthethic panel” (stitching together several separate panels) to provide a picture of the course of satisfaction in several domains over the course of a life. What he is trying to explain here is how the ups and downs of domain satisfaction combine to produce a stable lifetime happiness trend.

The virtual congruence of predicted with actual happiness implies that the slight rise in happiness through midlife that occurs in the population as a whole is due, on average, chiefly to growing satisfaction with family life and work, which in combination more than offset diminishing satisfaction with health. As individuals marry and form families and progress in their careers, the enhanced happiness they obtain from these sources offsets the adverse impact on happiness of a gradual deterioration in health. Beyond midlife, however, happiness decreases slowly, because the continuing decline in satisfaction with health is joined by diminishing satisfaction with family situation and work. These negative influences on happiness are considerably offset, however, by an upswing in people’s satisfaction with their financial situation. This upswing, which is most marked at the oldest ages clearly cannot be due to an upsurge in income at older age, but must reflect a decrease in emotional strain as financial pressures and material needs diminish in the later stages of the life cycle.

Basically, after middle age, everything gets worse other than financial satisfaction, which continues to rise. And it rises at a rate sufficient to more or less offset decreasing satisfaction in all the other domains. Now, I think Easterlin sort of misses the most plausible hypothesis about the cause of climbing financial satisfaction. Easterlin’s view is that basically that at retirement our financial expectations relax, and so the reality expectations gap closes. There’s probably a lot to that. Of course the effect can’t come from increasing income once you’ve stopped having an income, or have reduced your income to pensions/annuities/old age assistance.

It seems to me that the obvious hypothesis is: retirement is focused on consumption and consumption is satisfying.

I know my financial satisfaction isn’t really rising much precisely because I’m at the stage in life where a large portion of any increase in income get ploughed directly into savings for retirement. Right now, I worry about saving enough for retirement. When I retire, long after I’ve paid off my student loans, my mortgage, etc., and I have saved enough, then I won’t worry about whether I saved enough. Most crucially, I get to start consuming the fruits of a lifetime of labor.

A lot of pre-retirement consumption is instrumental consumption. I have to buy clothes that I might not otherwise buy because of my job. I invest in my (hypothetical) children’s education. I might worry about the kind of car I have because the signal my car sends affects my perceived status, which affects my likelihood of promotion, which affects my income, which affects my consumption level in retirement. But when I’m retired, I just consume what I like because I like it. (Well, for the most part: Irv next door just bought a sweet set of Pings and I want to look good in the clubhouse, too. But, still, even my status competition has shifted to the leisure domain. I enjoy golfing more than overpriced french cuffed shirts.) As you get closer and closer to the end of life, and it is becomes more and more certain that the money isn’t going to run out, consumption becomes ever more worry-free, and so more enjoyable.

Obviously, income and wealth aren’t the same thing. Old people are the wealthiest, even though they don’t have the biggest incomes. The non-instrumental enjoyment of wealth is a great pleasure, and that’s what keeps life from being miserable in old age.

So, given Easterlin’s finding that financial satisfaction is what staves off unhappiness in old age, and the evergreen finding that at any given time and place people with higher incomes are happier, what argument is there, relevant to individual lives, that money has no important relation to well-being. I don’t want to know whether I am happier than someone at the same point in the income distribution 50 years ago. That’s irrelevant. I don’t want to know whether I am happier than a Serb at the same point in the Serbian distribution. That’s irrelevant. What I want to know is whether I will be happier if my income increases 20%. The answer is, yes, I probably will be happier. I want to know if my life will go better overall if I am wealthy in my golden years. The answer is, again, yes, probably.

If I have to read another article that shows me the flat 50 year happiness trend against the rising real income trend, and then implies that it wouldn’t matter to me if my income doubled, I swear I will strangle a kitten. What wouldn’t matter to me is if my income only ever increased at the rate of real income growth. But that just doesn’t happen for most of us. We shoot up through a bunch of income deciles over our working years. If improving relative position makes us happier, then most of us grow happier over our working lives due to rising incomes. As when we drop income deciles upon exiting the labor market, we coast on our accumulated wealth. That’s the story. Money matters.

Most of the literature on positional preferences emphasizes the downside. But what if the upside is bigger?

Becker and Murphy in Social Economics argue that without a taste for status, there would be too little entreprenuerial activity, because the expected monetary payoff of an entrepeneurial gamble would often be too small. However, if you add the expected status payoff to the monetary payoff, entrepreneuial gambles become rational. We would all be poorer if we didn’t have a taste for status.

Today, Tyler points to a number of papers by Rick Harbaugh. His “Falling Behind the Joneses: Relative Consumption and the Growth-Savings Paradox” is a beautiful example of the possible upside of positional preferences. Here is the introduction:

Consumers in rapidly growing economies should borrow against future earnings to smooth consumption, or at least should save at a lower rate than consumers in countries with stagnant or falling incomes. Instead, multi-country studies show a strong positive correlation between income growth and savings rates (Bosworth, 1993). Such a correlation could result from high savings rates inducing high growth rates (Lucas, 1998), but the pattern in most rapid-growth economies has been for rapid income growth to precede sharp increases in household savings rates. Of the possible explanations for this growth-savings paradox, the Duesenberry (1949) relative consumption model, which assumes utility comes from individual consumption relative to societal per capita consumption, seems an unlikely candidate. Rising incomes would appear to induce excessive consumption as consumers attempt to “keep up with the Joneses”. This notion is examined with a simple two-period model. Rather than increasing consumption, concern for relative consumption can induce a fear of falling behind which raises precautionary savings. As societal income growth increases this fear intensifies, allowing for a positive effect of growth on savings rates and potentially explaining the growth-savings paradox.

Benjamin Friedman argues that growth is a public good and, as is the nature of public goods, individuals will underinvest in it unless the government does something about, in this case by mandating or rewarding savings relative to consumption. Could it be that our fear of falling behind just is the “tax” that motivates investment in growth?

Tim Harford, writing in the new Forbes, tackles the money and happiness question in an entertaining article. Especially quotable:

So, money does not buy happiness. Or does it? “In every society, at any point in time, richer people are happier,” points out Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C., who runs a blog on happiness research and public policy. “But that in itself doesn’t tell you much about the relationship between money and happiness.”

Well, that’s just my favorite part. Read the whole thing.
Over at the Fly Bottle we really like Tim’s big sex-n’-Wittgenstein finish:

Some results are predictable enough: Work is miserable, and commuting is worse. Others are not so obvious. For instance, praying is fun, but looking after the kids is not. Spending time with your friends is one of the most enjoyable things you can do, but spending time with your spouse is merely OK. In fact, parents or other relatives turn out to make more enjoyable company than the supposed love of your life.

What is perfectly clear, though, is that socializing with anyone except your boss makes you feel good. Sex is best of all. This is handy advice at last. But what if you are having sex with your boss? Whereof economists cannot speak, we must remain silent.

Layard’s advice is good. I doubt Oswald was really trying to say that if you’re depressed, wait until you’re older. It is worth noting that satisfaction in about every life domain other than the financial declines as we age. So don’t think this “money can’t buy you happiness” schtick means you can go chintzy on the 401K. When your knees break down, your eyes start to go, half your friends have died, and your kids never call anymore, money is the main thing buying you happiness. (See Easterlin. Head right for the graphs in the appendix.)

The Pew poll mentioned below confirms a longstanding trend: Republicans say they are happier than Democrats. This year, 45% of Republicans said they were “very” happy as opposed to 29% of Democrats. That’s a big gap! Here’s the the 30+ year trendline from Pew:

This stability is interesting in part because, I take it, that the demographic composition of Republican and Democratic voters has changed not insignificantly over the last 30 years. Is that right? Anyway, what accounts for Dem.-Rep. gap? Well, it’s not income. Republicans report themselves as happier at all points on the income distribution, as this Pew graph shows:

So what’s the deal? Here’s the Pew folk

[The regression] analysis shows that the most robust correlations of all those described in this report are health, income, church attendance, being married, and, yes, being a Republican. Indeed, being a Republican is associated not only with happiness, it is also associated with every other trait in the cluster.

Clean-livin’ Christians are more likely to be in good health, go to church, be married, and vote Republican.
What doesn’t the study mean? In today’s Colorado Springs Gazette, hometown paper of the Focus on the Family folk, I am quoted thus:

Does membership in the GOP really make people happy? Probably not, said Will Wilkinson, who studies happiness for the Cato Institute. The bliss is probably connected to some other facet of life that also inclines people to be Republicans, he said.

“People might read that and say, ‘I’d like to be happy, maybe I should be a Republican.’ It definitely doesn’t mean that,” Wilkinson said.

Sorry Dobsonites!

Assuming that the entire Dem.-Rep. difference doesn’t disappear when controlling for demographic variables, what psychological traits would you guess predict both higher self-reports and Republicanism?

The Pew Research Center released a big report today on happiness in the U.S., “Are We Happy Yet.” I’m just now digging in, but I’ll have a lot to say about it tomorrow, I’m sure. For now, let me just leave you with this:

I’ve just noticed that my Reason review of Richard Layard’s Happiness, “Happiness Is…Higher Taxes,” is now online. Check it out, and please tell me what you think.

R.J. Rummel has posted a nice summary of Inglehart and Klingermann’s excellent paper, Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness [pdf].

. . . they did a multiple regression of well being against measures of a nation’s economic development, whether it was historically ruled by Protestant elites or not, its years under communist rule, and its measure of freedom. These variables account for 80 percent of the variation in well being, a remarkable fit. They then removed independent variables with low significance in stages to achieve of fit of 78 percent of the variance with three significant variables, which in the order of their significance are: GNP per capita, years under communist rule, and freedom. Aside from applying sample tests of significance to a universe of cases, a problem with their analysis, is the high multicollinearity among these three variables (on this problem, see my blog here). Without eliminating this intercorrelation, it is impossible from this regression alone to determine what variables are dominant.

The whole post’s worthwhile.

I’ve just received Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis and so far it is the best “how to be happy” book I’ve come across. Good combination of classical wisdom, current research, and good sense. For those who don’t know of him, Haidt is a first-rate social psychologist at UVA who works on moral emotion and cognition.

Another truly useful thing about Haybron’s paper is the totally stunning clarity with which he commits the Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization. The Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization is the fallacy of unfavorably contrasting a realistically (or pessimistically) described process or institution with an idealizistically desicribed process or institution. The fallacy was first made explicit to me by Steve Horwitz at an IHS conference. He drew a matrix on the board that looked something like this:

The distribution of the Xs here shows how libertarians tend to commit the fallacy. Big government folk tend to go for a grim non-ideal market and a Panglossian government.
Almost the entirety of what I’ve been calling the “cognitive paternalism” literature amounts to an elaborate form of this version of the fallacy:

It would not be a fallacy if it was shown that institutions of government decisionmaking are in general more means-ends reliable than individual decisionmaking in the setting on non-government institutions. But no one ever does try to make that argument. I suspect that there is no good argument for it. The argument would need to be of this general form:

If genuine experts were in charge of the policymaking process, then they could write enforceable policy that would tend to improve the means-ends rationality of individual behavior.

The difficulties are legion. Let’s just concentrate on experts. The expert identification process is itself an institutional problem that is very hard to solve. There is no broad consensus among citizens as to who is an expert. Consider that Leon Kass was designated by the Bush adminstration as an expert in bioethics to make recommendations on government policy. We have Kass, among others, to thank for the president’s (I think deeply mistaken) opposition to cloning, stem-cell research, and, yes, human-animal hybrids! Is Kass a genuine expert of not? Was the Bush adminstration means-ends reliable when it appointed Donald Rumsfeld to run the DoD? It depends on who you ask. Maybe a majority of American’s say “yes.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but we clearly don’t even agree about the ends that we ought to be means-ends rational about. Philosophers and religious leaders and politicians are forever nominating themselves as experts about truly good ends. And, of course, as experts about who the experts about truly good ends are.

Well, you see the problem. We always have to keep in mind the possibility that if some domain of life is turned over to rule by experts, we may get the wrong experts. Imagine James Dobson as the czar of American family policy, empowered to structure incentives to lovingly guide us to behave according to his expert conception of healthy, fulfilling, truly good family life. The Rawlsian fact of pluralism is a real fact, and it doesn’t just disappear because you are a scientist, or because you are really right. James Dobson, and the millions whe love him, knows he’s really right, too. Ask Peter Singer. What does he think?

That said, here is Haybron:

Consider that a deep faith in the ability of individuals effectively to seek their own good has provided an important justification for liberal restrictions on the state’s role in promoting good lives. This strain of thought finds its classic expression in Mill’s On Liberty, where he writes that “the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place” (Mill 1991). Recall also the lines cited at the start of this paper. In essence, Mill argues that individuals tend to know how they are doing, and what’s good for them, far better than anyone else does, and so societies should let individuals make their own decisions about how to live. Give people as much freedom to live as they wish, with as much scope for shaping their lives as they see fit, as possible.

And yet, if individuals are prone systematically to botch choices regarding their happiness, or even if this must be considered a serious possibility, then this aspect of liberal thought loses a good deal of its support, specifically the traditional consequentialist arguments like Mill’s that favor it. We cannot simply assume a high level of prudential competence in the typical person. Nor can we assume, contra Mill, that governments won’t often know better than individuals what’s best for them, since some of our prudential shortcomings appear to be systematic. Thus policymakers armed with knowledge of human psychological weaknesses might be able to shape social arrangements to compensate for them, in ways that will not always sit well with liberal sensibilities. One might object here that, as Mill claimed, individuals still tend to know their own affects better than anyone else does. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that most people mistakenly think themselves happy. Even if they are the best judges of their specific feelings, it may be that well-informed officials have a better grip on how the population feels, in general, than the individuals taken in aggregate do. So, for instance, state officials might know that the average person isn’t happy, while the average person mistakenly believes herself happy.
Plainly, much more would need to be said actually to undermine consequentialist arguments for liberal strictures on state paternalism. Nor would the weakening or defeat of those arguments open the door for rampant government paternalism, since we could in any event have powerful reasons of autonomy for limiting state interventions in our lives. My purpose here is just to show how AI [affective ignorance] and related psychological matters could impact political thought: we may find, perhaps among other things, that we need to rethink common doubts about the efficacy of state paternalism in making people happier. [emphasis added]

The first emphasized passage is a truly remarkable example of the Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization. Here is my paraphrase: we can’t assume that individuals know what’s best for them, and so we can’t assume that other individuals, with the same psychological limits, embedded in an incredibly fragile and and improbable structure of institutions, constituted by the patterns of interaction among millions of other individuals similarly psychologically limited, won’t do better!

That’s right! We can’t just assume that! But once we correct for the fallacy and make our levels of (non-)idealization symmetrical, we are more than justified in believing that the government, on average, isn’t likely to help more than it hurts.
Anyone who has studied economic development will come to suspect that the fraility of human rationality and trust is at the root of most societies’ inabilitity to develop minimally adequate institutions manned with “policymakers” armed with anything but a well-honed predatory instinct. Simply assuming policymakers “armed with knowledge of human psychological weaknesses” that enable them to “shape social arrangements to compensate” for those weakness right after being so thoroughly non-idealistic about human psychology ought to strike us as an embarrassing mistake. This is just like simply assuming perfect human rationality. Goverment is a solution to other problems only if the problem of good government has already been solved (or is even solvable). There is no deus ex machina. There is, of course, a gigantic literature about the quality of government institutions through time. The vast majority of all government institutions and policies ever tried have a record of simply astounding means-ends failure.

When individual prudence breaks down we marry the wrong person, take the wrong job, decide to take the wrong drug, work too much, or vacation too little, etc. And that’s too bad. But it is simple impossible to avoid the truth that government policy is set by the same kind of individual human beings who act on predictions about what is going to make us all better off. There is never a guarantee that these people know what they are doing. There probably cannot be a guarantee. All we can do is mitigate the possibility for harm by keeping power away from deeply imperfect people. When government institutions go sour the people running them start unjust wars, slaughter their own citizens by the millions, systematically oppress their own people, keep them in squalor generation after generation, or starve them by the droves. This is, one must admit, rather worse than the anxiety and dismay of an individual who has made some mistakes about her own happiness.
There are, of course, some notable successes in government. It is of course possible for there to be genuine experts, and for government appointed genuine experts to do a good job. We will miss you Alan Greenspan! But, then again, some people aren’t systematically means-ends irrational, either. In the best case, individuals don’t need a government crutch to help them do the right thing. And in the best case, government crutches can help. But our world isn’t the best case. Often the best we can do is put up and defend strong barriers against the worst case. My worry is that the cognitive paternalists are unwittingly eroding those barriers.

Another great thing about chatting with Carl the other day is the pointer he gave me to the work of Dan Haybron, a philosopher at St. Louis University. Dan has written a couple of the papers that I’ve been trying in vain to find. His web page is a treasure trove. His paper Do We Know How Happy We Are: One Some Limits of Affective Introspection and Recall makes the skeptical case I have been trying to make, based on the same research I have been looking at, much better than I have so far been able to make it. I’m delighted to see this paper in part because it helps me know that I’m not crazy.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self-assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are wholly unaware of them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block’s controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self-reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways.

The abstract doesn’t really capture the core of what I’m interested in here, which is the reliability of self-report survey instruments. The paper contains a very trenchant and cogent critique.

Now, I’ve been arguing that the happiness surveys fail to measure increases in average objective happiness. I suppose it reveals my priors to admit that it really hadn’t seriously occurred to me that they could be failing to measure decreases. Haybron seems to think this is a distinct possibility.

Here is a Haybron’s conclusion:

There is a family I know—I will call them the Wilsons—whose members are quite amazingly loud. Wonderful people they are, but the din from their constant shouting, thumping, and crashing about is, for the unseasoned visitor, almost unbearable. Yet they seem to have no idea there’s anything at all unpleasant or odd about it, since it is perfectly normal for them. Those who know them see it differently: however hardened their sensibilities might have become, it’s almost certainly an unpleasant place for the family too. (It must be.) It is worth pondering whether mainstream American society might not be a little like the Wilsons: oblivious, and more or less inured to, a noisy, obnoxious, stressful, and spiritually deflating way of life.

Of course,Haybron’s priors are revealed in the fact that he doesn’t seem to have considered that we might be rather better off than we think. This kind of dispute brings home, I think, the need for a long-term longitudinal physical correlates of happiness study. My guess is that some correlates of unhappiness (stress/cortisol levels, e.g., ) may have gone up, but that some correlates of happiness (some kinds of dopiminergic activity, e.g.) may have also gone up. The multi-dimensional physical constitution of real happiness will complicate efforts to show unambiguous increases or declines, especially since there may be no generally valid way to weigh the disutility of cortisol against the utility of dopamine, or whatever, in terms of real happiness.

I just got off the phone with Carl Craver, a smart philosopher of neuroscience (yes, redundant) at Wash U in St. Louis. I had some vague ideas about brains and happiness and I wanted to talk to somebody who not only understands brains, but philosophy of science, and so forth. In trying to formulate one of my vague ideas to Carl, I think I semi-successfully clarified something worthwhile to myself. It’s not what I was trying to clarify, but I’ll take it! Thanks, Carl!

So . . . here’s a datum that needs explaining:

Self-reported happiness is stable over the past 50 years–the percentages of the population reporting themselves in each category has not shifted significantly.

Here are two hypotheses that account for this fact:

(1) Adaptation, aspiration, and/or social comparison affect the real qualitative feel of subjective states, such that the way people feel now (in the various categories in the distribution) is essentially the same as the way people felt fifty years ago.

(2) Adaptation, aspiration, and/or social comparison affect the way people report
the way they feel, such that the percentages of people who say they feel “very happy,” etc. remain pretty constant, although the real qualitative feel of their subjective states now (in the various categories in the distribution) is not essentially the same as it was fifty years ago. More people are in fact happier now, but the reporting mechanisms keep moving the goal posts.

My gut says strongly that (2) is correct. This is not to say that adaptation, etc. do not at all affect the real quality of our subjective states. I think they do. But not enough to have kept the real quality of happiness totally static over time. (Also, it might turn out that, say, adaptation is a real effect, while social comparison is a reporting effect or vice versa. But I don’t want to get too complicated just now.)

How do you test this? Well, is it really that hard? There is ample reason to believe that self-reports contain real information. However, I suspect that the information they do contain is not not very usefully comparable across time and/or place. Nonetheless, we can say with a high level of certainty—due to various kinds of self-report (there is no other way)—that certain hormones and neurotransmitters, etc. correlate with feeling good, and others correlate with feeling bad. Seratonin, dopamine, oxytocin: good. Cortisol, etc.: bad. Same with certain distinctive patterns of neural activation. My friend Paul Zak takes blood samples and measures oxytocin levels to see how trusting people are. (He doesn’t use self-reports, but real performance in economic games containing an assurance problem. It should also be noted gratuitously that Paul is one of Wired’s 10 Sexiest Geeks for 2005.) It should in principle be possible to measure the quantity of particular substances in people’s system, or the activity levels of certain parts of the brain (generally involving a number of these substances) as a proxy for the way people really feel, as opposed to the way they say they feel.

So here’s the idea: Get a good sized random sample of people in a particular society (or several societies). Measure their happiness-relevant vitals again and again over time—say, twenty years—and see what you get.

My predictions:

(a) There are multiple bases for good and bad self-reports. For example, some “very happy” people may have very consistently low cortisol levels. (Buddhist happy.) Some “very happy” people have very high status-related seratonin and testosterone levels, with a moderately high amount of cortisol. (Big honcho happy.)

(b) Many of the variables that predict high self-reports, such as income, autonomy, sociality, etc., will be shown to correlate with slightly different physical bases of good feelings. Some variables will be more seratonin related. Some variables will be more oxytocin related. Etc.

(c) The composition of the physical basis of high self-reports changes as we age.

(d) Over time, we will see shifting of the distribution of different kinds of happiness (e.g., Buddhist happiness vs. big honcho happiness) within the self-report categories due to changes in cultural, social and economic institutions.

and, finally,

(e) in year twenty (assuming social stability and a continuation of the general trend in economic growth) the percentage of the population having the physical profile(s) that predicted “very happy” in year one will have increased significantly, but the self-reports will not reflect this change.

There’s probably already good evidence for (a)-(c). But let’s really find out.

My intutions here were heavily primed by reading Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. Fogel advances a very physical conception of economic productivity in terms of calories consumed and calories spent. I was astonished to see the huge spike in economic productivity with the discovery of the germ theory of disease and the advent of adequate sanitation. Prior to this, almost everyone had some kind of infection almost all the time, and a big portion of the calorie budget went into fighting infection, and not productive labor. If you’re not constantly sick, you have more energy and can work harder longer.

The thing that struck me is that people who were sick all the time cannot have really felt all that well. But people who were sick all the time wouldn’t have a good idea of what it meant to feel not sick all the time, either. That’s just the way things were. And I suspect that had folks in 1880 or whenever answered happiness surveys, they’d mostly say they were doing pretty good, like now. I bet you’d see a upward shift in the self-reports with good public health measures. But I highly doubt the shift would really correspond to the real change in what it felt like on the inside to move from really high to pretty low rates of infection. (I’d like to know the physical correlates for the lousy feelings of bacterial and viral infection. Couldn’t we measure those, too?)

So, there’s a research program for the taking! If you’re a super-rich patron looking to make a big contribution to the science of human well-being, well, you know how to reach me!