Happiness & Public Policy

3 Comments so far

1. Asher Dresner September 12th, 2006 8:38 am

   I haven’t actually finished reading the review yet, but just thought I’d drop you a line to say that you write brilliantly. I am a big big fan of tart explanations of complex ideas, and I haven’t seen much better than paragraphs like the “The problem is my stinking combined with your retching” paragraph.
   I have added your feed to my gmail webclips.

2. Matt January 18th, 2007 12:34 am

   Thanks for the review. (I just finished Layard’s book tonight.) You were right to criticize his impatience with dealing with objections to his utilitarianism; the sections of his book that attempt to respond to standard philosophical problems are terrible, and maybe he shouldn’t have written anything rather than taking too little time to say something worthwhile in response.

   One thing that occurred to me, as I was asking myself why people would settle for a lower income with higher relative position, was this: the people in the study Layard cites were Harvard kids, children of money and politics, and in politics, it would seem that relative income would make a difference: I can give more money to MY politician’s campaign, and thus exert more political influence. (This is simplistic and sort of cynical, but I just want to get the basic idea across.) The thing that bothered me was that I hadn’t (though I haven’t looked hard) found a very satisfying explanation of the impact of comparison and relative income - generally just some hand-waving about the evolved nature of our competitiveness.

3. bncoxixysivi February 3rd, 2007 10:07 am

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