Happiness & Public Policy

There are undoubtedly more. Feel free to add in the comments.

1. Life-satisfaction isn’t happiness, so measuring life satisfaction isn’t a way of measuring happiness.
2. In any case, almost all work based on life-satisfaction surveys simply assume, against the grain of scientific knowledge about the reliability of self-reports, that talk tracks fact; almost no one tries to control for the contextual nature of the self-ascription of subjective states.
3. Work on social comparison tends to infer wrecklessly from the logic of mate competition and the existence of primate dominance hierarchies to an agonistic view of human status. Worse, and semi-nonsensically, the wealth distribution is identified with the status dimension. None of this is supported by anthropological or sociological theory, evidence, or first-person experience of status competition.
4. There is a willingness to draw sweeping generalizations on the basis of cross-sectional surveys, but many of these obscure large variations between individuals or cohorts. Even if surveys actually tracked happiness, as opposed to fairly uninteresting, contextually erratic global judgments about how life is going, we’d need better longitudinal data to know much worth knowing.
5. Happiness is not a natural, universal psychological kind about which one can draw strict law-like generalizations. Happiness is a cultural/normative kind: a combination of basic emotions, moods, beliefs, and behavioral and inferential dispositions. It is a syndrome of feeling, belief, and action. The constitution of the syndrome, as exemplified in philosophy, history, and literature, has changed markedly over just the past 500 years.
6. Because of 4., a lot of speculation on, say, the adaptive function of happiness is misguided. The function of positive affect or the reward system simply isn’t the same thing as the function of happiness. It is likely that happiness has no more a biological function than ataraxia, stoic imperturbility (and maybe, I think, the Biblical “peace that passes understanding”). A paper on the adaptive biological function of ataraxia, apatheia, nirvana or satori or existential dread would strike us as weird. These are historically and culturally specific syndromes of feeling, belief, and behavior. Papers on the biological function of happiness ought to strike us in about the the same way.
7. On the policy front: There seems to be a widespread but largely unspoken view that a “scientific” approach to value, and therefore policy, must involve a master value that can be maximized, and into which all subordinate values can be translated. But this assumption flows from precisely the kind of rationalist a priori method that is anathema to an empirical approach to value. Descriptive moral anthropology clearly supports value pluralism, not monism. The scientific problem of institutional design in a pluralist world isn’t the problem of how to maximize the quantity of a single culturally contingent syndrome of feeling, belief, and behavior, at the expense of competing syndromes. Rather, the problem is how to create patterns of social cooperation that are stable because each participant judges the terms of cooperation beneficial, despite the fact that there is no single agreed upon conception of “benefit.” In a culture like ours, where most worldviews place some significant value on happiness, terms of cooperation will need to be conducive to happiness, or they will not be considered beneficial, won’t gain willing compliance, and so won’t be stable. So a “scientific” approach to policy takes happiness seriously. But that’s a far cry from the absurdity of trying to maximize according to the terms of just one of the competing conceptions of value.