Happiness & Public Policy

In the same vein as David’s fascinating post below, here is a refreshingly accurate article on the relationship between wealth and self-reported happiness around the world from the New Scientist titled “Wealthy Nations Hold the Keys to Happiness.” The occasion of the article is the publication of a world map by Adrian White, a Ph.D. psychology student at the University of Leicester, that vividly pictures self-reported life satisfaction around the world. The relationship between wealth and the percentage of people who say they are happy leaps out pretty clearly.

According to the analysis, a country’s happiness is closely related to its wealth, along with the health and education levels of its people. It is no surprise that people spending heavily on healthcare, such as US citizens, rank highly, says White, as this investment increases life expectancy and general wellbeing.

“There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people,” he says. “However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher [earnings] per capita, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.”

[…]

Large industrialised countries fared well in the new analysis, with the US and UK coming in at 23 and 41, respectively, out of 178 nations.

This stands in contrast with the recently released “Happy Planet Index” from the New Economics Foundation think tank, which placed Columbia and Honduras high up. The Happy Planet Index ranked each country according to the reported happiness level of its people divided by the amount of the world’s resources they consume.

“In the west we have the tendency to be the ‘worried well’,” White says. Too true.

I like to emphasize that self-reported subjective life satisfaction is a far cry from objective well-being, which includes non-subjective factors like health, longevity, the development of basic human capacities, and more. Complaining about the misery of life under capitalism is a sport for privileged people who, thanks to capitalism, are doing so objectively well that they can spend their days doing things like, say, getting a Ph.D. in American Studies from Berkeley and writing books about how Zombie movies reflect the horror of capitalism.

Now, I think most of us can agree that even if capitalism does give us boneheaded essays on the anti-capitalist implications of shambling, undead brain-eaters, all this health, wealth, and happiness probably makes it a good deal anyway.

[Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty]

Nice column in the Times Online from James Whyte. Highlight:

it is clear that happiness is not everyone’s ultimate value either.
I know academics who have sacrificed happiness for discovery. And I
know bankers who work very hard and earn a lot of money. They know that
more wealth will not increase their happiness as much as more leisure
would. Nevertheless, they keep working. They prefer money to happiness.

Some will say my greedy friends are making a mistake. Professor
Layard, for example, says they are in the grip of an addiction from
which it is the Government’s duty to save them through punitive income
taxes. It is, of course, tempting to think that those who do not share
your values are crazy. But it is also an alarming pretext for state
intervention. Free men should fear the happy brigade.

To have been born British is to have won first prize in the
lottery of life. This is almost as true now as it was when Cecil Rhodes
said it. But not because the British are or ever were the happiest
people on earth. It is because, unlike those happy Nigerians, we are
prosperous and free. Which means we have just about as much happiness
as we want.

Journalist Stuart Jeffries has a truly excellent piece on “Why Happiness Is Overrated” in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. Choice excerpts:

But as soon as the word “happiness” is invoked in this context, something has gone awry. Every undergraduate who has written an essay on the distinctions between pleasure, wellbeing and happiness (as I remember doing), knows that you’re getting into a conceptual morass by invoking happiness as an achievable societal goal. Kant wrote wisely, “The notion of happiness is so nebulous that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he can never convey accurately and distinctly what it is that he really wishes and wills ” But today, as never before, it is being touted as the societal cure-all: happiness is treated almost as a human right rather than what it is; namely, a goal that retreats the closer one tries to get to it. Perhaps happiness is an unnecessary goal that confuses us when we try to tackle real social problems.

…

A genial spirit, Coleridge was gadding about madly; sometimes winningly, sometimes irresponsibly, just as he usually did, up hill and down dale, through metaphysics and poetry, when he smacked into the wall of Wordsworth’s will. His best friend refused to put Coleridge’s poem Christabel into the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This, seemingly small, incident crushed Coleridge, making him doubt his poetic gifts, and left him for years crossing a desert of opium, illness and marital unhappiness.

Can we say that Coleridge would have been a better man, poet or essayist had he not been through this misery? You may object that Coleridge was a poet and intellectual, so perhaps needed an injection, of depression to fire him up, while the rest of us shlubs, trying to get through the day, don’t. We must be made happy; insured against depression; inoculated somehow against misery: it is our right, dammit! But it is a patronising view that implies ordinary people must live experientially less-fulfilled lives than artists.

Read the whole thing.

Time to pick up the pace with the happiness blogging. If I’m not doing a lot of thinking, at least I can be doing some linking.

Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness, by Jennifer Senior

More and more psychologists and researchers believe they know what makes people happy. But the question is, does a New Yorker want to be happy?Ab

Positive psychologist Chris Peterson on ABC News piece about measuring happiness, with a link to the survey on the Authentic Happiness site.

Dogs Come Top Of The Human ‘Happiness Index’.

There have been a ton of pieces about the Kahneman, Krueger, et al paper in Science. It’s far less exciting than it looks, and a little bit confused, I think. They have found, basically, that a backrub doesn’t feel any better when you’re rich. But they take this to mean that wealthier people are victim of a kind of “illusion” when they report “very happy” at higher rates. But is the integration of moment utilities have a better claim to “happiness” than global life-satisfaction judgments? If so, why? Argumentum ad Bentham? My take: a cultural constructivist emotional syndrome conception of happiness helps explain both the experience sampling and the life satisfaction survey results. Whoops! Thinking.

I’m quoted in this morning’s LA Times (I think the piece is front page) in an article on happiness research. Unfortunately, I am quoted rather exactly, and therefore come off somewhat lacking in gravitas:

"Most of the things that have been published about the policy implications of happiness research have definitely had a big-government slant to it. They’re like, ‘Here’s another reason for the government to do something else,’ " said Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute.

Now, I stand by the quote! They are in fact totally like "Here’s another reason for the government to do something else." Ah! The vernacular. Anyway, I really enjoyed chatting with the author Stu Silverstein over the phone. And showing up in an article between Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Richard Easterlin is more than all right by me. 

Haven’t read it yet, but I’m seeing it all over. The useful thing about the new study is that it compares life-satisfaction survey answers with Kahneman’s day reconstruction method (basically, writing down what you did and how it made you feel at the end of the day. Highlights:

“If people have high income, they think they should be satisfied and reflect that in their answers,” Krueger said. “Income, however, matters very little for moment-to-moment experience.”

And

“Despite the weak relationship between income and global life satisfaction or experienced happiness, many people are highly motivated to increase their income,” the study said. “In some cases, this focusing illusion may lead to a misallocation of time, from accepting lengthy commutes (which are among the worst moments of the day) to sacrificing time spent socializing (which are among the best moments of the day).”

My take: Not surprising. Life satisfaction judgments are going to reflect widely shared cultural assumptions about happiness. Wealth is part of a widely shared conception of the good life. Or maybe people think they ought to feel better about higher relative position, but this doesn’t really enter much into experience. So the self-reported happiness gap between the wealthy and less wealthy will shrink the closer the self-report gets to actual events.

By the way, funny how these things are reported. Why not “Good news! The least wealthy are only 12 percent less happy the wealthiest.” Dueling political inferences: money doesn’t make the rich happy, so it doesn’t hurt them if we take their money vs. not having money doesn’t make the poor unhappy, so it doesn’t help them to give them any. Take your pick.

Kahneman’s Benthamism prevents him from reading happiness-motivation splits as anything but “illusion.” If you simply assume that people value only happiness intrinsically, and desire other things only for the happiness it brings, then working hard to make money, say, will seem like a kind of mistake if money doesn’t maximize happiness. There are a couple alternative interpretations. One is that here we have a revealed preference for something other than happiness. Even if people say they’re trying to be happy, talk is cheap. Action shows us what is genuinely valued—not happiness. Or it may be that there is a kind of “illusion” here, but a good illusion. Our system maybe does this: Identify something valuable. Conclude that it will make us happy, which motivates us to go after it. Go after it. Get it. It makes us happy or not. Whether it does is irrelevant to the system.

Now, if that’s the way the system works, is it really an illusion, exactly? Compared to what? The way the system doesn’t work? Can the fact that we are motivated really be a trick? Maybe. No doubt our Darwinian system “wants” things we don’t. Do I really want pretty women? Do I really want the higher status that will help me get pretty women? If the prospect of happiness is a trick to get us to want stuff that Nature needs us to get, are we really sure we really want happiness after all. We find out that it’s the basis of the motivating trick, and we still want it? Becuase that’s what we’re built to want, even if it jerks us around? What if I can’t stop wanting misery-making pretty women and also can’t stop wanting happiness? Screwed? That’s life?

If the at-a-time gap in happiness between rich and poor is smaller than we thought, is the hedonic effect of relative position smaller than we thought.

By the way, this study involves women only. It will be interesting to see whether there are significant male-female differences with the day reconstruction method.