Effective Policy and the Measurement of Human Well-Being
Economists Andrew Oswald and Andrew Branchflower begin a very interesting new NBER paper [$$$] on the relationship between levels of self-reported happiness and blood levels with this dubious claim:
For effective social and economic policies to be designed, it is necessary for policymakers to be able to measure human well-being.
They better hope they’re wrong, because if they’re right, then effective social and economic policy cannot be designed! Oh no!
Why? Two reasons:
(1) Human well-being, as opposed to the several dimensions or components of well-being, is pretty much impossible to measure.
Why? Because the specific nature of human well-being is relative to the individual and the components of well-being are diverse and must often be traded against one another.
What does this mean? Let’s start with the relativity of well-being. The achievement of valued aims (meaningful goals, important personal projects, whatever you’d like to call it) is a component of human well-being if anything is. However, the content of valued aims varies from person to person. It follows pretty straightforwardly that the specific requirements of well-being vary from person to person.
(For those of you on the lookout for the scourge of “post-modernist relativism,” please note that this kind of “relativism” is in fact a kind of relativism, and is also completely innocuous, entailed by the uncontroversial fact that different people have different personalities, different tastes, and different “callings.”)
Next, consider the diversity of the components of well-being and the potential conflicts between them. Health and longevity are components of well-being if anything is. But so is the individual achievement of valued aims. Some people’s perfectly reasonable aims may be incompatible with maximizing their health and longevity. Imagine a cholesterol-saturated gourmand who would rather die than give up his foie gras, or an adventurer who draws profound meaning from facing down life-threatening challenges. So… how much weight do we give to one component of well-being — health and longevity, say – relative to another — for example, the achievement of valued aims that conflict with maximal health and longevity? The answer is that there is no answer — no answer science and empirical evidence compels us all to agree on, at any rate.
The upshot, then, is that while we can measure various dimensions or components of well-being — whether it be health and longevity, the experience of pleasure, a sense of self-efficacy and control, the development of basic human capacities, or the achievement of valued aims — we cannot measure well-being as a whole because Mother Nature has nowhere posted a table of exchange rates between the various values that compose individual welfare. It’s simply not out there for the scientist to find.
Now, there may be a rough cultural consensus at any time and place about the relative weight to place on competing individual welfare-constituting values. But this consensus, to the extent that there is one, has to be discovered, and changes as time goes by. So, at this point, we’re not “measuring well-being” so much as attempting to find some bit of overlap if people’s conceptions of well-being. We can use the overlap to base a few general principles of mutually beneficial social interaction almost everyone will be willing to affirm. But the larger and more diverse the society, the smaller and more general the overlap. There are always broad swathes of often heated disagreement in pluralistic societies. And that’s what principles and institutions of liberal neutrality are for: to peacefully accommodate the inevitable lack of consensus about questions of value in open, cosmopolitan societies.
Would you say that a set of policies were “effective” if it peacefully and stably coordinated the behavior of millions of individuals in pursuit of their valued aims, and constantly increased their capacity to to realize them, despite the fact that there are as many conceptions of well-being as there are people? Would you consider such a set of policies “effective” even if we didn’t know how to measure human well-being scientifically?
(2) Policymakers have no incentive to accurately measure human well-being – even if it was accurately measurable — or to appoint, or take counsel from, those who do.
Lucky for them, Branchflower and Oswald begin their paper with a monumental falsehood. Their introductory proposition implies, among other things, that effective social and economic policy never has been designed! Their general idea, I take it, is that in order to design something effective, you have to be able to measure “effectiveness.” This may well be, but it
But this is also false. There are many things that work well without most of us knowing how or why — without know the meaning of “well.” And there are ways of “designing” through trial and error that delivers results without delivering knowledge of the mechanisms.
I think my considerations (1) and (2) imply that not only does effective policy not require that policymakers are able to definitively measure well-being, but that effective policy is much more likely if we fully grasp the indisputable empirical facts that conceptions of well-being (and of “effective”) are plural (and this is so whether or not I am right on the philosophical point that the constitution of well-being for each individual requires trade-offs between different dimensions of well-being) and that policymakers are neither scientists nor reliable consumers of science.
Maybe it is disappointing to social scientists — frustrating even! – to face up to the fact that no interest or competence in social science whatsoever is required for a hugely successful career as a policymaker, which is to say, as a politician or bureaucrat. This is even the case in places where social science flourishes most! Disappointing as that fact may be, social scientists may want to take it into account when thinking about the design of effective policy.
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Nice, Will. I appreciate the parenthetical “relativism” paragraph, but you get more to the point when you simply say later on that these things are “plural”. Pluralism (about values, like happiness) is not relativism.
Will -
thanks for the post. (1) says happiness cannot be measured. but i think you mean that it can’t be measured in such a way as to provide the basis for social policy. otherwise: one could grant both that happiness is relative and involves trade-offs and still hold that happiness is measurable, if one thinks that well-being is subjectively measurable. if, that is, each individual can resolve the two problems and judge her own happiness. and indeed many people (both ordinary folks and researchers) do appear to hold that an individual can make a judgment about her own happiness, particularly across time - each person determines for herself what her goods are (relativity) and how to balance them (trade-offs), and off we go, pursuing happiness. in short: hence the “subjective” in “subjective well-being”.
one might think that this is a trivial point, merely a clarification. but assume the question indeed is: “Are measures of SWB sufficient for social policy?”. you say “no” because when a policy is applied it will affect people broadly and not individually, with the result that some people will be worse off under the policy, due to their different preferences and trade-offs. but i doubt any policy-maker would deny that some people will be worse off; the policy-makers aim is to make the citizenry better off, and, they claim, in order to judge whether the citizenry is better off, we can ask each of them.
perhaps, however, you can come back and re-apply your points to the aggregation: how will we aggregate the results, if people have different preferences?! why should the increase in happiness to sam and pat outweigh the decrease in happiness to chris?!
but since happiness is measured subjectively, chris’s happiness includes, if she wants, the dis-value of “living under the new policy” in addition to the policy’s effect on her. (e.g. if the policy is increased taxation, her happiness is lowered, perhaps, both by the loss of income and by being interfered with (further!) by the state). moreover, chris can weight this however she likes - does it mean a .1 drop in happiness, or a .5 drop? it’s up to her.
isn’t this enough for policy-makers to go on?
peace,
cathal
Unhappy about happiness research…
The always readable Cato Institute gadfly Will Wilkinson has not one, but two, long posts about the supposed evils of trying to measure happiness. I only provide brief excerpts - so read the whol thing. In the first, Effective Policy and the Measuremen…
you are a great writer, man - you write very well.
However, I strongly disagree will your position for a number of reasons: First, we humans are engineered, I believe, to migrate to happiness causing behaviors and attitudes, if we have the opportunity and knowledge to do so. Our culture restricts both our opportunities and knowledge of “right” behaviors that WILL cause happiness.
The components of a fully actualized (maslow) human being functioning at peak can be measured, I believe, like reasonable physical fitness (there is a new medical diagnosis, “muscle bound”!), meaningful life purpose (subjective, or is it?), balanced use of mental capacities, like art, music, mathematics, etc. and altruistic activity, to name a few. Many of these components of happiness can be measured by simply knowing the quantity of time spent in these particular areas of being a human being. Obviously, stress can be measured by total hours spent making a living, length of commute, etc.
These measureable components contributing to the over all Happiness of an individual can and ought be measured and could add much to our overall societal Happiness and well being.
Secondarily, developing public policy without some measure for Happiness (other than our absurd, GDP (See www.rprogress.org for a more rational measure of how well we are doing) is like designing a highway system for vehicles that have no specifications of turning radius, speeds, stopping capabilities, weight, or whatever. It would be ridiculous to even attempt to do it without measures of the “needs” of the highways’ vehicles populations so “they” can use the highway.
Also, like our culture now, these Highways would be super under designed to accomodate the worst, not the best, and thus tend to create “vehicles” that conform to lowest functioning, rather that highest functioning congruent to actual real innate capabilities. It seems to me we have designed our culture for old, beat up used Ford’s rather than the Maseratti’s that we all ARE.
Jean
Man, you have a lot of great information on this site. You ought be proud. thank you. Jean
However, rereading your comments, you mentioned a person that is addicted to eating to the point of killing himself and also mentioned another taking significantly dangerous chances with his life in pursuit of his (own) happiness.
I would suggest to you three things:
One, these people are hurting us by their dangerous behaviors and are clearly ADDICTs out of control. They hurt us because WE must care for them when they consciously break themselves. They therefore, using my moral code are insane and ought be locked up and retrained for their, as well as my and your, well being.
Secondarily, our culture, for some bizzare reason allows others to hurt themselves regardless of the consequences of their behaviors just so they do it slowly: eating one’s self to death, drinking too much, whatever. Does this make any sense to the rest of us that have to catch them when they fall? There is a rational Happiness maximizing line here some place. I’m not sure, yet, where it is.
Thirdly, most accept the fact that we human’s live to 75 years or so and behave in ways that generally support this length of life. I wonder what our life span would be if both WE and OUR CULTURE supported our fully functioning human capabilities (Scientific American article about 70% of normal diet increasing longevity of animals by 30 to 40 percent, with increased vitality and health). If one normally lived to say 300 years old would a youngster of 40 risk stupid behaviors and lose out on her next 260 years? Would we, a loving, moral society allow another to kill themselves? I don’t know. What do you think? jean