Happiness & Public Policy

Harvard’s Ed Glaeser essay in this month’s Cato Unbound is fresh this morning. He says lots of interesting things, but I thought I’d pick out this bit, which concerns my pet issues:

A belief in the value of liberty flows strongly through mainstream neoclassical economics. Economists frequently speak about an aim of maximizing utility levels, and this is often mistranslated as maximizing happiness. Maximizing freedom would be a better translation. The only way that economists know that utility has increased is if a person has more options to choose from, and that sounds like freedom to me. It is this attachment to liberty that makes neoclassical economists fond of political liberty and making people richer, because more wealth means more choices.

There is a recent wave of scholarship suggesting that the government can help individuals be happy by reducing their choices. While happiness may be a very nice thing, it is neither the obvious central desiderata for private or public decision-making. On a private level, I make decisions all that time that I expect to lower my level of happiness, because I have other objectives. On a public level, I can’t imagine why we would want to privilege this emotion over all other goals. A much better objective for the state is to aim at giving people the biggest range of choices possible, and then let people decide what is best for them.

Excellent. I sometimes call Glaeser’s argument, and arguments like it, ”the economist’s folk theorem for the morality of growth.” You end up with things like the “Easterlin Paradox,” if you get confused about the meaning of “utility” and think bigger choice sets are supposed to entail greater happiness. But Glaeser isn’t the least bit confused. I find his version of the economist’s folk theorem enormously compelling.

The solipsism of childlessness may be deplorable, but it’s not unhappy:

Although they won’t receive flowers or candy on Mother’s Day, women who have not had children seem to be just as happy in their 50s as those who did go down the family path.

In fact the loneliest, least contented and most vulnerable women were found to be mothers who were single, divorced or widowed in middle age, according to new research. Being healthy and having a partner gave a bigger boost to women’s happiness and well-being than being mothers, with education, work and relationships with family and friends also important factors.

“Among this group of women in their 50s the childless women are very similar to the moms in terms of their psychological well-being,” said Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Florida and the lead author of the study.

Over at National Review Online, I examine how French economic policy is giving French folk short shrift happiness-wise in light of the upcoming election.