Happiness & Public Policy

I’m Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. Cato will be releasing my paper “In Pursuit of the Policy Implications of Happiness Research” in April, and I am working on a book on the idea of a scientific politics of happiness, with a special emphasis on the policy implications of happiness research for the U.S. This blog is a place for me to think aloud, gather research resources, and have have useful conversations with my smart readers.

What is my perspective on happiness research and public policy? Since my considered overall opinion isn’t always obvious from individual blog posts, here’s an attempt to state my view as clearly and succinctly as possible.

I am constructively critical of happiness research. I think happiness is a worthwhile scientific subject, and should be studied using the best methods of inquiry. However, what passes today for happiness research is disappointingly rudimentary and only somewhat illuminating. I believe it is quite likely that whatever happiness researchers are measuring, it is not what we ordinarily think of happiness.

There is a great deal of confusion about what happiness is. It is not: (1) a cognitive judgment about one’s satisfaction with one’s life (this is what happiness surveys measure); (2) a maximally pleasant stream of experience; (3) overall well-being, which includes many non-experiential components, like health (you can have cancer without feeling it), real opportunity, or the development of basic human capacities. I defend what I call a modular conception of well-being. In addition to health, development, and opportunity modules, well-being requires a “best way of feeling” module. But that module doesn’t have to be happiness as we now know it.

Throughout history, there have been many alternative specifications of the “best way of feeling” module, such as the subjective aspects of eudaimonia, apatheia, ataraxia, satori, nirvana, etc. For most of us, happiness constitutes that module of well-being. The phenomenon of happiness is, in my view, an ongoing emotional condition akin to depression, but positive. Neither depression nor happiness is a constant feeling, but a stable disposition to feel a certain way. A happy person doesn’t always feel good. At any given time she might have the flu, or be deeply disappointed by failing to get a job she wanted. But a happy person’s default state is a positive mood, she is easily prompted to positive emotions, and is not readily thrown into sadness or negativity.

The particular positive feelings that constitute the expression of happiness, as opposed to some other emotional condition, are a historically and culturally contingent package of basic emotions. That is to say, our shared expectations about what it feels like to be a happy person changes over time. That doesn’t mean happiness isn’t really real. If you’ve ever been happy or unhappy, you know it is as real as it gets. It’s just not a mandatory, universal part of the human psychological framework–though the capacity for happiness is. And once we understand what happiness is, we can study systematically and rigorously what habits, social norms, and political systems are conducive to happiness. This study is crucially important, since happiness for most of us is a necessary “module” in a life that is going objectively well.

I am harshly critical of a number of the philosophical assumptions underlying much happiness research, such as the idea that pleasure or happiness is the only value, and provides a single, authoritative, “scientific” standard for all policy.

I am a pluralist and a classical liberal. Pluralism in two different forms is important in my thinking: pluralism of values, and pluralism of value conceptions. I believe that there are multiple, often incompatible objective values. There is nothing scientific about attempting to maximize one value at the expense of others. That’s value pluralism. Furthermore, people have strikingly different conceptions of the best way to prioritize and balance the separate values. (Indeed, some of them may deny that value is plural.) In liberal societies, where a huge number of value conceptions are represented in the population, it is inappropriate for one faction of citizens to attempt to impose their conception on others through the organized coercion of the government. This is not simply an argument about the immorality of force as a principle of human interaction, but a practical argument about the conditions under which pluralistic societies can remain peaceful, stable networks of cooperation that benefit all citizens regardless of their value commitments.

Even if happiness research was up to snuff conceptually and scientifically, most attempts to apply it to policy are, in my view, strikingly unscientific. I believe that the science of society is largely the science of coordination or stable interdependent cooperative action. I call this the “old science” of happiness, because it is roughtly what our Enlightenment Founders such as Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Morris had in mind when they talked about politics as “the science of social happiness.” To keep it very short, my view is that thanks to the 20th Century liberal revival of the “old science,” it is now known that clear price signals (prices need not in money terms, but are often work best when they are) are the key to effective, broadly mutually beneficial, social coordination. Extending the tradition of Hume, Smith, and the Founders, thinkers such as Hayek, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Douglass North, and Vernon Smith, have masterfully laid out the institutions necessary for extended, stable cooperation in a pluralistic society. Happiness researchers are most often completely oblivious to the sciences of coordination, generally ignorant of the coordinating and equilibrating properties of price systems, and very often incorrectly assume the possibility of effective paternalistic policy through expert political management.

I believe our best evidence indicates that liberal market democracies are the happiest places on the planet, and perhaps the happiest places in history. Indeed, it is not unlikely that people in these countries aren’t very far from the upper limit of good feelings. The evidence indicates that there are very few policies that we could implement that would susbstantially improve how good citizens of wealthy liberal market democracies will feel, other than make them more liberal and thereby wealthier. This is one reason why I think the “old science” gets it right.