Happiness & Public Policy

The truly delicious bits of this new NBER working paper by Di Tella, Haisken-De New, and MacCulloch on adaptation to income and status is the stuff on political leanings:

We study “habituation” to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7,812 people living in Germany from 1984 to 2000. Specifically, we estimate a “happiness equation” defined over several lags of income and status and compare the long run effects. We can (cannot) reject the hypothesis of no adaptation to income (status) during the four years following an income (status) change. In the short-run (current year) a one standard deviation increase in status and 52% of one standard deviation in income are associated with similar increases in happiness. In the long-run (five year average) a one standard deviation increase in status has a similar effect to an increase of 285% of a standard deviation in income. We also present different estimates of habituation across sub-groups. For example, we find that those on the right (left) of the political spectrum adapt to status (income) but not to income (status).

That is (in case you’re confused), folks on the left get used to money, but not status and the reverse for folks on the right. This is funny, since I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on inequality, mostly by political philosophers on the left, and they are positively obsessed specifically with the status effects of material inequality. It’s pretty amusing if this is just a reflection of a particular personality type. More generally, the fact that the happiness-effects of various things seem to be mediated by ideological leanings seems to basically ruin the prospect of using happiness research as a neutral, scientific way of assessing policy. It may just end up sort-of-usefully reminding us that one group may like a certain policy and another group may not simply because it makes one group feel better and another group feel worse. It doesn’t settle the dispute: it explains why we’re having it. Also, ideological mediation is one more nail in the coffin for the introspective method of normative philosophy. If the effects of this or that on people’s sense of well-being is mediated by their ideological cast, then chances are, our intuitions about real and hypothetical cases are probably already deeply infected with our ideological notions–or with the personality traits that lead us to find those notions attractive–and arguments based on these intuitions simply beg all the interesting questions in a subtle way.

Only about 2.2 percent of women in China consider sex as the most valuable factor to make them happy, a recent survey has found. About 22.5 percent of the women surveyed prioritized love as the big happiness maker, because the word ’sex’ was still considered as a taboo.

[…]

Citing a reason for a low percentage of women linking their happiness to sex, a leading sexologist in the country said that traditionally the word ’sex’ carried negative meanings. “The word was stereotyped with negative meanings. A good woman should not like sex. Love is a beautiful word,” said Li Yinhe, a noted sexologist and professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.”But, power, money and sex all represent the negative things. It (power) shows big progress. More and more women want to achieve their life value, which eclipses the importance of the private life for women. When women start to value self fulfillment, they become more equal to men,” the China Daily quoted her as saying. [emphasis added]

People who tell you there isn’t significant cultural variation in the way people answer survey questions are dreaming.

Whole thing here.

From the IHT:

Darrin McMahon still cannot define happiness after spending six years researching and writing a book about it.

While that has been a frustration, the Florida State University history professor said it is also what gives happiness its power and allure.

[…]

“The concept of luck is embedded in the very word happiness — luck or fortune,” McMahon said. “That’s true in every Indo-European language. It’s a really striking thing, all the way back to the ancient Greek and moving forward.”

Happiness is linked to such words as happen and happenstance. Greek tragedies were filled with the idea that happiness was a matter of fate.

“The Gods are spiteful and capricious,” McMahon said. “Just when you think everything’s going well, they pull the rug out from you and send a thunderbolt down.”

That began to change with Socrates, but the concept of humans having some control over their own happiness did not flower until the 18th century.

“If you ask somebody today what happiness is, they’ll inevitably tell you that it involves feeling good,” McMahon said.

But it meant something more to the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle held that happiness was based on a lifetime of experience. You could not really tell if you were happy until you were dead. Many felt virtue was the key to happiness even though it took suffering to achieve. Cicero once said a virtuous man could be happy even while being tortured.

Christianity maintained the link between virtue and happiness. During the Enlightenment, though, thinkers began to focus more on pleasure and the ability of people to pursue, if not always attain, happiness.

While pleasure today has become virtually synonymous with happiness, McMahon believes the older concept of a life well lived has not been entirely lost.

“You push most people and they will admit that, well, it’s not enough to be happy simply to be pleasured as it were,” he said. “You need other things, and they’ll talk about family and they’ll talk about love and they’ll talk about meaning and so forth.”

McMahon will be writing the lead essay in next month’s edition of Cato Unbound, and I’ll be commentator. Should be fun!

I was delighted to see two of my intellectual fixations—the taste for status and the taste for purity—bundled together in the New York Times.

The urge to achieve social distinction is evident worldwide, even among people for whom prominence is neither accessible nor desirable. In rural Hindu villages in India, for instance, widows are expected to be perpetual mourners, austere in their habits, appetites and dress; even so, they often jockey for position, said Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist in the department of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.

“Many compete for who is most pure,” Dr. Shweder said. “They say, ‘I don’t eat fish, I don’t eat eggs, I don’t even walk into someone’s house who has eaten meat.’ It’s a natural kind of social comparison.”

Awesome. I have a longish essay forthcoming in the Center for Independent Studies’ Policy magazine about the politics of relative position and status competition. One of my main points is that there is an indefinite number of culturally mediated dimensions of status competition, and competition on some dimensions is beneficial or benign, making it impossible to draw determinate policy implications out of the simple fact that we’re motivated by status. Competition for purity among mourning windows strikes me as benign.

And I recently wrote a piece for Reason laying out why Democrats should stop listening to George Lakoff and start listening to Jonathan Haidt, who has done fascinating work on the psychology of purity and disgust, based in part on the work of Shweder.

I think status competition on moral dimensions can be a good thing, as long as the relavant moral emotions and principles are good. But I think it can also be distorting. I’d guess that some Islamist terrorism is motivated by status competition on Haidt’s ingroup and purity dimensions of moral emotion. But this also accounts in part for very successful church charity drives. The way innate dispositions are mediated by culture is almost the whole ballgame.

A number of works I’ve seen on the importance of social comparison extrapolate in a fairly simple way from the existence of non-human dominance hierarchies to human status. (Frank, for instance, motivates his view of status by citing the general logic of competition for mates.)  Many go further and identify human status largely with position in the income distribution. Both moves are mistaken.

It’s fair enough to point out that humans are primates, and so we should see some continuity. But humans also have language, higher cognitive abilities, and complex, cumulative cultural transmission and evolution. Humans, like other primates, eat. But human eating takes place in a rich cultural context, and the expression of human eating behavior is thickly culturally mediated. Like chimps, we like meat. Unlike chimps, we worry about eating it with the "correct" hand, or utensil, etc. Some of us won’t eat certain foods because of culturally transmitted dietary taboos. One should expect that human social comparison and positional competition, even if it is universal, will also be thickly mediated by culture, and will be expressed in different ways in different cultures.

Furthermore, human status need not be a homologous to dominance. Here is anthropologist Joe Henrich in his paper with Franscisco Gil-White, "The Evolution of Prestige: freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission." (Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 1-32):

Although nonhuman status is still poorly understood, a single process appears at least strongly predominant: agonism (aggression, intimidation, violence, etc. — that is, force or force threat). The resulting social assymetries are referred to as "dominance hierarchies" in the ethological and behavioral ecology literatures. The privileges that accrue to dominant individuals are (1) in males, preferential reproductive access to females, food, and spaces, as well as disproportionate amount of grooming from others; (2) in females, preferential access to food and spaces, and disproportionate grooming. Despite some controversy, the evidence suggests that dominance correlates with fitness. (Cowlishaw & Dunbar, 1991; Ellis, 1995). The stability of dominance is often reinforced through "reminders": submissive behaviors (e.g., grooming, submissive displays, yielding space, etc.) from subordinate to superior, whether or not induced through intimidation by the latter.

In humans, in contrast, status and its perquisites often come from nonagonistic sources—in particular, from excellence in valued domains of activity, even without any credible claim to superior force. For example, paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking—widely regarded as Einstein’s heir, and current occupant of Newton’s chair at Cambridge University—certainly enjoys high status throughout the world. Those who, like Hawking, achieve status by excelling in valued domains are often said to have "prestige."

Henrich’s argument is that prestige is a feature of the human cultural capacity, which is adaptive because it saves the cost of having to learn everything yourself. I’m going to just continue to quote as at length because this really makes sense to me:

Once some cultural transmission capacities exist, natural selection favors improved learning efficiencies, such as abilities to identify and preferentially copy models who are likely to possess better-than-average information. Moreover, selection will favor behaviors in the learner that lead to better learning environments, e.g., gaining greater frequency and intimacy of interaction with the model, plus his/her cooperation. Copiers thus evolve to provide all sorts of benefits (i.e., "deference") to targeted models in order to induce preferred models to grant greater access and cooperation. Such preferred models may be said to have prestige with respect to their "clients" (copiers).

The above implies that the most skilled/knowledgeable models will, on-average, end up with the biggest and most lavish clienteles, so the size and lavishness of a given model’s clientele (the prestige) provides a convenient and reliable proxy for that person’s information quality. Thus, selection favors clients who initially pick their models on the basis of the current deference distribution, refining their assessments of relative model worth as information becomes available through both social and individual learning. This strategy confers a potentially dramatic adaptive savings in the start-up costs of rank-biased social learning. Finally, because high-quality information ("expertise," "performative skills," "wisdom," "knowledge") brings fitness-enhancing deferential clients, models have an extra incentive to outexcel each other. 

Because status-as-prestige isn’t agonistic, there are clearly market-like gains from positional competition in a domain. There may be a fixed number of clients, and so competition for clientele may be zero-sum. But clients adopt models and defer to them because that makes them better off, not because of a threat. And insofar as reputation tends to tracks information quality, deference will be deserved.  

(The adaptive advantages of cultural transmission necessarily include  the danger of the success of maladaptive ideas. Boyd and Richerson explain why this must be the case in detail in Not By Gene’s Alone. On Tuesday, I heard a good talk by Bob Subrick on how witch doctors in Botswana have successfully undermined WHO education efforts to contain HIV/AIDS by promoting widely believed false folk theories about the cause and transmission of the disease. This clearly involves a maladaptive allocation of prestige.)

So, the fact that we have a cultural capacity at all makes space for non-agonistic comparative advantage-based prestige/status. It would seem to me to follow that market systems, by promoting the refinement of the division of labor, promotes the multiplication of dimensions of excellence and therefore prestige. It is possible in market systems to gain the benefits of prestige and clientele from becoming a highly desired graphic designer, marketing consultant, or musician. 

Additionally, the fact that we have a cultural capacity is going to imply that, unlike other primates, status competition is going to be highly mediated by culture. It is possible to gain status among Mormons by being a good Mormon. There may be heated competition, even bitterness, over who is the best Mormon in the ward ("She’s not really that good a mother!" "I paid my tithing plus five percent!" ), but such positional competition may serve on the whole to reinforce generally socially constructive norms. Indeed, it seems likely that one of the ways we judge the quality of a culture is by the way it mediates and channels potentially harmful universal human dispositions, such as status-seeking and tribalism. Mormon culture mediates status-seeking in generally beneficial ways. Redneck and ghetto culture doesn’t.

The degree to which our place in the distribution of income/wealth is going to correlate with our status depends on culture. Some cultures and sub-cultures are more materialistic than others. Some are pointedly anti-materialistic. It’s worth pointing out that comparative excellence style prestige is pretty clearly going to correlate with greater earnings in general. The higher the prestige in a domain, the fiercer the bidding from clients for access. That doesn’t have to mean higher incomes, but on the whole it will. In this kind of case, higher relative position in the income/wealth distribution will be tracking, more or less loosely, excellence/prestige on some other dimension. Our high relative position on that dimension may make us both happy and high on the income/wealth distribution. But that doesn’t imply we care much at all about the income/wealth distribution. (The world’s best guitarist may have a lot of guitars, but he’s getting more out of his status as the best guitarist, not as a guy who has a hell of a lot guitars.)

What is going to count as a positional externality is going to depend on what kind of position people care about. That’s a matter of the kind of culture they’re embedded in. It strikes me that policy types ought to take a step back and be willing to think about whether cultures and sub-cultures are in general peaceful, healthy, stable, and mutually beneficial. My colleague Jude Blanchette today gave me Alesina and Fuchs-Schundeln’s paper on the effects of communism on people’s preferences. They find that the longer people spent in communism, the more they prefer a heavily intervening state. What are we to make of that? Give them what they want because that’s what they prefer? Or ask whether a system that leads people to want that is a good one to have? Similarly with cultures and subcultures. If a culture mediates status-seeking in such a way that certain acts of aspiration, success, and upward mobility might plausibly be understood as a kind of negative externality, should we plunge in and attempt to "rectify" the externality and push for efficiency relative to those culturally laden preferences? Or should we stop and ask if there is anything we can do to ensure that a culture that engenders these preferences does not long survive? 

It appears that happiness is a topic unfit for fact-checkers. You can apparently say whatever you like! For instance, Bae Myung-bok, the international affairs editor of Korea’s JoongAng Daily (which is apparently distributed by the IHT/NYT), writes:

Whenever I live or travel abroad, there is something I feel anew: That material possessions are not in proportion to happiness. When it comes to gross domestic product, Americans should be tens of times happier than the Vietnamese but this is not so, at least in my experience. On the contrary, Americans seem to lead harder lives and live in less comfort. Surveys also show that the happiness index of Bangladeshis is higher than that of people in advanced nations like the United States and European countries. Economic abundance is only one component of happiness.

It’s true: economic abundance is only one component of happiness; and material possessions are not proportionate to happiness. People who are ten times wealthier are not ten times happier. But, then again, no one has ever even suspected that that could be true.

Now, Vietnam. Kim Kahn, Ai Nu, Bich Lan, and Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese refugees who stayed in my family’s basement for a few months in Marshalltown, Iowa when I was a kid, would, I suspect, be quite surprised to discover that they had moved into a harder, less comfortable life. Say what you will about Marshalltown, Iowa, but “hard and uncomfortable” aren’t going to leap to mind. (You can live like a king in a large, well-appointed house with a big yard there on well less than the median American annual income. As an aside, this house—well-known in Marshalltown—really is a mansion, with 8 bedrooms 5.5 baths and about 9000 sq. ft. The same price—1/2 mil.—will get you maybe 2000 sq ft in a neighborhood just past the borderlands of gentrification in DC. Trade offs! Here is a more typical Marshalltown house, and price, in the neighborhood I grew up in. Mortgage much less then my half of the rent in a cheap house in DC. But boy do I digress.)

The last I heard of them (we’ve lost touch) they were doing quite well by Iowan and American standards, which means they were doing very well indeed. I recall asking them when I was a kid whether they wanted to go back to Viet Nam. They said they missed the rest of their family, but would rather bring them to the U.S. than move back. (I’m pretty sure they did succeed in bringing a number of family over.) So there’s a data point for you.

Now, Bangladesh . . . These surveys are available to anyone with an internet connection. For instance, here is some world values survey data. Here is the subjective well-being rankings of 82 societies. [doc] I’m not sure exactly how the scale works on this one, but the high score is 4.62 (that’s Puerto Rico! — Rico in happiness! The italics on the list denote the “Latin bonus.”). The low score is -2.40 (that’s Indonesia). The U.S. scores 3.47, comfortably in the “High” category. And Bangladesh? 0.54, on the low end of the “Medium-Low” category.

Clearly, the U.S. could bring up its happiness score a bit by finally making Puerto Rico a state. And look at Mexico! Here’s my public policy idea for maximizing average SWB in the U.S.: build a wide, wide bridge over the Rio Grande! Make it 12-lanes, one-way. So, clearly, the money isn’t everything. But Bangladesh, Mr. Myung-bok, doesn’t even come close. Consider yourself fact-checked.

Now, Myung-bok also discusses Friedman’s Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, and seems sympathetic to its point, which I’m glad to see. But he seems confused about the application. After observing that Vietnam’s high rate of growth seems to have done them good, he says:

But a high growth rate like that in Vietnam cannot be expected of a country like France that has already entered a stage of maturity. If this is the case, where should people in advanced countries look for happiness? I think they should find it in establishing fair game rules by removing social discrimination and expanding transparency.

Friedman’s thesis just is that goals like removing discrimination and expanding transparency are more socially and politically feasible when growth rates are healthy and steady. True, France is an already developed economy, and isn’t likely to see 7% annual growth rates. However, the French are in the bottom quarter of OECD countries growth-wise, and could certainly improve by following the lead of Ireland, cutting taxes, freeing up labor markets, repealing onerous regulations, etc. And, if Friedman is right, that’s what they need to do in order to ease the social unrest they’re experiencing.

Myung-bok writes, in conclusion:

If everyone in a society could accept that he or she did not lose in competition because of a difference in skin color, religion, race, gender, region or school, wouldn’t the sense of happiness in that society increase even if its economic growth were slow?

And the response is that this kind of acceptance is least likely when growth is slow, and it therefore seems to many that they are competing just to keep their portion of a shrinking pie. Tolerance for mobility from below—and for difference and equality—is greatest when people have a sense that things are getting better all the time and that there’s more than enough to go around.

Here’s a nice article reviewing some of the highlights of happiness research from Katie Santich at the Orlando Sentinel. She dwells a bit on the “hispanic bonus” (latin americans, especially, are unaccountably happy) given the Orlando demographic, but it’s a nice overview. The best thing about it is an introduction to an interesting new (to me) thinker, Julie Norem, a psychologist at Wellesley who studies the upside of negativity.

And although years of study in cognitive therapy have shown there are ways people can increase resiliency, optimism and an emphasis on their strengths, not everyone needs it, Norem said, to accomplish greatness.

She cites the recently published “Lincoln’s Melancholy,” in which author Joshua Wolf Shenk convincingly argues that Abraham Lincoln struggled with major depression. It was perhaps, Shenk theorizes, Lincoln’s grim but accurate view of reality that moved him to want to change things for the better.

“One of the problems of putting happiness at the forefront,” Norem said, “is that, if you’re really focused on that, you can gloss over a lot of things that may not make you happy but are awfully important to understand or just learn about.”

Precisely.

From Reuters:

Happiness rose along with per capita income until earners reached the highest bracket, at which point it dipped somewhat.

“It seems when people are satisfied with their income, other factors then matter more,” Tsutsui told Reuters.

I found this bit sort of funny:

Men tended to be a bit less happy than women, perhaps because Japan’s male-dominated society means they have bigger social responsibilities, Tsutsui said in a report on the survey.

And if women would have been a bit less happy? No doubt it would have been Japan’s male-dominated society.

Is there a problem in comparing one person’s utility to another’s?

Well, it depends on what you mean by utility, of course. If, as on the formal theory, utility is just a way of representating an ordinal ordering of preferences, and preferences are propositional attitudes only contingently related to qualitiative states of consciousness, then there’s a problem, sort of, in the sense that quantitative comparison doesn’t make any sense. It’s just ruled out by definition. (How it is that you do welfare economics anyway has been one of the main preoccupations of the modern economics profession.)

Now, if utility is a certain kind of feeling of pleasure, then interpersonal utility comparisons are no more problematic than intrapersonal utility comparisons. I feel better now that I did when I woke up. It’s a fact! And I can feel better than someone else does, obviously. If Bob is enjoying a massage, and Al is taking his CPA exam, then Bob is likely racking up more utility, in the substantive psychological sense of utility.

The tricky question has to do with the value of utility, in this sense of utility. If you’re a Benthamite, then utility just is value. But unless one’s moral sense has been corrupted, it is easy to see that Benthamism is false. The value of lots and lots things obviously swings quite free of utility-as-pleasure. So if we ask, “Whose mental state realizes more value, Bob’s or Al’s?,” it is not easy to say. It may not be possible to say. The fact that Bob is experiencing more utility is informative only if we know how valuable utility is. Perhaps Al, while he finds the CPA exam arduous and boring, also finds that he is well-prepared, and the test, although not at all pleasurable, is the occasion for the experience of competence and self-efficacy. Arguably, the experience of competence and self-efficacy is more valuable than the warm, transient pleasure of a good massage.

(Some of you will be tempted to confuse the fact Al is feeling something that is good [self-efficacy] with the idea that he feels good. Don’t do that. Imagine a different example where the performance of competence is physically and mentally excruciating. Maybe a great warrior in a struggle to the death with a fierce opponent. Titus Pullo in the arena against the gladiators in the latest episode of Rome, say. Gravely wounded, and at the brink of exhaustion, Pullo simply doesn’t “feel good,” if you’re speaking English [or Latin]. Nevertheless, there may be value in his experience of competence as a fighter.)

Of course, we should avoid talk of the plain old valuable and ask, “valuable to whom, for what?” Different people have different life plans, and different life plans have different requirements. As Aristotle noted, food is good for everyone, but how much food is good depends on what you’re up to. Milo the wrestler needs more food than the rest of us, owing to his vocation. Likewise, the value of utility-as-pleasure depends on our projects and goals.

For example, take this bit of a USA Today story about performance artist Criss Angel:

In the premiere, he lit himself on fire. This week, Angel flies suspended from a helicopter, hanging with four 8-gauge fish hooks stuck into his back. “You have to put them in the flesh just right. Too shallow and they will rip right out, too deep can be permanent muscle damage. It was excruciatingly painful, yet one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done.”

And I take it that Angel sees some of the beauty of it–some of the value of it–in the fact that it was excruciatingly painful. Same with David Blaine starving himself, or freezing himself in a block of ice. The pain is essential to the art. It could even be that Criss Angel dies with more dolors than hedons in the bank, due to the exquisite pain involved in his macabre calling, yet passes into the afterlife considering his life a brilliant, beautiful success.

So how does the value of Criss Angel’s excruciating pain compare with the value of somebody else’s pain? That’s the question that doesn’t make any sense. A lifeplan-relative theory of value makes the interpersonal comparison of the value of utility-as-pleasure impossible, since pleasure and pain doesn’t play the same role in everyone’s life plan, even if it is possible to compare who is having more or less pleasure or pain. We have not found the science, and we won’t.

Asians reliably report lower “happiness” on surveys than do Westerners, even after controlling for wealth and institutions. Are their lives worse? Is there something the matter with them? No. The value they place on whatever it is that happiness surveys track may just be different. The may be doing just as well relative to their lifeplans as we are, and maybe even better.

So long as we possess our own why regarding life, we can put up with almost any how.—Human beings do not seek happiness—only the Englishman does.

– Friedrich Nietzsche