Happiness & Public Policy

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!

From the Feb. 12 New Yorker’s wonderful profile [pdf] of Paul and Patricia Churchland by Larissa MacFarquhar [pdf].

One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven my car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’”

I’ve actually come to think and talk a bit like this, though not to this degree. I believe it is true, as MacFarquhar writes of Paul Churchland:

The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile’s complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine.

As anyone who has had the misfortune of being my girlfriend/primary oxytocin source knows, I have an annoying habit of microanalyzing my physical/subjective states. I only wish I had access to some kind of biofeedback machine so I could better calibrate my physicalist vocabulary. There are detectable qualitative distinctions between different kinds of positive and negative states, and there really is no reason why we should be so dumbfounded, inarticulate, or (usually our best) cleverly metaphorical when it comes to describing the character of our inner lives. Further, I think that once one gets a subjective grasp of the difference between the effects of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline, glucocorticoids, prolactin, testosterone, etc., monistic conceptions of pleasure and happiness become almost self-evidently false, and a kind of pluralism comes to seem almost inevitable as the trade-offs between different kinds of physical/qualitative states become apparent. 

What are happiness and well-being? No need to make it complicated. Dan Haybron is correct:

The short answer, according to me

Happiness is best understood as consisting in a person’s overall emotional condition. This includes moods, many emotions, and a person’s mood propensity, or tendency to experience various moods (which varies considerably over time). To be happy is roughly for one’s emotional condition to be solidly positive, with a heavy predominance of positive over negative affect.

Well-being consists in nature-fulfillment, making my view eudaimonistic. The account will likely take this form: well-being consists mainly in the fulfillment of the self’s emotional and rational aspects—i.e., in being authentically happy, and in success regarding the commitments that shape one’s identity. But our subpersonal natures probably also count, so we might add, secondarily, the fulfillment of our “nutritive” and “animal” natures: health or vitality and pleasure.

Almost correct. So, I take it back. Plenty of need to make it complicated. Starting about ten minutes ago, I no longer understand what “nature-fulfillment” is. I have no idea what my self’s “emotional and rational aspects” are. I have emotional capacities and cognitive capacities of various sorts—powers Hobbes might say. But I can’t exercise all of them. I am budget-constrained in the exercise of my capacities. Which ones to exercise, then? Which one’s to develop, perfect? Which to ignore, let wither? (How do I even individuate them—know where one ends and another begins?) If I’m supposed to exercise just the ones that add up to “well-being,” then we’ve circularly defined well-being, and haven’t said anything about it.

Further, I claim, our basic, culturally untutored cognitive capacities don’t add up to some kind of natural “rationality” in either an Aristotelian or Kantian (or whatever) sense. Rationality is an art. So our normative conception of rationality (and probably our conception of various forms of emotion) just is a kind identity-shaping commitment that doesn’t exist prior to or independent of set of social conventions and a personal commitment to hew to them. If I shape my identity by commitment to the exercise of certain emotional or rational capacities, then it may be necessary to sacrifice the exercise of some other emotional capacities—for example, the ones that reinforce a “solidly positive emotional condition,” or happiness. Can happiness be anathema to some people’s well-being?

Back to this nature-fulfillment business. Many folks seem to believe in “callings,” or nature-fulfilling activities. Maybe your calling is to make beautiful music on the piano. But it’s not like there are pianos in the wild, sprouting from the ground under the baobab trees. In a possible world without pianos, where would you be? Is the piano just a specification of a general to-be-fulfilled nature, a general naturally defined set of begging-to-be-realized potentials just hanging around in some kind of waiting room of the “self” (or subpersonal animal)? It seems doubtful. It seems more likely that the piano is an opportunity for a previously undreamt identity-shaping—capacity-shaping—commitment. There is no kind of personal nature that mastering the piano fulfills without pianos.

It is tempting for me to see this conclusion as a fat shiny nail craving the tender attentions of my hammer and to argue (Bang!) here is an argument for the proliferating plenitude and specialization of market society. The more piano-like opportunities to uniquely shape a custom soul, the better. But, the thought is, there may be no relevant fixed “nature,” and so there may be little normative  oomph in the possibility of committing to and fulfilling a particular constructed nature, unless there is something especially fitting about that nature relative to the infinite alternatives. But in that case we still need something fixed, like natures, just more individualized and specific.

Maybe we do have them, not because we come with them built in, but because they get built in through the interaction of our natural material–basic capacities, powers, etc.—with the culture we find ourselves embedded in. The more various and abundant the culture, the more fine-grained our micro-natures. So well-being as nature-fulfillment in market societies requires the maintenance of markets that churn out a dizzying variety of undreamt identity-shaping ”pianos” that we can commit to in order to realize our seemingly factory-installed but hyper-individualized “potentials.”

So, Bang!, anyway.

Toot toot! Hop on the Herbert Spencer cluetrain!

Assuming it to be in other respects satisfactory, a rule, principle, or axiom, is valuable only in so far as the words in which it is expressed have a definite meaning. The terms used must be universally accepted in the same sense, otherwise the proposition will be liable to such various constructions, as to lose all claim to the title—a rule. We must therefore take it for granted that when he announced “the greatest happiness to the greatest number” as the canon of social morality, its originator supposed mankind to be unanimous in their definition of “greatest happiness.”

This was a most unfortunate assumption, for no fact is more palpable than that the standard of happiness is infinitely variable. In all ages—amongst every people—by each class—do we find different notions of it entertained. …

Generalizing such facts, we see that the standard of “greatest happiness” possesses as little fixity as the other exponents of human nature. Between nations the differences of opinion are conspicuous enough. On contrasting the Hebrew patriarchs with their existing descendants, we observe that even in the same race the beau ideal of existence changes. The members of each community disagree upon the question. Neither, if we compare the wishes of the gluttonous school-boy with those of the earth-scorning transcendentalist into whom he may afterwards grow, do we find any constancy in the individual. So we may say, not only that every epoch and every people has its peculiar conceptions of happiness, but that no two men have like conceptions; and further, that in each man the conception is not the same at any two periods of life.

The rationale of this is simple enough. Happiness signifies a gratified state of all the faculties. The gratification of a faculty is produced by its exercise. To be agreeable that exercise must be proportionate to the power of the faculty; if it is insufficient discontent arises, and its excess produces weariness. Hence, to have complete felicity is to have all the faculties exerted in the ratio of their several developments; and an ideal arrangement of circumstances calculated to secure this constitutes the standard of “greatest happiness;” but the minds of no two individuals contain the same combination of elements. Duplicate men are not to be found. There is in each a different balance of desires. Therefore the conditions adapted for the highest enjoyment of one, would not perfectly compass the same end for any other. And consequently the notion of happiness must vary with the disposition and character; that is, must vary indefinitely.

Whereby we are also led to the inevitable conclusion that a true conception of what human life should be, is possible only to the ideal man. We may make approximate estimates, but he only in whom the component feelings exist in their normal proportions is capable of a perfect aspiration. And as the world yet contains none such, it follows that a specific idea of “greatest happiness” is for the present unattainable. It is not then to be wondered at, if Paleys and Benthams make vain attempts at a definition. The question involves one of those mysteries which men are ever trying to penetrate and ever failing. It is the insoluble riddle which Care, Sphinx-like, puts to each new comer, and in default of answer devours him. And as yet there is no Œdipus, nor any sign of one.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is not for Spencer an anti-utilitarian argument. Spencer is an utilitarian. But, fascinatingly, Spencer is a pluralist about both the composition of happiness, and about conceptions of the composition of happiness. His own thick conception of happiness—that it is the gratification produced by the maximal exercise of the several faculties enabled by their degrees of development—accomodates variability across persons in the capacity of faculties and their development. In a separate argument, Spencer notes that there may be tradeoffs in the development in faculties (developing one more may require developing another less), and maintains that there is no adequate general principle for determining the relative value of the (evidently qualitatively different) gratification of different faculties. Spencer also notes that even were the nature of happiness unitary, epistemically transparent, and uncontested, individual variation would in any case pose an intractable knowledge problem for a benevolent utilitarian policy czar. The upshot of Spencer’s pluralism about happiness is the same as the upshot of pluralism about value in general. The best bet politically is a general, neutral framework of rights that enable harmonious social cooperation in pursuit of one’s good, however one conceives it. As far as I can tell from my amateur Spencer scholarship is that this argument is pivotal for Spencer’s general view about the congruence of rights and utility.

[The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number] is no rule at all … but rather an enunciation of the problem to be solved. It is your ‘greatest happiness’ of which we have been so long and so fruitlessly in search; albeit we never gave it a name. You tell us nothing new; you merely give words to our want. What you call an answer, is simply our own question turned the right side up. If this is your philosophy it is surely empty, for it merely echoes the interrogation.

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of them Developed, 1861.

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 just rediscovered this 2002 Slate Dialogue about happiness between Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman, moderated by Robert Wright. That’s a group I’d like to have dinner with! Nice bit from Pinker:

Certainly the difference between happiness on the one hand and a good and meaningful life on the other can’t be overemphasized. Last year when I lectured to my introductory psychology class about happiness I made this point using a set of thought experiments from the late philosopher Robert Nozick. If a genie offered you the possibility of living the rest of your life in a state of sublime happiness, but you had to be asleep the whole time and dreaming, never to taste reality again, would you take it? How much extra happiness would you agree to if you had to lose a unique talent, like athletic or musical giftedness, or if you had to give up 30 IQ points? To take an extreme case, would you agree to a lifelong increment in happiness on the condition that you would be transformed into a pig? Would you agree to become happier if it meant that one of your siblings had never been born or one of your children? All these examples, I said, show that happiness is not our only goal, perhaps not even our main goal, in life.

Exactly.

Louis Rayo and Gary S. Becker, “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness,” Working Paper, University of Chicago.

Abstract. We model happiness as a measurement tool used to rank alternative actions. The quality of the measurement is enhanced by a happiness function that adapts to the available opportunities, a property favored by evolution. The optimal function is based on a time-varying reference point —or performance benchmark— that is updated in a statistically optimal way. Habits and peer comparisons arise as special cases of this process. This also results in a volatile level of happiness that continuously reverts to its long-term mean. Throughout, we draw a parallel with a problem of optimal incentives, which allows us to apply statistical insights from agency theory to the study of happiness.

This looks pretty promising. I’ll comment when I’ve read the paper.

Julia Annas, “Happiness as Achievement,” Daedelus, Spring 2004

Philosophers (and some psychologists, too) will finnd it unsurprising that if you rush to look for empirical measures of an unanalyzed ‘subjective’ phenomenon, the result will be confusion and banality. After all, what is it that the social scientists on the World Database of Happiness are actually measuring? Here is the heart of the problem. Is happiness really something subjective? Is it simply a matter of pleasure, a positive feeling? We can at least hope that it is not, and that we can come to conclusions better than the claim that what anyone needs to be happy is food and possibly meaning.

Annas, one of the world’s experts on the classical conception of human well-being, simply brutalizes the scientific pretensions of the happiness survey approach. The disdainful asides are great. Take footnote 1.

For an amusing example, see , where “scientists” claim to have solved “one of the greatest mysteries plaguing mankind” by actually giving us a mathematical formula: P + (5 x E) + (3 x H) = happiness, where P = personal characteristics, E = existence, and H = higherorder needs. You compute your formula by answering four questions.

Or this:

I have seen a survey that asks people to measure the happiness of their lives by assigning it a facefrom a spectrum with a very smiley face at one end and a very frowny face at the other. Suppose that you have just won the Nobel Prize; this surely merits the smiliest face. But suppose also that you have just lost your family in a car crash; this surely warrants the frowniest face. So, how happy are you? There is no coherent answer–unless you are supposed to combine these points by picking the indifferent face in the middle!

Annas’s point is that happiness is a global condition that applies to an entire life–an achievement in living–not a transitory feeling, nor even a feeling about how things are going. It is a way that things are going. Our own happiness is something we can be wrong about, and so unlikely to be something captured by a self-report.

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.

Here is a discussion of the “evolutionary-cybernetic” interpretation, which centers on control.

Happiness can therefore be seen as an indication that a person is biologically fit (near to the optimal state) and cognitively in control (capable of counteracting eventual deviations from that optimal state), in other words that he or she can satisfy all basic needs, in spite of possible perturbations from the environment.

This strikes me as similar to Ayn Rand’s idea that happiness is an indicator of life-success. The difference is the evolutionary component. Inclusive fitness often requires the sacrifice of self-interest.

What does the Supreme Court think about happiness? I don’t know. But here is the entry on happiness in the Catholic encyclopedia.

I heard on the news this morning that Aetna is planning to cover depression treatments in some of their health plans. The New York Times reports:

Under the plan, Aetna will pay primary care doctors additional fees to screen patients for depression and to provide follow-up consultations for patients who are either put on antidepressants or, in more severe cases, referred to psychiatrists or psychologists. Aetna plans eventually to offer the program nationwide.

The additional costs of identifying and treating depression, Aetna said, can in many cases be more than offset in avoiding the larger financial costs associated with the disease - and the higher medical expenses that often arise when other chronic conditions, like diabetes and heart disease, are compounded by depression. Depressed patients with such diseases often stop taking their medications or fail to carry out recommended exercise and diets.

Researchers said that 33 million Americans require treatment for depression each year, and at least one in six people have the disease, with varying degrees of severity, at some point in their lives.

Now, it’s certainly awful to be sad, listless, and unmotivated. (I’ve been there. You too, probably.) And I think it can be a very good thing to take mood-enhancing drugs when you feel low. Depression certainly makes you feel uneasy, but is it really a disease?

The “paradox” of prosperity crowd makes hay out of rising rates of depression diagnosis. Lane, in The Loss of Happiness, for example, characterizes it as an “epidemic.” However, it is at least as likely as not that the “epidemic of depression” is an artifact of, among other things, (1) an egregiously lax and ill-defined diagnostic category, (2) shifting cultural norms about the range of normal function, (3) and diagnostic zealousness driven by the interests of the mental health profession (we’re like real doctors and we deserve to be paid like it!) and (4) pharmaceutical companies who want to sell huge quantitites of mood-enhancing drugs to people who inhabit a culture that doesn’t think it’s OK to take drugs unless you’re “sick.”

This grandly evasive passage from Lane captures the thinness of the evidence and the desperation to build mansions of conjecture upon it:

Rising depression of this magnitude is a tragedy for any civilization, but the epidemological study of these tragic phenomena is dependent on measurement instruments that are being perfected, and the longitudinal data are in their infancy.

That is to say, “We can’t really say with any certainty whether the incidence of depression is really rising or not, but my book will be much more exciting if I act like I know that civilization is in the throes of tragedy.”

As an antidote to depression hysterics, I strongly recommend “The Age of Depression,” by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield in the penultimate edition of the Public Interest.

After examining the epidemiological numbers, they write:

No plausible theory of depressive disorder, whether genetic, psychological, or social, can explain why rates of depression would have increased so much in such a short period of time. Instead, the explanation appears to lie in changes in the ways that physicians, mental-health professionals, and people themselves characterize and diagnose their mental states. There are, and always have been, true depressive disorders, in which the response to loss goes awry and takes on a debilitating life of its own. But in the past, such disorders were distinguished from normal sadness that arises in response to life’s vicissitudes. That traditional, common-sense distinction has broken down in contemporary psychiatry, resulting in the conflation of depressive disorders with normal sadness. The sources and social implications of this breakdown are as yet largely unappreciated. [emphasis added]

Horwitz and Wakfield provide a fascinating history of depression through the ages and an extremely illuminating account of how theory wars over the DSM categories led to an overly inclusive “theory neutral” clinical conception of depression.

The basic flaw, then, is that the DSM-IV fails to exclude from the disorder category sadness reactions to events other than death of a loved one that are intense enough to meet the DSM-IV’s criteria but are still normal reactions. The age of depressive disorder in which we find ourselves today is partly an artifact of a logical error.

The section on “The Constituencies for Depression” is also key to understanding the political and financial stakes surrounding medicalization of sadness. For example,

the DSM’s criteria are used in virtually all of the thousands of studies done in recent years on depression, and many researchers’ careers are built around these studies. Consequently, any major reconceptualization of diagnostic criteria would throw all that into doubt. Adequately distinguishing normal sadness from depressive disorder could also possibly narrow opportunities for research funding, especially if the NIMH followed suit by focusing its efforts on true disorder.

And perhaps more important:

Many private-practice clinicians will readily admit that a sizable proportion of their “depression” caseload consists of individuals who are psychiatrically normal but experiencing stressful life events. To obtain reimbursement for the treatment of such patients, the clinician must classify the individual within a DSM category of disorder, and depression is one of the more commonly used and easier ones to justify given the ubiquity of its symptoms. The result is a strange case of two “wrongs” seemingly making a “right”: The DSM provides flawed criteria that do not adequately distinguish disorder from nondisorder; the clinicians, knowingly or unknowingly, incorrectly classifies a normal individual as disordered (Why should the clinician question a diagnosis officially sanctioned by the DSM?); and the patient receives desired treatment for which the therapist is reimbursed.

The news about Aetna simply illustrates how much many people have to lose should depression be recategorized in order to become scientifically legitimate. In any case, the Horwitz and Wakefield paper is very important.

If we put the overdiagnosis of depression together with the framing effects of self-reporting discussed yesterday, we arrive at the possibility that we are happier than we think, possibly even happier than we have ever been.

Also recommended:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “mental illness” by Christian Perring.

Allan Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness

Jerome C. Wakefield,”The concept of mental disorder: On the boundary between biological facts and social value,” A merican Psychologist. 1992 Mar Vol 47(3) 373-388

Randolph M. Nesse, “Natural Selection and the Elusiveness of Hapiness“, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 2004, p. 1333-1347. [pdf]

ABSTRACT. The quest for happiness has expanded from a focus on relieving suffering to also considering how to promote happiness. However, both approaches have yet to be conducted in an evolutionary framework based on the situations that shaped the capacities for happiness and sadness. Because of this, the emphasis has almost all been on the disadvantages of negative states and the benefits of positive states, to the nearly total neglect of ‘diagonal psychology’, which also considers the dangers of unwarranted positive states and the benefits of negative emotions in certain situations. The situations that arise in goal pursuit contain adaptive challenges that have shaped domain-general positive and negative emotions that were partially differentiated by natural selection to cope with the more specific situations that arise in the pursuit of different kinds of goals. In cultures where large social groups give rise to specialized and competitive social roles, depression may be common because regulation systems are pushed far beyond the bounds for which they were designed. Research on the evolutionary origins of the capacities for positive and negative emotions is urgently needed to provide a foundation for sensible decisions about the use of new mood-manipulating technologies.

This is the best paper I know of on happiness and evolution. I found Nesse more subtle and insightful than Buss in “The Evolution of Happiness” [pdf]. Both, I think, lay too much stress on environmental mismatch, and neither are sufficiently careful about what “happiness,” as opposed to positive affect and goal-conducive motivational states, really is. My mitigated connectionist/Hayekian tendencies lead me to worry less about mismatch, and lead me to worry more about the possibility that happiness, as we think of it in the west, is a culturally learned blend of basic affective states packaged together with certain objective life conditions (i.e., not a natural psychological kind.) But I think Nesse provides a very promising account of what positive emotions are for, in terms of adaptive function.

I found Nesse’s discussion of the “maladaptivity” of manic behavior especially interesting. Which leads Nesse to observe:

One of the main questions facing happiness research is whether most people would be better off if they experienced more positive affect, and if that proves to be the case, how it can be accounted for given that mood regulation mechanisms were shaped by natural selection. Much happiness research starts with the folk psychology notion that happiness is good for you and proceeds to demonstrate correlations between positive affect and a variety of other indicators of well-being including friendships, achievement, health and longevity.

Nesse goes on to point out that a few (of the far too few) longitudinal studies have shown that more positive affect is generally associated with other positive changes for individuals. But this poses a puzzle:

If positive affect is strongly heritable [as it appears to be] and improves function [as the longitudinal studies seem to indicate], and presumably reproduction, then why did natural selection not long ago shape a higher average level of positive affect? More directly, why are there so many very successful people with many friends and resources who remain in states of chronically low mood?

I think the answer is likely to be that what Nesse has in mind as “improved function” isn’t actually improved biologically proper function, but is rather improved function relative to an internal human normative standard, and so doesn’t reliably cash out in terms of inclusive fitness. Anyway, a very rich paper well worth reading.

I find it extremely frustrating that economists, who like to color themselves intellectually rigorous folk, insist on confusing people about the meaning of words. Here’s Robert Frank in Luxury Fever:

In economist’s parlance, it is customary to speak not of happiness, but of utility. The analogous construct in the psychological literature is subjective well-being, a composite measure of overall life satisfaction. For present purposes, little will be lost if we view both expressions as being roughly synonymous with satisfaction.

The problem is that is “customary” for economists to speak not of happiness, but of utility, in a most confusing and haphazard fashion. Conceptually, happiness has nothing to with utility in economics, nor does subjective well-being, or subjective satisfaction. Utility is way of representing an ordering of preferences. It simply isn’t a psychological concept, nor a value concept, nor does it imply either. A utility function is just a little machine in which you can put an ordering ofpreferences, a pair of alternatives, and have something that somebody decided to call a “utility” assigned to each alternative, the most preferred getting the greater utility.

If I prefer the presence of a mouse in Paul Krugman’s kitchen over the absence of a mouse, and there is a mouse in Paul Krugman’s kitchen, then my preference is "satisfied" and I “get” more utility from this state of affairs than the alternatives, even if it in no way enters into my life or experience. The world being such that my highest ranked preferences are semantically satisfied, and that I am “getting” as much utility as possible relative to my ordering, logically has nothing at all to do with my subjective well-being.

As Lionel Robbins put it, just as economics was systematically expunging the psychological from economics:

So far as we are concerned, our economic subjects can be pure egoists, pure altruists, pure ascetics, pure sensualists or – what is much more likely – bundles of all these impulses.

That is to say, economics makes no substantive assumptions about the contents of preferences. It cares only for the form of preferences, namely, that they be consistent.

So why does Robert Frank, and almost everyone else in the economics profession, insist on keeping us all in a state of confusion? Contra Frank in the preceding page of Luxury Fever, economists qua rigorous appliers of utility theory, don’t think that being wealthier ought to make you happier. They think that a bigger budget gets you a more preferred bundle of goods, and more preferred means, by definition, more utility. But since utility is a not a subjective psychological state (since semantic satisfaction is not), no one should be surprised that having more utility won’t make you more anything, subjectively. The world could be exactly the way you prefer it, and you could be miserable, because you could prefer to be miserable.

The “paradox” of our being wealthier, but no happier, is a paradox only relative to a substantive psychological theory, which is what utility theory isn’t. Bentham did think that money was a proxy for pleasure, and that pleasure constituted happiness. So this would be a paradox for Bentham. But Bentham’s vulgar psychological egoism and hedonism are, as Robbins more or less points out, simply not a part of economic theory. And the paradox emphatically isn’t one for a modern utility theorist. The “paradox” is just proof that utility and happiness are non-identical, which didn’t need to be proved anyway, since the only identities in an axiomatic theory are definitional.

[Update: What is “semantic satisfaction”? It is the “fit” between the content of a propositional attitude and the world. In the case of a belief, if the content of the belief matches the world, then its “satisfaction conditions” are met. In the case of a preference, if the world matches the content of the preference, then its satisfaction conditions are met. This is not the “I can’t get no satisfaction” sort of satisfaction. Which is why preference satisfaction talk compounds the confusion over utility. It need not be satisfying to have one’s preferences satisfied, and so one’s utility may have no utility for creating utility, or, in other words, may be of little use in bringing pleasure.]

Schwartz also constantly mixes up objective opportunity and the representation of such: “. . . choice has negative features, and the negative features escalate as the number of choices increases.” No, the negative features escalate as the number of choices entertained, or represented to the self, increases.

It is very important for Schwartz that whatever negative consequences there may be here aren’t a simple function of the number of choices, but are rather a function of the individual’s psychology, otherwise all the advice he gives us (choose when to choose; satisfice more, maximize less; don’t dwell on foregone alternatives; be grateful; anticipate adaptation; be wary of social comparison; etc.) would be moot.

But if he lays too much weight on the point that whether or not there are negative consequences to more choice depends on how individuals psychologically manage their representation of the choices, their procedures for making them, and their attitudes toward choices already made, then it becomes fairly clear that the market, per se, isn’t harming anyone, or causing dissatisfaction by causing choices to proliferate. But Schwartz wouldn’t want that to be clear.

Like Layard’s argument that upward moves in the income distribution impose a negative externality on people beneath, Schwartz is more or less arguing that a high number of alternatives amounts to a negative externality of markets. But in both cases, the authors provide very useful and likely effective techniques of individual psychological management to immunize oneself against the negative effects of dimished comparative position or a vast array of choices. But this self-help advice directly implies that the market is not the causal origin of the imagined harm.