Happiness & Public Policy

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.

Happiness research tells us that people think they’re pretty happy as long as things aren’t totally going to shit. So then if you’re the state, why not just take credit for it!

Thailand’s gross domestic happiness index, measured on both Thais and expatriates, has increased due mainly to His Majesty the King’s compassion and graciousness, according to an Abac poll released yesterday.

No doubt they’ve been closely tracking levels of His Majesty the King’s compassion and graciousness with the latest measurement technology so they could throw the data in the regressions. 

If you happen to be a subscriber to the Prospect (the British one), you can read my article on why politicians who say they care about happiness have got to care about economic growth and economic freedom. Otherwise, you can read the first 2.5 paragraphs. I’ll let you know if they make it free for non-subscribers.

The politics of happiness research just got a bit more interesting. British Conservative leader David Cameron is now campaigning on a happiness platform. In a speech at a conference organized by Google in Hertfordshire, Cameron said,

It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB—General Well-Being.

This is interesting because up until now, the politics of “well-being” have been primarily a welfare-liberal or social democratic phenomenon. So why the happiness schtick for the Tories? Why now? The Financial Times editorial page says:

Read more

The BBC has been running a six part documentary called The Happiness Formula that appears to buy in almost completely to Lord Layard’s technocratic Benthamite vision . I’ll be putting up several posts responding to a number of the articles posted on the BBC website. For now, here is Daniel Ben-Ami at Spiked Online, who begins with the fundamental objection:

The critical flaw of the BBC’s new six-part documentary on happiness was apparent from the start. It assumed that happiness should be the key goal for society and then set out to illustrate the contention. . .

A crucial distinction that I’m willing to make over and over is the distinction between aggregative and coordinative conceptions of social goals.

In an aggregative or summative conception, the goal is simply to maximize the amount of something valuable, such as happiness or pleasure. Aggregative conceptions of the social good run into Rawls/Nozick separateness of persons problems, since individuals are treated primarily as little containers for value. We should want individuals to contain as much of THE VALUE as possible not primarily because that’s what makes their life go well from their point of view. Indeed, it may not be; we may wish to dispassionately contemplate significant form, to exhaust ourselves in pursuit of an elusive, recondite truth, or to achieve purity of spirit through mortification of the flesh. Well, too bad. Our projects have worth only insofar as the advance THE PROJECT—maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain.

Ben-Ami rightly notes that “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration names a right, not a duty. In the basically Lockean conception of agency common to many of the American Founders, it was taken as a basic psychological truth that action is motivated by the prospect of our own happiness, because that’s the way God made us. Interference with the pursuit of what God created us to pursue contravenes the laws of nature, and not even Kings have authority to do that. Given that we are each motivated by happiness, given that we will seek our self-interest, how can a society’s institutions coordinate thousands of individual happiness-oriented pursuits. Whan Adams says “the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government,” he has in mind the way constitutions structure or coordinate individual behavior. “Social happiness” is a not a sum of individual utilities. Social happiness is a well-ordered system in which millions of acts of individual self-interest are harmoniously coordinated.

Now, Enlightenment psychological hedonism is false. People can and are motivated by all sorts of things. However, it remains that individuals are motivated almost entirely by their individual projects, if not by happiness or pleasure. We can bracket the questions of what motivates us, and of what is ultimately valuable, and find that the question of social happiness—the question of the “divine science of politics”—construed as the problem of creating a stable set of institutions that coordinates and orders the pursuit of our individual projects, remains in full force.

Now, happiness is a primary goal for very many people, and so knowledge of what contributes to happiness will be useful indeed. But it is a giant mistake to assume that happiness is the sole value, that science says so, or to extrapolate from millions of happiness-oriented projects to THE PROJECT, which is a pernicious myth. The divine science of social happiness is not the science of summation, it is the science of coordination.

. . . I trust the friends of the proposed constitution will never concur with its enemies in questioning that fundamental principle of republican government, which admits the right of the people to alter or abolish the established constitution whenever they find it inconsistent with their happiness. . .

- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78

Hamilton here echoes the language of the Declaration. Again, happiness here seems to mean something quite broad like “good fortune” or “well-being,” not a feeling of pleasure of satisfaction. That may be on reason why the two following passages bear only a superficial resemblance in content:

By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.

- Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

And

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.

- John Adams, “Thoughts on Government”

A further reason why Adams is not expressing a Benthamite sentiment (his son, by the way, was a big fan of Bentham) is contained in the paragraphs directly preceding:

the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government, which are generally institutions that last for many generations, there can be no employment more agreeable to a benevolent mind than a research after the best.

Pope flattered tyrants too much when he said,

“For forms of government let fools contest,
That which is best administered is best.”

Nothing can be more fallacious than this. But poets read history to collect flowers, not fruits; they attend to fanciful images, not the effects of social institutions. Nothing is more certain, from the history of nations and nature of man, than that some forms of government are better fitted for being well administered than others.

That, in a nutshell, is Bentham’s bind. Adams is looking for a general, structural solution to the problem of securing ease, comfort, and security, and isn’t going to just assume rational administration by benevolent experts. Bentham’s constitutional writings don’t assume this, either, but he often slips into it. For instance, in an article about Bentham’s ideas in poverty relief policy, Michael Quinn writes:

Bentham does appear to glory in the scope which detention in a Poor Panopticon gives its governor to break down and recast entire personalities. He can plausibly be presented as anticipating Skinner’s box, and filling it with, to use his own expression, ‘that part of the national livestock which has no feathers to it and walks on two legs’, instead of rats. Ought we not then to suspect that, in Bahmueller’s words, ‘if the truth were known, we would soon suspect that it was not only the indigent that Bentham wanted to control, but us too, all of us. That is, we might suspect that Panopticon was a version of Benthamite society writ small.’ Indeed, is Bahmueller further correct to view the emerging apprentices of the Poor Panopticon, liberated after an entire lifetime of indoctrination, as the stormtroopers of a Benthamic blitzkrieg, as ‘foot soldiers in a surreptitious guerilla war he hoped to wage against the entrenched mores of an unutilitarian society’? When Bentham describes his poor house as a ‘utopia’, is the correct implication that drawn by both Bahmueller and Himmelfarb, that he believes that everyone would be much better off for a course in utilitarian conditioning?

It’s not obvious that he does think this. But I think it is a clear temptation in any aggregative or maximizing theory.

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It is an indisputable point, (or, at least, there is room to think it, in this philosophical age, an acknowledged truth) that the first object of all governments, should be to render the people happy.

- Jean Francois, Marquis de Chastellux, An Essay on Public Happiness, 1774.

This book is a pretty amazing and often pretty weird attempt at normative economic history. Chastellux tries to estimate, on the basis of the data available at the time, which “nations” through history best excelled in producing happiness. The assumption, as the quote suggests, is that the best government is the one with the happiest subjects.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence clearly contains the assumption that the legitimacy of a government, the justification of its authority, depends on its securing the conditions for its subjects happiness. What are other sources for the happiness legitimacy link?

It is interesting that many mentions of happiness in the Enlightenment seem meant to apply to the affairs of the people as a whole—a happy ordering, as opposed to a collection of happy individuals–although both are often meant at once. The difference between the Lockeans and the Benthamites about the government-happiness connection is the difference between a coordinative and an aggregative conception of morality. Coordinative moral theories scale up into theories of coordination sustaining political institutions. The Federalist Papers, e.g. Aggregative moral theories tend to scale up into paternalistic authoritarianism, e.g., “Government house utilitarianism,” to use Bernard Williams’s great phrase. Bentham himself waffles between simply imposing utility maximizing institutions (the Panoptican, the National Charity Corporation) manned by utilitarian elites and, on the other hand, setting up cooperation sustaining institutions that of necessity must be structured to limit predation, which limits the power of elites of whatever philosophical stripes.