Happiness & Public Policy

You may or may not have noticed that this blog has grown cobwebs. I decided to concentrate all of my blogging at my primary blog, The Fly Bottle. However, I’ve been blogging a good deal about happiness lately (in addition to other topics philosophical, economical, psychological, and political), so I encourage you to join me over there. Better yet, subscribe to my feed for effortless updates. Thanks to everyone for reading and subscribing to Happiness and Public Policy. Cheers!

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.

If you’re tired of reading about happiness, maybe you’d like to hear me talk about it. Here’s my appearance on Counterpoint for ABC National Radio (that’s Australia) with presenter Michael Duffy, and my latest Cato podcast with Anastasia Uglova.

If you’re not tired of reading about happiness, here are my contributions to the current Cato Unbound discussion.

The Quest for a Scientific Politics of Happiness

Happiness as an Input to Political Deliberation

Why We Think We’re Unhappy and What Not to Do About It

Good News about Depression and Suicide

The Artificiality of Happiness

These are a bit more polished than my average blog posts. You should, of course, read the whole discussion, which I’ve personally found very stimulating.

Sorry to have gone missing since the release of my paper. I’ve been working on a number of shorter pieces, and on the new issue of Cato Unbound, on happiness. The discussion so far has been terrific. If you haven’t been following, here’s what we’ve had so far:

Lead Essay

• The Pursuit of Happiness in Perspective by Darrin M. McMahon

Reaction Essays

• Why Societies Should Pursue Happiness by Barry Schwartz
• The Data Tell a Different Story by Ruut Veenhoven
• The Quest for a Scientific Politics of Happiness by Will Wilkinson

The Conversation

• Virtue, Pleasure, and Paternalism in Happiness Policy by Darrin M. McMahon
• Reasoned Evaluation or Blind Faith? How Should States Determine Policy? by Barry Schwartz
• Happiness as an Input to Political Deliberation by Will Wilkinson
• Why We Think We’re Unhappy and What Not to Do About It by Will Wilkinson
• “Going to Hell” Is a Relative Matter by Barry Schwartz
• Policy Trade-offs, Justice, and Happiness by Darrin M. McMahon
• The Place of Happiness in Pluralism by Ruut Veenhoven
• What Public Policy Can Add to Happiness by Ruut Veenhoven
• Justice and Happiness and Growth, not Justice or Happiness or Growth by Barry Schwartz
• Good News about Depression and Suicide by Will Wilkinson

Check it out. The conversation will last through tomorrow.

From The Economist [thanks FK!]:

Cytokines actually act on sensory nerves that run to the brain from organs such as the heart and the lungs. That action stimulates a brain structure called the dorsal raphe nucleus. It was this nucleus that Dr Lowry focused on. He found a group of cells within it that connect directly to the limbic system, the brain’s emotion-generating area. These cells release serotonin into the limbic system in response to sensory-nerve stimulation.

[…]

This result is intriguing for two reasons. First, it offers the possibility of treating clinical depression with what is, in effect, a vaccination. Indeed, M. vaccae is considered a bit of a wonder-bug in this context. Besides cancer, and now depression, it is being looked at as a way of treating Crohn’s disease (an inflammation of the gut) and rheumatoid arthritis.

Second, it opens a new line of inquiry into why depression is becoming more common. Two other conditions that have increased in frequency recently are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. One explanation for the rise of these two conditions is the hygiene hypothesis. This suggests a lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs is leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.

In the case of depression, a similar explanation may pertain. If an ultra-hygienic environment is not stimulating the interaction between immune system and brain, some people may react badly to the consequent lack of serotonin. No one suggests this is the whole explanation for depression, but it may turn out to be part of it.

I’m skeptical of numbers that show massively increasing depression, but it would be amazing if a good part of what increase there has been is due to our being unnaturally clean, rather than, say, the breakdown of social cohesion in commercial society.

Lynda Hurst had a thoughtful piece on happiness in Sunday’s Toronto Star. My favorite bit:

Since 1972, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying to replace the GDP with the GNH, Gross National Happiness. Material well-being is only one component of well-being, it explained. “That doesn’t ensure that you’re at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other.”

Sounds good. But as public policy, has it created peace and harmony?

In 1990, Bhutan expelled 100,000 people because they weren’t ethnically indigenous, a move that would have cut deeply into the traditional GDP. But Bhutan insists the happiness levels of its people haven’t been affected. The remaining people, that is.

Should other governments be emulating Bhutan (minus the mass expulsions)?

Sweet.

Read the whole thing, all the way to the end, or you’ll miss the part where I’m quoted.

[Update: Now with link to article!]

From Scientific American:

Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.

Crap! I’m a happy guy.

From the totally awesome Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random Nietzsche quote with a random Family Circus strip.

Nietzsche is right. Which is why, if you care about your happiness, you should try hard to diminish your taste for power.

My piece on happiness and economic growth in this month’s non-American Prospect has escaped from behind the paywall and is now available for your cost-free reading pleasure. I have to say I’m pretty psyched that my kitten-strapped-to-a-guillotine-connected-to-a-bicycle analogy came through intact:

The fact that average self-reported happiness has not risen with average incomes does not imply that there is no point in becoming richer. A steady rate of growth may be necessary to keep happiness and other good things at a high stable level. (Imagine a guillotine, on which a kitten is strapped, connected to a bicycle that must be pedalled ever more quickly to keep the blade aloft. Slow down, and the kitten gets it.) In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman argues that steady economic growth “fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness and dedication to democracy”—a list I doubt any politician would come out against.

I assure you that it all makes sense in context.

This is funny…

British dance star FATBOY SLIM has refused a request from Britain’s Conservative Party to use his 1995 track HAPPINESS during their annual political conference. The party, lead by DAVID CAMERON, asked the DJ’s record label for permission to play the single - released under the name PIZZAMAN - at the conference in Bournemouth, England. The musician, real name NORMAN COOK, is staunchly left-wing and refused to let the right-wing party use his track. He previously blasted the Labour Party for using his song RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW in their election campaign two years ago (04). Cook says, “At least the Conservatives had the decency to ask, unlike Labour. “The Tories, however, remain my least favourite political party - so an empathic no is the answer. “Is Happiness going to be the new direction for the Conservatives? We shall wait and see.”

If you’re looking for a better happiness blog than this one, i.e., one that actually updates, I can recommend none more than Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project blog. The blog is prep for Gretchen’s forthcoming book, which is

a memoir about this year, during which I’m testing every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I can find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah. I’m gathering these rules for living from everywhere I can, and I’ll report what works and what doesn’t. This happiness blog is part of my larger project.

Fantastic idea. And the blog’s a great read. There are a number of happiness blogs out there, but most of them are dippy rah rah self-improvement things, and though Gretchen’s blog and book is about self-improvement, it’s neither dippy nor rah rah. It’s smart, literate, psychologically sophisticated and plain interesting.

Derive:

• Average happiness does not fall.

From

• If average income rises, then average happiness does not rise or fall.

• Average income does not rise.

Oh. What’s that? You can’t? Because nothing follows from the negation of the antecedent? Right.

Bryan Caplan on Gilbert…

“Money itself doesn’t make you happy,” [Harvard psychology professor Daniel] Gilbert says. “What can make you happy is what you do with it. There’s a lot of data that suggests experiences are better than durable goods.”

I’m baffled. Don’t many durables provide a flow of experiences? A nice T.V. is the obvious example; a fine stereo system’s another. My CD collection is my pride and joy - whenever I worry about being robbed over vacation, my first thought is the sorrow of seeing my CD shelves empty.

I don’t share Arnold’s methodological aversion to happiness research, but this sounds like a very hasty generalization.

Two points. (1) Market egalitarianism. Qualitiative differences between  cheap and expensive consumer goods is almost nil. There is almost no experiential difference between a cheap TV and a “nice” TV. If Deadwood is good on a $2000 plasma screen on HBO, it’s 98% as good on your sister’s giveaway used 19″, a $35 DVD player, and Netflix. The extra expenditure buys almost nothing in terms of the quality of experience. Same with the music. For $4.95 a month, I can get I’m guessing 75% of of Bryan’s CD collection on Yahoo. Capitalism make money worth much less when it comes to manufactured non-positional  goods. (2) Adaptation. The mind is a novelty whore — a change detector. Consciousness loses its grip on the added quality of a premium picture, sound system, etc., very fast. The cheap, almost perfect substitute for an expensive stereo is a cheap stereo.  The cheap substitute for an exquisite meal at the best restaurant in Paris is… what? IHOP in Arlington? A great memory and a great story is an ongoing flow of positive experience. Gilbert is right.

An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) discusses the emerging, more nuanced, happiness research orthodoxy on money and happiness: money doesn’t make people happier, though people with more money say they’re happier. We say we’re happier when we have more money, because, upon reflection, it seems satisfying to be higher-status. But having more money doesn’t actually make you feel better when you’re not reflecting on it.

What happens when high-income earners aren’t contemplating their position in the financial pecking order? Consider a June 30 article in Science magazine by Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, Norbert Schwarz, Arthur Stone and Prof. Schkade.

The five professors analyzed data for 374 workers who were asked every 25 minutes during the workday about the intensity of various feelings. Those with higher incomes didn’t report being any happier, but they were more likely to say they were anxious or angry.

The five professors also studied government data detailing how folks divvy up their waking hours. They found that people with higher incomes tend to spend more time working, commuting and engaging in obligatory nonwork activities, such as maintaining their homes. All of these are associated with lower happiness.

“People who are richer aren’t having a better time,” Prof. Schkade concludes. “But if you ask them about their lives, they report being a little more satisfied” than those who are less affluent.

It seems to me that what they mostly showed is that it is not easy to make money, which is not surprising. It is also not surprising that people who went through the trouble of making money are generally glad they did. For the life of me, I can’t get much out of this study other than that working to make more money can be stressful and the astoundingly obvious fact that a backrub, or whatever, won’t feel better just because the terms of your labor contract provide a higher than average salary.

Kahneman, et al., however, insist on attributing the higher than average SWB for wealthy people to a “focusing illusion,” which makes no sense. That life satisfaction judgments do not track the temporal integration of Kahneman’s “moment utilities” is not evidence that there is some kind of illusion. It is just evidence that satisfaction judgments are value laden, and people value things other than utility.

Suppose there is a big marathon going on. There is a guy running the marathon, and there is a guy sitting in a bar drinking beer and watching it on TV. You sample their experience over the course of the event. It turns out that the guy running the marathon is experiencing high levels of stress, near-exhaustion, searing pain, etc. The guy drinking beer feels pretty good. It’s air conditioned, and he’s got a bit of a buzz on. Now, the marathoner wins the race. You ask him how he feels about his life that day: “Fantastic! It’s the best day of my life!” And you ask the guy who spent three hours drinking beer: “OK, I guess. I really should have been doing yardwork. Good race, though.” The runner does not only not subtract the pain of the race from the pleasure of winning, the pain, and his triumph over it, increases his sense of satisfaction. Because, naturally, his satisfaction judgment is based on values other than pleasure and pain, such as self-command, perserverence, drive, and winning. Is he undergoing a “focusing illusion”? Asburd. The problem is Kahneman’s value theory.

2 comments

I’ve just received the full World DB of Happiness on CD from Rotterdam, which is really inexpensive. I’ve also been teaching myself to use R, the open source stats package. There’s a bunch of simple regressions I’d like to see, but which nobody seems to have done. So I shall do them! Again and again my degrees in studio art and philosophy come in handy. But, seriously, the free resources available online for teaching yourself statistics are truly incredible. When you’ve got a computer to do the math, it doesn’t seem to be that hard!

Here are some hypotheses I’d like to test:

• Steady rates of GDP growth keep SWB levels stable.
• Economies that experience one time negative growth shocks in period one, will see lower levels of SWB in period two.
• Countries with more volatile GDP growth will have lower avg SWB.
• If growth is consistently volatile, SWB will not be more volatile, just lower.
• Economies that experience decelerating growth in period one will see lower levels of SWB in period two.
• Places with a higher risk of political and economic instability have lower levels of SWB.

Basically, I’ve had it up to here with the claims that since GDP growth barely has a positive effect on SWB, growth doesn’t matter, and so policymakers can just feel free to screw around with policies that will reduce growth rates. We’ll see!

Oh, and if you know of any studies that test any of these hypotheses, plese fill me in….

In the same vein as David’s fascinating post below, here is a refreshingly accurate article on the relationship between wealth and self-reported happiness around the world from the New Scientist titled “Wealthy Nations Hold the Keys to Happiness.” The occasion of the article is the publication of a world map by Adrian White, a Ph.D. psychology student at the University of Leicester, that vividly pictures self-reported life satisfaction around the world. The relationship between wealth and the percentage of people who say they are happy leaps out pretty clearly.

According to the analysis, a country’s happiness is closely related to its wealth, along with the health and education levels of its people. It is no surprise that people spending heavily on healthcare, such as US citizens, rank highly, says White, as this investment increases life expectancy and general wellbeing.

“There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people,” he says. “However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher [earnings] per capita, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.”

[…]

Large industrialised countries fared well in the new analysis, with the US and UK coming in at 23 and 41, respectively, out of 178 nations.

This stands in contrast with the recently released “Happy Planet Index” from the New Economics Foundation think tank, which placed Columbia and Honduras high up. The Happy Planet Index ranked each country according to the reported happiness level of its people divided by the amount of the world’s resources they consume.

“In the west we have the tendency to be the ‘worried well’,” White says. Too true.

I like to emphasize that self-reported subjective life satisfaction is a far cry from objective well-being, which includes non-subjective factors like health, longevity, the development of basic human capacities, and more. Complaining about the misery of life under capitalism is a sport for privileged people who, thanks to capitalism, are doing so objectively well that they can spend their days doing things like, say, getting a Ph.D. in American Studies from Berkeley and writing books about how Zombie movies reflect the horror of capitalism.

Now, I think most of us can agree that even if capitalism does give us boneheaded essays on the anti-capitalist implications of shambling, undead brain-eaters, all this health, wealth, and happiness probably makes it a good deal anyway.

[Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty]

Nice column in the Times Online from James Whyte. Highlight:

it is clear that happiness is not everyone’s ultimate value either.
I know academics who have sacrificed happiness for discovery. And I
know bankers who work very hard and earn a lot of money. They know that
more wealth will not increase their happiness as much as more leisure
would. Nevertheless, they keep working. They prefer money to happiness.

Some will say my greedy friends are making a mistake. Professor
Layard, for example, says they are in the grip of an addiction from
which it is the Government’s duty to save them through punitive income
taxes. It is, of course, tempting to think that those who do not share
your values are crazy. But it is also an alarming pretext for state
intervention. Free men should fear the happy brigade.

To have been born British is to have won first prize in the
lottery of life. This is almost as true now as it was when Cecil Rhodes
said it. But not because the British are or ever were the happiest
people on earth. It is because, unlike those happy Nigerians, we are
prosperous and free. Which means we have just about as much happiness
as we want.

Journalist Stuart Jeffries has a truly excellent piece on “Why Happiness Is Overrated” in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. Choice excerpts:

But as soon as the word “happiness” is invoked in this context, something has gone awry. Every undergraduate who has written an essay on the distinctions between pleasure, wellbeing and happiness (as I remember doing), knows that you’re getting into a conceptual morass by invoking happiness as an achievable societal goal. Kant wrote wisely, “The notion of happiness is so nebulous that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he can never convey accurately and distinctly what it is that he really wishes and wills ” But today, as never before, it is being touted as the societal cure-all: happiness is treated almost as a human right rather than what it is; namely, a goal that retreats the closer one tries to get to it. Perhaps happiness is an unnecessary goal that confuses us when we try to tackle real social problems.

…

A genial spirit, Coleridge was gadding about madly; sometimes winningly, sometimes irresponsibly, just as he usually did, up hill and down dale, through metaphysics and poetry, when he smacked into the wall of Wordsworth’s will. His best friend refused to put Coleridge’s poem Christabel into the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This, seemingly small, incident crushed Coleridge, making him doubt his poetic gifts, and left him for years crossing a desert of opium, illness and marital unhappiness.

Can we say that Coleridge would have been a better man, poet or essayist had he not been through this misery? You may object that Coleridge was a poet and intellectual, so perhaps needed an injection, of depression to fire him up, while the rest of us shlubs, trying to get through the day, don’t. We must be made happy; insured against depression; inoculated somehow against misery: it is our right, dammit! But it is a patronising view that implies ordinary people must live experientially less-fulfilled lives than artists.

Read the whole thing.

I’m quoted in this morning’s LA Times (I think the piece is front page) in an article on happiness research. Unfortunately, I am quoted rather exactly, and therefore come off somewhat lacking in gravitas:

"Most of the things that have been published about the policy implications of happiness research have definitely had a big-government slant to it. They’re like, ‘Here’s another reason for the government to do something else,’ " said Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute.

Now, I stand by the quote! They are in fact totally like "Here’s another reason for the government to do something else." Ah! The vernacular. Anyway, I really enjoyed chatting with the author Stu Silverstein over the phone. And showing up in an article between Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Richard Easterlin is more than all right by me. 

Haven’t read it yet, but I’m seeing it all over. The useful thing about the new study is that it compares life-satisfaction survey answers with Kahneman’s day reconstruction method (basically, writing down what you did and how it made you feel at the end of the day. Highlights:

“If people have high income, they think they should be satisfied and reflect that in their answers,” Krueger said. “Income, however, matters very little for moment-to-moment experience.”

And

“Despite the weak relationship between income and global life satisfaction or experienced happiness, many people are highly motivated to increase their income,” the study said. “In some cases, this focusing illusion may lead to a misallocation of time, from accepting lengthy commutes (which are among the worst moments of the day) to sacrificing time spent socializing (which are among the best moments of the day).”

My take: Not surprising. Life satisfaction judgments are going to reflect widely shared cultural assumptions about happiness. Wealth is part of a widely shared conception of the good life. Or maybe people think they ought to feel better about higher relative position, but this doesn’t really enter much into experience. So the self-reported happiness gap between the wealthy and less wealthy will shrink the closer the self-report gets to actual events.

By the way, funny how these things are reported. Why not “Good news! The least wealthy are only 12 percent less happy the wealthiest.” Dueling political inferences: money doesn’t make the rich happy, so it doesn’t hurt them if we take their money vs. not having money doesn’t make the poor unhappy, so it doesn’t help them to give them any. Take your pick.

Kahneman’s Benthamism prevents him from reading happiness-motivation splits as anything but “illusion.” If you simply assume that people value only happiness intrinsically, and desire other things only for the happiness it brings, then working hard to make money, say, will seem like a kind of mistake if money doesn’t maximize happiness. There are a couple alternative interpretations. One is that here we have a revealed preference for something other than happiness. Even if people say they’re trying to be happy, talk is cheap. Action shows us what is genuinely valued—not happiness. Or it may be that there is a kind of “illusion” here, but a good illusion. Our system maybe does this: Identify something valuable. Conclude that it will make us happy, which motivates us to go after it. Go after it. Get it. It makes us happy or not. Whether it does is irrelevant to the system.

Now, if that’s the way the system works, is it really an illusion, exactly? Compared to what? The way the system doesn’t work? Can the fact that we are motivated really be a trick? Maybe. No doubt our Darwinian system “wants” things we don’t. Do I really want pretty women? Do I really want the higher status that will help me get pretty women? If the prospect of happiness is a trick to get us to want stuff that Nature needs us to get, are we really sure we really want happiness after all. We find out that it’s the basis of the motivating trick, and we still want it? Becuase that’s what we’re built to want, even if it jerks us around? What if I can’t stop wanting misery-making pretty women and also can’t stop wanting happiness? Screwed? That’s life?

If the at-a-time gap in happiness between rich and poor is smaller than we thought, is the hedonic effect of relative position smaller than we thought.

By the way, this study involves women only. It will be interesting to see whether there are significant male-female differences with the day reconstruction method.