Happiness & Public Policy

Great line, from Alison Rowat in The Herald:

Some bravehearts, sickened by their acquisitiveness, resolve never to buy another gizmo. Children of the sixties are especially prone to crises of consumer confidence. There are few sadder sights than an old hippie clutching a digital wine thermometer and wondering where it all went wrong. They wanted to change the world, man, not ensure the Chablis was the right temperature.

The moral:

Gadget buyers shouldn’t be judged too harshly. As well as keeping millions in work, they are investing in an idea, a dream of themselves as better, healthier, less stressed, more sociable individuals. Have coffee machine, have friends round for dinner. Have juicer, be Dame Kelly Holmes. If only happiness did come in a pod or with a plug attached. The simple, boring truth is that the finest cup of coffee in the world is the one poured from a battered old flask at the top of a hill just climbed. The most delicious toasties are the ones carried to your sick bed by a loved one. And feeling the need to check the temperature of a bottle of wine before serving is really God’s way of telling you to get out more.

Sounds about right, whatever a toastie is.

From a silly Bill McKibben LA Times op-ed:

New data suggest that we’ve been flying blind for many decades. We made an assumption — as a society and as individuals — that more was better. It seemed a reasonable bet, and for a while it may have been true. But in recent years economists, sociologists and other researchers have begun to question that link. Indeed, they’re finding that at least since the 1950s, more material prosperity has yielded little, if any, increase in humans’ satisfaction.

In the 1990s, for instance, despite sterling economic growth, researchers reported a steady rise in “negative life events.” In the words of one of the study’s authors, “The anticipation would have been that problems would have been down.” But money, as a few wise people have pointed out over the years, doesn’t buy happiness. Meanwhile, growth during the decade increased carbon emissions by about 10%.

Further, economists and sociologists suggest that our dissatisfaction is, in fact, linked to economic growth. What did we spend our new wealth on? Bigger houses, ever farther out in the suburbs. And what was the result? We have far fewer friends nearby; we eat fewer meals with family, friends and neighbors. Our network of social connections has shrunk. Do the experiment yourself. Would you rather have a new, bigger television, or a new friend?

Second paragraph: What researchers!? Third Paragraph: which economists and sociologists? Name them. McKibben simply has no idea what he’s talking about. There is almost NO credible empirical data in support of the proposition that economic growth or increasing individual incomes makes people less happy. Indeed, almost all the evidence points resolutely in the other direction. And it’s not even true that growth reduces social cohesion. It doesn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt, either. There’s no trade-off between friends and new televisions. He’s just tossing out falsehoods left and right. What a fraud.

If he wants to cut carbon emissions, he should say: “Cutting carbon will cut into growth, and almost all evidence indicates that a decrease in the rate of growth will lead to lower average levels of life satisfaction. But I think it’s worth it.” That, at least, would have the virtue of truth.

In one scene of the Terry Gilliam classic Brazil, there is a poster with a campy illustration of a 1950s American-looking family all wearing rictus grins in a huge car that says “Happinness” and then something else. I think I’ve seen the image other than on the poster in Brazil, and I’d like to use it on the blog masthead, if it is not locked down by copyright. Anyone know where I can find it? If I become ambitious, I may try to find a screencap…

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.

It struck me this morning that Schwartz’s problem of managing “too much” freedom is kind of the opposite of the problem of managing too little freedom implicit in Admiral Stockdale’s Epictetian stoicism and Victor Frankl’s existential therapy. Or is it the same!? (If you don’t know, Stockdale was tortured for years by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war. Frankl was imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis.)

Stockdale tells us [pdf]:

Epictetus was telling his students that there can be no such thing as being the “victim” of another. You can only be a “victim” of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? “He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart… What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity… Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I’ll show you a Stoic.”

[If you haven’t read Stockdale’s amazing account of his torture and confinement, do it.]

Frankl writes:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

So here we have strategies for maintaining a sense of freedom — a psychological feeling of choice, control, agency, and self-efficacy — under conditions where the external menu of open alternatives is more or less blank. Both push us to consider what ultimately is and is not in our power. In the end, the only steadfast choices, the only ones that cannot be taken away, are choices about how to orient our minds, and about our attitude toward our situation. This implies that we can maintain a sense of freedom and openness, and the sense of responsibility and dignity that entails, even under conditions where we are not at liberty to act on most of our desires. The Stoic also implies that other freedoms, because they can be taken away, are not genuine freedoms, and so we should cultivate an attitude of indifference toward them. The only true freedom for the stoic is in virtue, and virtue is entirely a matter of what is genuinely up to us, and the only thing that is genuinely up to us is the maintenance of our composure.

Because the problem of two much choice is apparently the opposite of the problem of too little, I entertained the idea that what we need is to turn the stoic and/or existential attitude inside out. But now I’m not so sure. It seems to me that the problem of too much choice requires, in the first instance, a kind of withdrawal, detachment, and centering, and then a kind of selective re-engagement with the panoply of choices once we’ve achieved a firmer grasp of what one really cares about and is after in life.

It seems like a mistake to concentrate on the sheer quantity of choices rather than on the quality of the choices relative to the nature of the choosers. Chinese takeouts generally offer hamburgers, pizza, jalapeno poppers, etc., etc. The most celebrated restaurants often have tiny menus. If a friend offered to take me to either Lucky Dragon carryout or a Michelin 3 star, I would not regret my loss of the freedom to order curly fires with my wantons upon choosing the fancier joint. A single job you like is better than 1000 you don’t want.

If we were homogeneous in our natures, interests, talents, projects, and preferences, then it might be possible to trim the set of choices to a subset that is more manageable, and yet with all the best choices intact. But we are not homogeneous. So, even if the set of choices that is ideal for each of us, given our unique constitution and aims, is small, the fact of our variety will require the availability of a huge set of choices overall. Almost any reduction of the most inclusive set of choices reduces the quality of choices for someone, i.e., it restricts their freedom to choose something that is best for them.

The difficulty is that the plenitude of consumer culture, which offers the tantalizing possibility of a different ideal pattern of consumption for each of us, tends to drown out the whisper of what is best for each of us in the cacophony of variety. We are left searching through a junkyard for a handful of gems (though one man’s junk is another man’s gem), often without knowing what’s junk and what’s gems. But the problem is not quite that we have too much choice. If I need to get to Minnesota and don’t know how, the problem is not that there are just too many roads. The problem is that I don’t know which ones to take. It wouldn’t help me if there were fewer roads, none of which goes to my destination. But if I know the route, the number of other roads is irrelevant. Similarly, if I know what I am, know what I need, know what I like, and know what will make my unique life go uniquely well, then I can just tune out the stuff that is superfluous to me. Most of the choices will just psychologically fall away, fade into the background, because they are not for me.

So what we need is self-knowledge, and a procedure for identifying authenticity in desire, a kind of practical wisdom. It does not seem that public policy can do much about this for us. But a kind of Stoic indifference toward the hurly burly of market culture may be useful, helping us to stay disentangled from the lures of marketers, salespeople, and taste makers, and allow us to better focus and who we really are. A kind of existential therapy may also be useful, sensitizing us to reflexive modes of thought and action, our bad faith, our false consciousness, and our ability and responsibility to consciously define ourselves and make meaning in our lives.

So maybe the ways of thinking that make it possible to remain human in Nazi concentration camps and Hanoi prisons are also indispensable in carving authentic lives of customized meaning out of the otherwise disorienting surplus of alternatives. Maybe the way to maintain a sense of freedom when in chains is also a way to manage agoraphobic hyperventilation in the unbounded consumer paradise.

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.