Happiness & Public Policy

Economists Andrew Oswald and Andrew Branchflower begin a very interesting new NBER paper [$$$] on the relationship between levels of self-reported happiness and blood levels with this dubious claim:

For effective social and economic policies to be designed, it is necessary for policymakers to be able to measure human well-being.

They better hope they’re wrong, because if they’re right, then effective social and economic policy cannot be designed! Oh no! 

Why? Two reasons:

(1) Human well-being, as opposed to the several dimensions or components of well-being, is pretty much impossible to measure.

Why? Because the specific nature of human well-being is relative to the individual and the components of well-being are diverse and must often be traded against one another. 

What does this mean? Let’s start with the relativity of well-being. The achievement of valued aims (meaningful goals, important personal projects, whatever you’d like to call it) is a component of human well-being if anything is. However, the content of valued aims varies from person to person. It follows pretty straightforwardly that the specific requirements of well-being vary from person to person.

(For those of you on the lookout for the scourge of “post-modernist relativism,” please note that this kind of “relativism” is in fact a kind of relativism, and is also completely innocuous, entailed by the uncontroversial fact that different people have different personalities, different tastes, and different “callings.”)

Next, consider the diversity of the components of well-being and the potential conflicts between them. Health and longevity are components of well-being if anything is. But so is the individual achievement of valued aims. Some people’s perfectly reasonable aims  may be incompatible with maximizing their health and longevity. Imagine a cholesterol-saturated gourmand who would rather die than give up his foie gras, or an adventurer who draws profound meaning from facing down life-threatening challenges. So… how much weight do we give to one component of well-being —  health and longevity, say – relative to another — for example, the achievement of valued aims that conflict with maximal health and longevity? The answer is that there is no answer — no answer science and empirical evidence compels us all to agree on, at any rate.

The upshot, then, is that while we can measure various dimensions or components of well-being — whether it be health and longevity, the experience of pleasure, a sense of self-efficacy and control, the development of basic human capacities, or the achievement of valued aims — we cannot measure well-being as a whole because Mother Nature has nowhere posted a table of exchange rates between the various values that compose individual welfare. It’s simply not out there for the scientist to find.

Now, there may be a rough cultural consensus at any time and place about the relative weight to place on competing individual welfare-constituting values. But this consensus, to the extent that there is one, has to be discovered, and changes as time goes by. So, at this point, we’re not “measuring well-being” so much as attempting to find some bit of overlap if people’s conceptions of well-being. We can use the overlap to base a few general principles of mutually beneficial social interaction almost everyone will be willing to affirm. But the larger and more diverse the society, the smaller and more general the overlap. There are always broad swathes of often heated disagreement in pluralistic societies. And that’s what principles and institutions of liberal neutrality are for: to peacefully accommodate the inevitable lack of consensus about questions of value in open, cosmopolitan societies.

Would you say that a set of policies were “effective” if it peacefully and stably coordinated the behavior of millions of individuals in pursuit of their valued aims, and constantly increased their capacity to to realize them, despite the fact that there are as many conceptions of well-being as there are people?  Would you consider such a set of policies “effective” even if we didn’t know how to measure human well-being scientifically? 

(2) Policymakers have no incentive to accurately measure human well-being – even if it was accurately measurable — or to appoint, or take counsel from, those who do.

Lucky for them, Branchflower and Oswald begin their paper with a monumental falsehood. Their introductory proposition implies, among other things, that effective social and economic policy never has been designed! Their general idea, I take it, is that in order to design something effective, you have to be able to measure “effectiveness.” This may well be, but it

But this is also false. There are many things that work well without most of us knowing how or why — without know the meaning of “well.” And there are ways of “designing” through trial and error that delivers results without delivering knowledge of the mechanisms.  

I think my considerations (1) and (2) imply that not only does effective policy not require that policymakers are able to definitively measure well-being, but that effective policy is much more likely if we fully grasp the indisputable empirical facts that conceptions of well-being (and of “effective”) are plural (and this is so whether or not I am right on the philosophical point that the constitution of well-being for each individual requires trade-offs between different dimensions of well-being) and that policymakers are neither scientists nor reliable consumers of science. 

Maybe it is disappointing to social scientists — frustrating even! – to face up to the fact that no interest or competence in social science whatsoever is required for a hugely successful career as a policymaker, which is to say, as a politician or bureaucrat. This is even the case in places where social science flourishes most! Disappointing as that fact may be, social scientists may want to take it into account when  thinking about the design of effective policy.  

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 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.

2 comments

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.

Another truly useful thing about Haybron’s paper is the totally stunning clarity with which he commits the Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization. The Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization is the fallacy of unfavorably contrasting a realistically (or pessimistically) described process or institution with an idealizistically desicribed process or institution. The fallacy was first made explicit to me by Steve Horwitz at an IHS conference. He drew a matrix on the board that looked something like this:

The distribution of the Xs here shows how libertarians tend to commit the fallacy. Big government folk tend to go for a grim non-ideal market and a Panglossian government.
Almost the entirety of what I’ve been calling the “cognitive paternalism” literature amounts to an elaborate form of this version of the fallacy:

It would not be a fallacy if it was shown that institutions of government decisionmaking are in general more means-ends reliable than individual decisionmaking in the setting on non-government institutions. But no one ever does try to make that argument. I suspect that there is no good argument for it. The argument would need to be of this general form:

If genuine experts were in charge of the policymaking process, then they could write enforceable policy that would tend to improve the means-ends rationality of individual behavior.

The difficulties are legion. Let’s just concentrate on experts. The expert identification process is itself an institutional problem that is very hard to solve. There is no broad consensus among citizens as to who is an expert. Consider that Leon Kass was designated by the Bush adminstration as an expert in bioethics to make recommendations on government policy. We have Kass, among others, to thank for the president’s (I think deeply mistaken) opposition to cloning, stem-cell research, and, yes, human-animal hybrids! Is Kass a genuine expert of not? Was the Bush adminstration means-ends reliable when it appointed Donald Rumsfeld to run the DoD? It depends on who you ask. Maybe a majority of American’s say “yes.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but we clearly don’t even agree about the ends that we ought to be means-ends rational about. Philosophers and religious leaders and politicians are forever nominating themselves as experts about truly good ends. And, of course, as experts about who the experts about truly good ends are.

Well, you see the problem. We always have to keep in mind the possibility that if some domain of life is turned over to rule by experts, we may get the wrong experts. Imagine James Dobson as the czar of American family policy, empowered to structure incentives to lovingly guide us to behave according to his expert conception of healthy, fulfilling, truly good family life. The Rawlsian fact of pluralism is a real fact, and it doesn’t just disappear because you are a scientist, or because you are really right. James Dobson, and the millions whe love him, knows he’s really right, too. Ask Peter Singer. What does he think?

That said, here is Haybron:

Consider that a deep faith in the ability of individuals effectively to seek their own good has provided an important justification for liberal restrictions on the state’s role in promoting good lives. This strain of thought finds its classic expression in Mill’s On Liberty, where he writes that “the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place” (Mill 1991). Recall also the lines cited at the start of this paper. In essence, Mill argues that individuals tend to know how they are doing, and what’s good for them, far better than anyone else does, and so societies should let individuals make their own decisions about how to live. Give people as much freedom to live as they wish, with as much scope for shaping their lives as they see fit, as possible.

And yet, if individuals are prone systematically to botch choices regarding their happiness, or even if this must be considered a serious possibility, then this aspect of liberal thought loses a good deal of its support, specifically the traditional consequentialist arguments like Mill’s that favor it. We cannot simply assume a high level of prudential competence in the typical person. Nor can we assume, contra Mill, that governments won’t often know better than individuals what’s best for them, since some of our prudential shortcomings appear to be systematic. Thus policymakers armed with knowledge of human psychological weaknesses might be able to shape social arrangements to compensate for them, in ways that will not always sit well with liberal sensibilities. One might object here that, as Mill claimed, individuals still tend to know their own affects better than anyone else does. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that most people mistakenly think themselves happy. Even if they are the best judges of their specific feelings, it may be that well-informed officials have a better grip on how the population feels, in general, than the individuals taken in aggregate do. So, for instance, state officials might know that the average person isn’t happy, while the average person mistakenly believes herself happy.
Plainly, much more would need to be said actually to undermine consequentialist arguments for liberal strictures on state paternalism. Nor would the weakening or defeat of those arguments open the door for rampant government paternalism, since we could in any event have powerful reasons of autonomy for limiting state interventions in our lives. My purpose here is just to show how AI [affective ignorance] and related psychological matters could impact political thought: we may find, perhaps among other things, that we need to rethink common doubts about the efficacy of state paternalism in making people happier. [emphasis added]

The first emphasized passage is a truly remarkable example of the Fallacy of Asymmetric Idealization. Here is my paraphrase: we can’t assume that individuals know what’s best for them, and so we can’t assume that other individuals, with the same psychological limits, embedded in an incredibly fragile and and improbable structure of institutions, constituted by the patterns of interaction among millions of other individuals similarly psychologically limited, won’t do better!

That’s right! We can’t just assume that! But once we correct for the fallacy and make our levels of (non-)idealization symmetrical, we are more than justified in believing that the government, on average, isn’t likely to help more than it hurts.
Anyone who has studied economic development will come to suspect that the fraility of human rationality and trust is at the root of most societies’ inabilitity to develop minimally adequate institutions manned with “policymakers” armed with anything but a well-honed predatory instinct. Simply assuming policymakers “armed with knowledge of human psychological weaknesses” that enable them to “shape social arrangements to compensate” for those weakness right after being so thoroughly non-idealistic about human psychology ought to strike us as an embarrassing mistake. This is just like simply assuming perfect human rationality. Goverment is a solution to other problems only if the problem of good government has already been solved (or is even solvable). There is no deus ex machina. There is, of course, a gigantic literature about the quality of government institutions through time. The vast majority of all government institutions and policies ever tried have a record of simply astounding means-ends failure.

When individual prudence breaks down we marry the wrong person, take the wrong job, decide to take the wrong drug, work too much, or vacation too little, etc. And that’s too bad. But it is simple impossible to avoid the truth that government policy is set by the same kind of individual human beings who act on predictions about what is going to make us all better off. There is never a guarantee that these people know what they are doing. There probably cannot be a guarantee. All we can do is mitigate the possibility for harm by keeping power away from deeply imperfect people. When government institutions go sour the people running them start unjust wars, slaughter their own citizens by the millions, systematically oppress their own people, keep them in squalor generation after generation, or starve them by the droves. This is, one must admit, rather worse than the anxiety and dismay of an individual who has made some mistakes about her own happiness.
There are, of course, some notable successes in government. It is of course possible for there to be genuine experts, and for government appointed genuine experts to do a good job. We will miss you Alan Greenspan! But, then again, some people aren’t systematically means-ends irrational, either. In the best case, individuals don’t need a government crutch to help them do the right thing. And in the best case, government crutches can help. But our world isn’t the best case. Often the best we can do is put up and defend strong barriers against the worst case. My worry is that the cognitive paternalists are unwittingly eroding those barriers.

From Juan Non-Volokh, this humdinger:

BJØRNSKOV, et al, “The Bigger the Better? Evidence of the Effect of Government Size on Life Satisfaction around the World”

ABSTRACT: This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that government plays an unambiguously positive role for individuals’ quality of life, and public choice theory, that was developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement and regulation, thereby harming voters’ quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government spending. This negative impact of the government is stronger in countries with a leftwing median voter. It is alleviated by government effectiveness - but only in countries where the state sector is already small.

Semi-rhetorical question: If this sort of result keeps coming out of the data, as the data improves, how fast will statists develop grave methodological worries about happiness research? And how fast will limited government types start seeing something in it?

Rajeev Dehejia, Thomas DeLeire, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, “Insuring Consumption and Happiness Through Religious Organizations,” NBER Working Paper 11576. [$5 download, unless you have institutional access to NBER papers.]

The authors find (to grossly oversimplify) that religious participation helps insure against consumption shocks for whites, but not so much for blacks, and against happiness shocks through income loss for blacks and not so much for whites. Their attempt at explaining the black/white differences is interesting. But I was most interested in the concluding passage:

The finding that religious organizations partly insure individuals’ stream of consumption and of happiness against income shocks has important implications for the public provision of social insurance. Social insurance is less valuable for those who are already partly insured through their religious organization, implying that the optimal level of social insurance is inversely related to the religious participation of the population. Moreover, social insurance can crowd out insurance provided by religious organizations. Thus, even where Church and State are officially separated, governments providing less social insurance will indirectly stimulate the demand for insurance from religious organizations and thus mostly likely strengthen the influence of religious organizations.

This nicely illustrates the trade-off between a big welfare state and a flourishing civil society. How does this relate to the happiness literature?

The preferred politics in many of the happiness books is a kind of statist communitarianism. David Myers, for example, ascribes what he calls the “social recession” (i.e., increases in divorce, illegitimacy, crime, etc.) from the seventies through now to an increase “radical individualism” and “civil and economic libertarianism” while almost entirely dismissing the disastrous unintended effects of the Great Society welfare state. (If you thinks expanded welfare and social insurance programs are a key to social cohesion and welfare, you’re surely not going to point the finger at the state for “social recession.”)

However, the happiness literature, if it makes anything clear, makes clear that our embeddedness in community, family, and networks of friends really matters for a sense of well-being. The last sentence of the Dehejia et al paper suggests that more social government social insurance will reduce the demand for insurance from religious organizations, and thus reduce demand for religious participation. And, from a standard SWB perspective, this is a very bad thing. Gruber and Mullainathan (2002) find that “the effect on self-reported happiness of moving from never attending to attending [religious services] weekly is comparable to the happiness effect of moving from the bottom to top income quartile.” As much as possible, you should want to encourage local substitutes for government social insurance that also provide the benefits of friendship, community engagement, access to networks of social capital.

There are independent philosophical reasons to support a shift away from the state and back toward civil society, in addition to potential effects on self-reported happiness.

First, as David Schmidtz argues in Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility, government welfare and insurance programs are not a matter of individual vs. collective responsibility, but a matter of internalized vs. externalized responsibility. A church community collectively internalizes responsibility for it’s various members. (The internal welfare system of the LDS church is a wonderful example of this.) State assistance simply externalizes responsibility, and makes the recipient unaccountable to anyone in his or her community, and so promotes free-riding, and “individualistic” detachment from conventional social norms, etc. A plausible alternative explanation for Myers’ “social recession” is the rise of externalization of responsibility through the vastly expanded welfare state.

Second, as John Tomasi has pointed out [pdf], the way the secular liberal welfare state crowds out alternatives, like civil-society-based social insurance, violates principles of liberal neutrality. That’s why Tomasi argues provocatively (and I think correctly) that Rawlsian political liberalism implies something like Bushian compassionate conservatism. A liberalism that takes pluralism seriously must be loathe to promote hegemonic state liberalism, but must instead empower the institutions of civil society that, in addition to promoting the internalization of responsibility, better express the plurality of American society.

In his 1999 review of Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever, a book that worries itself to death about competitition for status and relative position, Jack Hirshleifer, quoting Adam Smith to good effect, aptly points out that taxes meant to supress competition over income level is probably just a case of pushing the lump around the rug.

Overall, however, the biggest status game in town is not big spending but acquiring power over other people. In short, politics. So a likely consequence of sumptuary legislation would be more and more intense contests over the perennial question, “Who shall be king?” As usual, Adam Smith said it best, in The Wealth of Nations: “It is of the highest impertinence and presumption…in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”

Earlier on, Hirshleifer makes the excellent point that advocates of higher taxes and bigger government, who are appalled by economic inequality, are well-nigh blind to the rather more objectionable inqequalities in political power that are a necessary part of their schemes. If the objection is that consumers have irrational preferences, so that they are lead into self-defeating, utility minimizing status competitions, then the objection applies equally to the political class:

In fact, one could well argue–Adam Smith certainly did–that those charged with public spending are likely to be even more interested in conspicuous spending than private persons. Think of the tax-financed white-elephant ballparks, the ornate federal office buildings that have sprung up not only in Washington, D.C., but just about everywhere, the hypertrophied public transit systems lacking nothing but riders, the Agriculture Department’s wildly wasteful irrigation schemes. Simple corruption is very likely the major explanation, true, but politicians’ desires for “monuments” (Hoover Dam, J.F. Kennedy Airport, the Sam Rayburn Office Building) are a big part of the story behind such travesties.

Arguments for new or bigger government initiatives driven by a charge of irrational or self-defeating preferences almost always make an implicit, arbitrary, exception for the ruling class. There’s no good justification for invidious comparisons between ideal coercion and non-ideal agency, and vice versa. If you think the pattern of voluntary interaction “fails” according to some standard due to some psychological foible, you’ve taken on a burden to demonstrate that the same foible does not imply that state action will lead to an even more serious failure. This is the burden the Frank/Layard-style statist rarely carries, explaining why their conclusion is so often a destination that can be reached only by a leap of faith.

Here’s Darrin McMahon in the WSJ, in a piece subtitled, “‘The pursuit of happiness’ is about more than private pleasures”:

For in Christian, classical or Lockean terms, virtue at its highest meant serving one’s fellow citizens, working for the public welfare, furthering the public good. It followed that virtue was the indispensable means to reconcile the conflicts of individual interest.

The last sentence is correct. But the reconciliation of conflict in Lockean-American terms doesn’t entail service of fellow citizens, working for the public good, etc. Virtue in Locke, Hume, Smith, etc., etc., is for the most part about the restraint of self interest to enable social cooperation. But it is self interest, operating within the bounds of virtue, that brings the blessings of society. This is the central liberal insight.

Order need not be teleological, based in the shared pursuit of a common goal. Nor need it be authoritarian, imposed from above by force. Order requires the coordination of individual’s acting for diverse ends, and virtue is of first importance because it enables coordination at the lowest cost, ensuring the greatest mutual benefit. Conscience does not eat into the surplus of cooperation. Cops do.

To think that civil peace or social order requires concerted efforts aimed at its maintenance is to totally misunderstand the idea of liberal order and the idea of liberal virtue. Virtue makes us happy because it enables the largest cooperative surplus and therefore allows us each to do better in self-interested terms. McMahon seems to think virtue makes us happy because our souls glow or something when we pitch in for the public welfare. But that’s not the liberal or the ur-American view.

The common good does require that some of us devote our energies to the maintanence of public institutions, of civil society and government. But the decision to work within public institutions is a personal decision about the kind of life one wants to lead, and is not especially meritorious or virtuous. There is no praise we owe to the bureaucrat that we do not owe to the cosmetologist. The wisdom of market liberalism is that it recognizes that the virtues of market exchange do serve one’s fellow citizens, the public welfare, and the common good, even when it is not aimed at these things.

Happy Independence Day!

Brad DeLong takes issue with my recent attacks no utilitarianism. In reply to my claim, against Layard, that if happiness is self-evidently good, then so are lots of other things, such as freedom, DeLong writes:

The response–against which Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink–would be that Wilkinson believes that if he were to sacrifice his freedom for his happiness, that if he were to do so he would then look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life, and that he would be unhappy. If Wilkinson says otherwise–that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise–Wilkinson is simply saying, “Baa baa buff.” He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.

I wonder if DeLong has carried on a conversation in the English language. Games of rational and moral justification sometimes but rarely terminate in reasons of happiness, much less in reasons of pleasure. He must hear “Baa baa buff” almost every time someone explains himself. Or BD just refuses to listen, uncharitably reads his philosophical theories into people’s heads, and so assumes that they are offering reasons of happiness when they are evidently not. DeLong’s argument, if I am making it out correctly, is that the following proposition deserves a little linguist’s star of semantic deviance:

(a) Happiness without freedom is not worth having.

English speakers, lend me your ears! Does (a) violate the intuitive semantic constraints of it’s constituent terms?

Well, if “worth having” in English means “conducive to pleasure” it sure does. But that’s not what “worth having” means in English. That’s what it means in Benthamese, the vulgar dialect of the morally insensate (economists, Asperger’s cases, etc.) “Worth having” in English means something like” valuable” or “good,” and there is surpassingly little evidence to be gleaned from the semantic practice of competent English speakers that “valuable” and “good” are synonymous with “pleasurable” or “happy making”. (a) is far from “Baa baa buff.” In context, it’s surely true!

My defense, then, is the truth of the claim that there are conditions under which being happy would be worse than not being happy. I take it that DeLong would agree that if a mad scientist rigged his brain such that slaughtering his own beloved children would bring him the most exalted, never-ending, guilt-free bliss, this would not be happiness worth having. Or is this, too, just “baa baa buff?”

Anyway, refusing to do violence to one’s language, or, more importantly, the complexity of moral experience, in the service of an ill-supported theory does not strike me as a project of obfuscation.

More later on Delong’s inability to understand the experience machine thought experiment.

I think I need to stop arguing with Layard about utilitarianism because he’s really just too philosophically inept to take all that seriously. The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb.

If I was still TA-ing ethical theory classes, and Layard turned this in, he’d get a solid “B”:

Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for society? Why not some other goal–or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance them against each other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it.

Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.

How is it that health, autonomy, accomplishment, and freedom are not self-evidently good? Layard will want to insist that we only want these other things for the sake of happiness. But that is just so much table pounding, and it is false. I am, in fact, willing to sacrifice some measure of happiness to ensure my autonomy, or to accomplish something of great value. I would, in fact, be willing to face suffering and death if that was required to preserve my freedom. And it’s pretty easy to point out that happiness is instrumental to other values. I want happiness because I will be motivated to accomplish great things if I am happy. I am more likely to be benevolent and kind if I am happy. I am more likely to have a meaningful, successful intimate relationship. I will live longer if I am happy, and it is good to live. Etc. If we are going to admit that it makes sense to talk about things being self-evidently good, then happiness surely is one of those things. And so are all the other goods Layard mentions. He gets nowhere.

Layard is right that a plurality of values requires balancing. But there is no way around this on a personal level, and especially not on a public level.

Individual moral intelligence involves weighing competing values and making judgments about their ordering according to standards that vary with context, relationship, social role, and more. It is hard to be a good person because it is hard to make out all the morally relevant characteristics of one’s situation, and it is hard to know how to trade values against each other, and to be modest but resolute in the face of complexity–not because it is hard to be motivated to maximize something ridiculous like net aggregate utility.

Layard’s larger problem is that he totally fails to grasp that the central problem of liberalism is how to accomodate and balance the pluralitiy of value conceptions of citizens in a cosmopolitan society. That Layard thinks he is in possession of the one true philosophy of value that allows him to rank other values is quite nice for Layard. But the very fact that I am spending my time writing a blog post disagreeing with Layard about utilitarianism demonstrates that not everyone agrees that his is the correct conception of value, or the correct standard for determining public policy. And the simple fact that we are having this disagreement, whether or not Layard is right about utilitarianism, is a reason not to accept utilitarianism as the sole arbiter of our public rules. Even if utilitarianism, or any comprehensive conception of value, is true, it cannot therefore be asserted as the legitimate basis of a just society as long as people reasonably reject it. None among us has the special authority to declare that ours is the public philosophy, and others will just have to live with it, like it or not.

Ironically, Layard accuses anyone who is not a utilitarian of paternalism, because he apparently thinks that if some value is a value, then the state ought to promote it, but that if a value doesn’t register as hedons, then you’re forcing people to act in the interest of alleged values that they don’t benefit from experientially.

However, Layard is a transparent paternalist. If you think that things other than happiness are good, then Layard will just say that you are wrong, have no moral right to act for values other than happiness, and that the state may force you to do what “science” reveals to be conducive to happiness, whether you most want happiness or not.

If one has aspirations for the totalizing rule of one’s comprehensive moral conception, it seems that one should accept a fair burden of persuasion. But Layard treats classic objections to utilitarianism as annoyances, or bad manners, and brushes them off with incompetent “argumentation.” Here’s what he says about Nozick’s famous experience machine:

If offered the chance, asks Nozick, would you plug in? Of course, many people would not, for all sorts of reasons. They would not trust the machine to deliver what it promised, so they would prefer to keep their real autonomy. Or they might have obligations to others that they could not perform if they were inert. And so on. Thus this is a weak test case, especially because it describes a situation so far from our reality that we have almost become a different animal.

That the machine perfectly delivers as promised is stipulated. Inability to entertain the counterfactual–to actually conduct the thought esperiment–is not an argument against it. And “obligations to others they could not perform”? Well, yes. This is precisely the sort of thing people might worry about because people generally think they ought to meet their obligations, regardless of the hedonic payoff. That’s part of Nozick’s point, dipshit. If Layard was honest, he would bite the bullet and say, yes, plug in. And if there was an experience machine for each of us that would maximize the hedonic quality of our experience, then we would be obligated individually and collectively to forgo a real life of actual action and actual engagement, and instead climb into our pods on the Matrix pod farm, and dream sweet virtual dreams until we die. If Layard will not deign to explain to us why, despite our deep sense of revulsion, we ought to see this scenario as the happiest of all possible circumstance, he cannot expect us to acquiesce to his Benthamite Philosopher Technocrat fantasy.

Looking through the literature on happiness (those in the know say “subjective well-being,” or just SWB), it seems clear that a good number of those involved have egalitarian or welfare liberal politics. A lot of these folks profess to being utilitarians of some sort. And there seems to be a push for more redistribution, less inequality, etc. But I think I’m detecting something amiss, here.

Much of the upshot of the literature is that extra money doesn’t do much for you; that people tend become accustomed to their level of material comfort; that people have happiness set-points to which they recur after positive or negative spikes in affect. The flip side of “a lot of money doesn’t make you happy” is “not so much money doesn’t make you unhappy.” So the problem with large economic inequalities isn’t the happiness gap, because the happiness gap is small.

Now, it turns out that one’s perception of one’s place in the income distribution matters to happiness, such that people lower in the distribution are less happy in virtue of being lower in the distribution (or thinking they are). But, aside from total egalitarianism, which isn’t likely to make anyone happy, there is nothing to be done about this. There is always going to be some distribution. There is always a bottom and a top quintile. The point being, I’m a bit puzzled at this point by the attachment to utilitarianism AND SWB research AND egalitarianism.

My hunch is that these folks aren’t really utilitarians after all. They have a prior intuition about the injustice of inequality, and the justice of progressive redistribution. Then, they attempt to undermine resistance to higher tax rates on the wealthy by pointing to research that they interpret to say that this won’t make the wealthy any less happy, and so, Why worry? The trouble is, it won’t make the poor (in a country like the US where the poor are already rich) much happier either, and won’t do anything to change relative position in the distribution. So what’s the point? The point is more progressive redistribution, to which many folks are committed to prior to and independent of utilitarianism or their interest in happiness.

In a way, it turns out that dogmatic welfare liberals are just like dogmatic libertarians. I’ve run into a lot of libertarians who think that a perfect libertarian regime MUST be most conducive to happiness. Because if it wasn’t, then that would be a strong argument against the perfect libertarian regime, against which there is no strong argument. Unsurprisingly, a lot of welfare liberals think this way too. Start with your political commitments, and then argue that everything good must revolve around your fixed point. This is fun at parties, but it tends not to make for good science.

Interesting paper by Nussbaum: Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and the Social Contract.

I was already moving in a Sen/Nussbaum capabilities direction even before I started to become skeptical of the usefulness of happiness as the standard of evaluation in contractarian normative modeling. So I’m pretty interested in what Nussbaum has to say. My guess is that I’ll feel a lot like I do when I read Rawls, that he’s right about the way to think about the issue, but wrong about some of the important facts that feed into the normative analysis. Will report later.

[Update: I take it back. Nussbaum’s is not the right way to think about the issue. She basically abandons the logic of contractarian reasoning simply because it cannot straightforwardly generate obligations to redistribute to people in poor countries. She does not argue that we have such a duty; she just asserts it. This is a problem not only because she punts on the question of the source of that obligation, but because she in effect ignores the logic of stable cooperation. If a system is not mutually advantageous for its participants, there is little reason to believe it will garner compliance, and thus define a stable order. But the point of contractarian reasoning is that it is non-utopian and has the analytical resources to identify the conditions for stable order. Nussbaum ends up merely stating an aspiration based in the assertion, rather than the reasonable derivation, of obligations to others. She therefore doesn’t lay out a serious international political theory. She is, however, quite right about many of the problems of Rawls and Pogge/Beitz at the international level.]