Happiness & Public Policy

Matthew Pianalto has written a useful review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness. It looks to me like Shumaker is one of those guys who insists on making happiness coextensive with their conception of a good life, and then argues that we’re can’t be happy, even though we think we are, since our lives don’t measure up to his substantive theory of the good.

Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home” (287).

This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers. This bit is interesting:

In Schumaker’s reconstruction of the development of modern civilization, happiness emerges as a powerful ideal as people settle down into permanent communities which, surprisingly, leads to distancing of happiness from everyday life. Schumaker suggests that the development of agriculture, which allowed cities of specialized laborers to emerge (leaving farmers in the countryside to provide food), gave rise to the concept of work, as something that one must begrudgingly labor at during the day so that one can be happy (or just eat) at night. Work, for most people most of the time, is not fun, and so the concept of work distances those who must work from the happiness that they are working toward.

Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued this is one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.

[Follwup: Speaking of nomads, by packing their entire moral philosophy into their conception of happiness, thinkers like Shumaker are left having to deal with findings like this as embarassments:

The effect of modernization on the well-being of Bedouin women (n = 150) was investigated. Results show that the more modern the objective circumstances of the women’s lives, and/or the more modern the husbands’ attitudes (as perceived by their wives), the greater their subjective well-being(SWB). The women’s own attitudes affected their SWB only via interaction with their husbands’ attitudes and/or life circumstances. If the husbands’ attitudes were modern, their wives’ attitudes were not significantly related to SWB. However, if the husbands’ attitudes were traditional, then the more modern the wives’ attitudes, the lower their SWB. These findings repeated themselves, to a lesser degree, with life circumstances. The results fit the latest theoretical developments on SWB, and reflect the changes taking place within Bedouin society.

Are Bedouin women suffering from false consciousness? Is this merely subjective form of happiness too superficial to care about? Do they really know what’s good for them? Do they know that modern practices are “unsustainable”?]      

The McKibben nonsense below has moved me to share a very short excerpt from my forthcoming Cato paper:

—

The best studies are those that track people over time and see what happens to their happiness as their circumstances change. One such study used the reunification of East and West Germany—and rapidly rising incomes in the East—as a kind of natural experiment to test whether increasing incomes do make us happier. In a paper entitled “Money Does Matter!” the authors write:

average life satisfaction in East Germany increased by around 20% between 1991 and 2001, leading to a clear convergence with West Germany. Importantly, increased real household incomes in East Germany accounted for around 35–40% of this increase, which corresponds to the economists’ view that money surely matters.

On the flip-side, sudden reductions in income correlate strongly with declining subjective well-being. Hagerty and Veenhoven note that “in Russia average happiness decreased by two points following the Rubel crisis in the mid 1990s, which severely disorganized the economy. As the Russian economy began to pick up, so happiness also began to rise.”

—

Note that these are quite recent papers using state-of-the-art research methods. McKibben doesn’t even deign to actually cite a single study or social scientist by name.

—

Citations

Paul Frijters, John P. Haisken-DeNew and Michael A. Shields, “Money Does Matter! Evidence from Increasing Real Incomes and Life Satisfaction in East Germany Following Reunification,” American Economic Review 94, no. 3 (June 2004).

Ruut Veenhoven and Michael Hagerty, “Rising Happiness in Nations 1946–2004: A Reply to Easterlin,” Social Indicators Research 79 (2006).

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.

This article from the Christian Science Monitor explores new census data that shows that the poor in America own computers, dishwashers, and other appliances of convenience and amusement at historic rates. Naturally, the happiness question arises, and shows how journalists have been effectively propagandized into repeating a misleading, ideological happpiness talking point whenever good economic news arrives…

. . . by almost all measures, the data show rising well-being for all of society. And while the wealth gap may not be narrowing, the rich-poor gap in lifestyles has narrowed substantially since 1992 when measured in many of these tangible items.

“In terms of the items people have … it amazes me the number of people who are at or near the poverty line that have color TVs, cable, washer, dryer, microwave,” says Michael Cosgrove, an economist at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. That’s not to ignore the hardships of poverty, he adds, “but the conveniences they have are in fact pretty good.”

Poor, but more comfortable
The study doesn’t explore the happiness factor — whether the growing material prosperity is actually making people feel more satisfied with their lives. While economists tend to focus on things that can be measured in dollars and cents, the spiritual side of the economy has begun to garner more attention. That’s partly because some research has found that once people gain a modest sufficiency in goods, further increases in income don’t result in rising happiness.

This happiness talking point is extremely misleading. First, “don’t result in rising happiness” obscures the fact that a large majority of poor Americans already report themselves as being pretty or very happy. I think many readers would interpet this as “doesn’t do anything to pull people up from misery or unhappiness.” It would be less misleading to say “further increases in income don’t result in happy people becoming even happier.”

Second, the talking point makes it sound as if there is some general finding that implies that a doubling of my salary would have no effect on my happiness. Which, of course, is total rubbish. We’re talking about wealth within the United States, here. So, while the correlation between average income and average happiness is weak (though positive) over time or between countries–meaning that the average happiness at any given point in the distribution over the critical absolute threshold is likely to hold pretty steady over generations or between societies–the correlation within a given country at a given time is strong, and that’s the relevant measure. Since everyone lives in a particular country at a particular time, what the research has found is that if your income increases, you are likely to get an increase in self-reported happiness. At any time and place, wealthier individuals will tend to be happier than less wealthy individuals.

Now, a rise in income sufficient only to maintain your position in the distribution will be unlikely make you much happier than you already are (unless your aspirations were low). However, through their prime working years, individual’s incomes generally rise much faster than the economy grows (my income, to take a very typical example, has increased well more than 200% since I first entered the labor market). And so you can expect your rising income to have a very positive effect on your happiness through your working years, and throughout your life, if you have invested well. And this is just what the life-cycle happiness breakdown shows. It’s our growing wealth that keeps our total satisfaction with life more or less steady as our satisfaction with health and family starts to declines in our our middle age.

Journalists need to understand that the “more money won’t make you happier” talking point is, in fact, a piece of propaganda designed to weaken public support for wealth-enhancing policies. Once the data is framed correctly, there is really no reason to use the talking points. It does nothing to “balance” the story. Even if it is true that the microwaves and dishwashers of those beneath the poverty line aren’t making them happier than they already were, they are freeing up time that would otherwise be spent on cooking and doing dishes. And that’s just good.

Magisterial is not a word to be thrown around lightly, but I suspect it applies to Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. (I’ve only been through the first 100 pages, but I don’t imagine it’s going to get any less impressive.) Friedman includes an important discussion of the relation between the comparative character of the effect of income on well-being and economic growth. It was, for me, the source of a satisfying “Aha!” moment.

Friedman notes that the effect of income on well-being depends mainly on two different kinds of comparisons. First, we compare our present circumstances to our past circumstances. If we’re better off economically than we used to be, we feel better off. Second, we compare our circumstances to those of other people. If we’re doing better than our imagined peer group, we feel better; if worse, then worse.

Friedman’s insight is that these two forms of comparison in some ways substitute for one another. If almost everyone is continuously doing better than they were before, due to a steady rate of growth, the satisfaction from intra-personal comparison mitigates the tendency to compare ourselves to others. However, if economy stagnates, and most are no better off economically than they used to be, the tendency to compare ourselves to others is heightened. And this, Friedman argues, has deleterious political and social consequences.

Here is what he says:

By continually giving people a sense of living better than they or their families have in the not very distant past, sustained economic growth reduces the intensity of their desire to live better than one another. Economic growth satisfies the form of people’s aspirations for “more” that is possible for everyone to fulfill. . .

When an economy stagnates, however, the importance people attach to living better than others against whom they naturally compare themselves is more intense. The fact they cannot do so, or at least on average cannot, then takes on heightened importance in their eyes. The resulting frustration generates intolerance, ungenerosity, and resistance to greater openness to individual opportunity. . .

Mobility, either economic or social, is inherently threatening because it means the possibility of movement either up, or, more to the point, down, compared to the prevailing norms of the society as a whole. But when the average income for an economy is stagnant, people who allow others to get ahead of them are not only falling behind in relative terms but also losing ground compared to their own past living standard. They lose out from the perspective of both benchmarks. When an economy is growing, however, and per capita income is rising, those who fall behind compared to others can still be moving ahead–and if growth is sufficient, moving ahead solidly–by the standard of their own experience.

If Friedman is right about this, and I suspect he is, then this is an exceedingly important argument. A number of happiness-centric economists argue that because increasing wealth has little positive effect on happiness, due to adaptation and comparison, we shouldn’t worry about implementing policies that would reduce, or even stall, economic growth just as long those policies are increasing happiness. But if slowing or stalling growth itself heightens the negative effects of social comparison, we have a powerful argument against such policies on the very grounds that they are supposed to be justified.

I highly recommend this book.

Salvius in comments below supplies us with our quote of the day:

You can’t make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abcesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say ‘yes’.

– Terry Pratchett

I finally received David G. Myers The American Paradox in the mail. Naturally, it begins, "We Americans embody a paradox." After quoting Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," that is. But what’s the "worst of times" about our times? Myers says, "There are those who wring their hands and just as rightly worry that our civilization could collapse on its decaying moral infrastructure." Just as rightly as whom? Those who claim, "We’ve never had it so good." And then we get data showing that, yes, things are as good as ever. Swell! And the evidence that "civilization could collapse on its decaying moral infrastructure?" Well, nothing. Pretty much.

Out of wedlock births are up (down recently, but up over decades). Crime. Violence in the media. "Rampant individualism." Materialism. Etc. But none of this begins to add up to the collapse of civilization. Indeed, we’ve just seen that we’re as rich and happy as ever. Hurray! No? The paradox, if there is any, is that none of this bad stuff has made us discernibly less happy. The inference ought to be that there is no threat to civilization. The moral infrastructure is sound. "Radical individualism" and "materialism" apparently leave us as happy as our grandparents in the imagined communitarian golden age. Our main political and economic institutions are remarkably robust, even as social institutitons evolve. And we’re just about as happy as people get. "Americans Watch TV More, Get Out Less, Are Exactly as Happy as Ever." Why don’t we see stories like that?

This is the nth book in this genre that I’ve read, and I simply no longer understand them. The more intimate I am with the data they present, the more inscrutable I find the overall arc of the arguments. The lesson they each show us is that we are better off in a multitude of different ways, worse off in a few others, and as happy as we’ve ever been. The troubled and disappointed tone has come to stupefy me. It simply doesn’t make sense, relative to common sense, or to the science, to think of individual happiness as an open-ended increasing sum, rather than as homeostatic, a kind of equilibrium state. So it’s just not a mystery why our wealth or anything isn’t making us a lot happier, because we’ve already arrived.

Assuming that it is possible to compare happiness across people (and I don’t really see why not), then there is a happiest person alive. That person is probably a genetic deviant, like the tallest person, the smartest person, or the fastest person. And, the thing is, they probably aren’t that much happier than many of us. I think we have to accept the possibility that many people who are alive today are about as happy as people get. We may be banging against the upper limits of our (non-reengineered) hedonic capacity. And that’s precisely why people are looking for something else or more, or whatnot.

Because happiness is just one of the good things that makes a life go well, not the thing that makes a life go well. Being happy is like having a good pair of shoes. They’ll take you lots of places. But you still need somewhere to go. And you still need pants.

More happiness stuff:

Rummel has posted this chart from Inglehart and Klingerman’s important paper showing the relationship between political freedom (as measured by Freedom House) and happiness. It’s very clear that freedom (as well having high GNP growth, and a non-communist past–highly interrelated attributes) is good for happiness. Rummel promises to sort out the colinearit problems.

Pete Boettke and Chris Coyne have posted a draft of a paper discussing a Austrian/Public Choice approach to the happiness lit. Chris points to his LibertyGuide review of Easterbrook’s book, and says something after my own heart:

There is one final point to be made regarding the underlying paradox which Easterbrook sets out to solve - perhaps there is no paradox at all. Most people would agree money and material things are not the equivalent of happiness. Given this, why would we expect to see a correlation between an increase in progress and an increase in happiness? It is not clear the claim has ever been that prosperity will lead to the removal of all uneasiness.

Right on.

So, you know all the paradox flogging books: The Progress Paradox, The American Paradox, The Paradox of Choice. Layard begins Happiness with “There is a paradox at the heart of our lives.”

Now, I’m increasingly baffled by the idea that there is anything paradoxical afoot. Many of these books refer to “Easterlin’s Paradox,” in honor of Richard Easterlin’s famous ‘74 paper showing that average self-reported happiness has not gone up as average income has gone up. Now, like I argued in my last post, this isn’t a paradox relative to orthodox economics, because happiness isn’t a concept in the theory of orthodox economics. There is a widespread folk theory, popular among economists, that says that desire satisfaction brings happiness, and that higher incomes brings more desire satisfaction, and so higher incomes ought to bring greater happiness. But the ideas of adaptation and social comparison most often used to explain the stability of the happiness trends are also part of popular folks theories, and, I think, much more plausible prior to rigorous investigation than the economist’s money–>happiness folk theory. Its pretty obvious from personal experience, not to mention from about the entirety of our literary tradition, that we tend to take what we have for granted, that we tend to measure ourselves against others we imagine to be our peers, the money alone won’t make you happy, that what we really need is each other, etc. So, the data show we’re wealthier and that we say we’re just as happy as we used to be. Where’s the paradox? There is no paradox.

But maybe there are explanations, other than the economist’s misguided folk theory, for the bullheaded insistence in describing as a “paradox” something that is in fact predictable and intuitive relative to intuitively plausible psychological principles.

In ages of yore there was a raging debate over whether capitalism or communism was best at delivering the goods. Capitalism now reigns as undisputed champ. But the conquest of scarcity under communism was also supposed to be psychologically transformative and liberatory. And so, yeah, capitalism delivers the goods. But are we transformed? No! We’re almost exactly the same, and that’s really disappointing. If you were expecting the era of material plenitude to free our minds for higher pursuits, and to enable deeper, more meaningful engagement with our fellow men, then capitalism may seem like a bust. We’re left yearning for something else.

So, we’re wealthier than ever, and have the extra freedom that entails. We’re at least as happy as ever. (Despite what you may read in the papers, the average isn’t flat, it’s just rising very slowly.) Indeed, we’re about as happy as people have ever been, as far as we can tell. Depression, like ADHD, is “on the rise” because simply because it is promiscuously defined and diagnosed. But there must be something wrong. Bowling alone? Ennervated by too many kinds of jam? Something. Because life’s just what it’s always been, only just a little better. And we were hoping for something more, well, dramatic.