Happiness & Public Policy

Due to technical difficulties, this blog disappeared for a few days, but we’re back. More and more frequent happiness blogging shortly.

George Will has written a ridiculous but entertaining column on the finding that Republicans are happier then Democrats.

Nevertheless, normal conservatives — never mind the gladiators of talk radio; they are professionally angry — are less angry than liberals. Liberals have made this the era of surly automobile bumpers, millions of them, still defiantly adorned with Kerry-Edwards and even Gore-Lieberman bumper stickers, faded and frayed like flags preserved as relics of failed crusades. To preserve these mementos of dashed dreams, many liberals may be forgoing the pleasures of buying new cars — another delight sacrificed on the altar of liberalism.

I think that the content of the ideology has a small effect. And very few Democrats are raging, Nation-subscribing leftists (just ask the subscription department at the Nation.) I think there are likely some personality traits that predict both voting Republican and reporting higher life satisfaction.

And, hey! headline writer! The biconditional is utterly inapproriate.

Tim Harford, writing in the new Forbes, tackles the money and happiness question in an entertaining article. Especially quotable:

So, money does not buy happiness. Or does it? “In every society, at any point in time, richer people are happier,” points out Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C., who runs a blog on happiness research and public policy. “But that in itself doesn’t tell you much about the relationship between money and happiness.”

Well, that’s just my favorite part. Read the whole thing.
Over at the Fly Bottle we really like Tim’s big sex-n’-Wittgenstein finish:

Some results are predictable enough: Work is miserable, and commuting is worse. Others are not so obvious. For instance, praying is fun, but looking after the kids is not. Spending time with your friends is one of the most enjoyable things you can do, but spending time with your spouse is merely OK. In fact, parents or other relatives turn out to make more enjoyable company than the supposed love of your life.

What is perfectly clear, though, is that socializing with anyone except your boss makes you feel good. Sex is best of all. This is handy advice at last. But what if you are having sex with your boss? Whereof economists cannot speak, we must remain silent.

Layard’s advice is good. I doubt Oswald was really trying to say that if you’re depressed, wait until you’re older. It is worth noting that satisfaction in about every life domain other than the financial declines as we age. So don’t think this “money can’t buy you happiness” schtick means you can go chintzy on the 401K. When your knees break down, your eyes start to go, half your friends have died, and your kids never call anymore, money is the main thing buying you happiness. (See Easterlin. Head right for the graphs in the appendix.)

The Pew poll mentioned below confirms a longstanding trend: Republicans say they are happier than Democrats. This year, 45% of Republicans said they were “very” happy as opposed to 29% of Democrats. That’s a big gap! Here’s the the 30+ year trendline from Pew:

This stability is interesting in part because, I take it, that the demographic composition of Republican and Democratic voters has changed not insignificantly over the last 30 years. Is that right? Anyway, what accounts for Dem.-Rep. gap? Well, it’s not income. Republicans report themselves as happier at all points on the income distribution, as this Pew graph shows:

So what’s the deal? Here’s the Pew folk

[The regression] analysis shows that the most robust correlations of all those described in this report are health, income, church attendance, being married, and, yes, being a Republican. Indeed, being a Republican is associated not only with happiness, it is also associated with every other trait in the cluster.

Clean-livin’ Christians are more likely to be in good health, go to church, be married, and vote Republican.
What doesn’t the study mean? In today’s Colorado Springs Gazette, hometown paper of the Focus on the Family folk, I am quoted thus:

Does membership in the GOP really make people happy? Probably not, said Will Wilkinson, who studies happiness for the Cato Institute. The bliss is probably connected to some other facet of life that also inclines people to be Republicans, he said.

“People might read that and say, ‘I’d like to be happy, maybe I should be a Republican.’ It definitely doesn’t mean that,” Wilkinson said.

Sorry Dobsonites!

Assuming that the entire Dem.-Rep. difference doesn’t disappear when controlling for demographic variables, what psychological traits would you guess predict both higher self-reports and Republicanism?

The Pew Research Center released a big report today on happiness in the U.S., “Are We Happy Yet.” I’m just now digging in, but I’ll have a lot to say about it tomorrow, I’m sure. For now, let me just leave you with this:

I’ve just noticed that my Reason review of Richard Layard’s Happiness, “Happiness Is…Higher Taxes,” is now online. Check it out, and please tell me what you think.

R.J. Rummel has posted a nice summary of Inglehart and Klingermann’s excellent paper, Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness [pdf].

. . . they did a multiple regression of well being against measures of a nation’s economic development, whether it was historically ruled by Protestant elites or not, its years under communist rule, and its measure of freedom. These variables account for 80 percent of the variation in well being, a remarkable fit. They then removed independent variables with low significance in stages to achieve of fit of 78 percent of the variance with three significant variables, which in the order of their significance are: GNP per capita, years under communist rule, and freedom. Aside from applying sample tests of significance to a universe of cases, a problem with their analysis, is the high multicollinearity among these three variables (on this problem, see my blog here). Without eliminating this intercorrelation, it is impossible from this regression alone to determine what variables are dominant.

The whole post’s worthwhile.

I’ve just received Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis and so far it is the best “how to be happy” book I’ve come across. Good combination of classical wisdom, current research, and good sense. For those who don’t know of him, Haidt is a first-rate social psychologist at UVA who works on moral emotion and cognition.

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.

Another great thing about chatting with Carl the other day is the pointer he gave me to the work of Dan Haybron, a philosopher at St. Louis University. Dan has written a couple of the papers that I’ve been trying in vain to find. His web page is a treasure trove. His paper Do We Know How Happy We Are: One Some Limits of Affective Introspection and Recall makes the skeptical case I have been trying to make, based on the same research I have been looking at, much better than I have so far been able to make it. I’m delighted to see this paper in part because it helps me know that I’m not crazy.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self-assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are wholly unaware of them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block’s controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self-reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways.

The abstract doesn’t really capture the core of what I’m interested in here, which is the reliability of self-report survey instruments. The paper contains a very trenchant and cogent critique.

Now, I’ve been arguing that the happiness surveys fail to measure increases in average objective happiness. I suppose it reveals my priors to admit that it really hadn’t seriously occurred to me that they could be failing to measure decreases. Haybron seems to think this is a distinct possibility.

Here is a Haybron’s conclusion:

There is a family I know—I will call them the Wilsons—whose members are quite amazingly loud. Wonderful people they are, but the din from their constant shouting, thumping, and crashing about is, for the unseasoned visitor, almost unbearable. Yet they seem to have no idea there’s anything at all unpleasant or odd about it, since it is perfectly normal for them. Those who know them see it differently: however hardened their sensibilities might have become, it’s almost certainly an unpleasant place for the family too. (It must be.) It is worth pondering whether mainstream American society might not be a little like the Wilsons: oblivious, and more or less inured to, a noisy, obnoxious, stressful, and spiritually deflating way of life.

Of course,Haybron’s priors are revealed in the fact that he doesn’t seem to have considered that we might be rather better off than we think. This kind of dispute brings home, I think, the need for a long-term longitudinal physical correlates of happiness study. My guess is that some correlates of unhappiness (stress/cortisol levels, e.g., ) may have gone up, but that some correlates of happiness (some kinds of dopiminergic activity, e.g.) may have also gone up. The multi-dimensional physical constitution of real happiness will complicate efforts to show unambiguous increases or declines, especially since there may be no generally valid way to weigh the disutility of cortisol against the utility of dopamine, or whatever, in terms of real happiness.

I just got off the phone with Carl Craver, a smart philosopher of neuroscience (yes, redundant) at Wash U in St. Louis. I had some vague ideas about brains and happiness and I wanted to talk to somebody who not only understands brains, but philosophy of science, and so forth. In trying to formulate one of my vague ideas to Carl, I think I semi-successfully clarified something worthwhile to myself. It’s not what I was trying to clarify, but I’ll take it! Thanks, Carl!

So . . . here’s a datum that needs explaining:

Self-reported happiness is stable over the past 50 years–the percentages of the population reporting themselves in each category has not shifted significantly.

Here are two hypotheses that account for this fact:

(1) Adaptation, aspiration, and/or social comparison affect the real qualitative feel of subjective states, such that the way people feel now (in the various categories in the distribution) is essentially the same as the way people felt fifty years ago.

(2) Adaptation, aspiration, and/or social comparison affect the way people report
the way they feel, such that the percentages of people who say they feel “very happy,” etc. remain pretty constant, although the real qualitative feel of their subjective states now (in the various categories in the distribution) is not essentially the same as it was fifty years ago. More people are in fact happier now, but the reporting mechanisms keep moving the goal posts.

My gut says strongly that (2) is correct. This is not to say that adaptation, etc. do not at all affect the real quality of our subjective states. I think they do. But not enough to have kept the real quality of happiness totally static over time. (Also, it might turn out that, say, adaptation is a real effect, while social comparison is a reporting effect or vice versa. But I don’t want to get too complicated just now.)

How do you test this? Well, is it really that hard? There is ample reason to believe that self-reports contain real information. However, I suspect that the information they do contain is not not very usefully comparable across time and/or place. Nonetheless, we can say with a high level of certainty—due to various kinds of self-report (there is no other way)—that certain hormones and neurotransmitters, etc. correlate with feeling good, and others correlate with feeling bad. Seratonin, dopamine, oxytocin: good. Cortisol, etc.: bad. Same with certain distinctive patterns of neural activation. My friend Paul Zak takes blood samples and measures oxytocin levels to see how trusting people are. (He doesn’t use self-reports, but real performance in economic games containing an assurance problem. It should also be noted gratuitously that Paul is one of Wired’s 10 Sexiest Geeks for 2005.) It should in principle be possible to measure the quantity of particular substances in people’s system, or the activity levels of certain parts of the brain (generally involving a number of these substances) as a proxy for the way people really feel, as opposed to the way they say they feel.

So here’s the idea: Get a good sized random sample of people in a particular society (or several societies). Measure their happiness-relevant vitals again and again over time—say, twenty years—and see what you get.

My predictions:

(a) There are multiple bases for good and bad self-reports. For example, some “very happy” people may have very consistently low cortisol levels. (Buddhist happy.) Some “very happy” people have very high status-related seratonin and testosterone levels, with a moderately high amount of cortisol. (Big honcho happy.)

(b) Many of the variables that predict high self-reports, such as income, autonomy, sociality, etc., will be shown to correlate with slightly different physical bases of good feelings. Some variables will be more seratonin related. Some variables will be more oxytocin related. Etc.

(c) The composition of the physical basis of high self-reports changes as we age.

(d) Over time, we will see shifting of the distribution of different kinds of happiness (e.g., Buddhist happiness vs. big honcho happiness) within the self-report categories due to changes in cultural, social and economic institutions.

and, finally,

(e) in year twenty (assuming social stability and a continuation of the general trend in economic growth) the percentage of the population having the physical profile(s) that predicted “very happy” in year one will have increased significantly, but the self-reports will not reflect this change.

There’s probably already good evidence for (a)-(c). But let’s really find out.

My intutions here were heavily primed by reading Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100. Fogel advances a very physical conception of economic productivity in terms of calories consumed and calories spent. I was astonished to see the huge spike in economic productivity with the discovery of the germ theory of disease and the advent of adequate sanitation. Prior to this, almost everyone had some kind of infection almost all the time, and a big portion of the calorie budget went into fighting infection, and not productive labor. If you’re not constantly sick, you have more energy and can work harder longer.

The thing that struck me is that people who were sick all the time cannot have really felt all that well. But people who were sick all the time wouldn’t have a good idea of what it meant to feel not sick all the time, either. That’s just the way things were. And I suspect that had folks in 1880 or whenever answered happiness surveys, they’d mostly say they were doing pretty good, like now. I bet you’d see a upward shift in the self-reports with good public health measures. But I highly doubt the shift would really correspond to the real change in what it felt like on the inside to move from really high to pretty low rates of infection. (I’d like to know the physical correlates for the lousy feelings of bacterial and viral infection. Couldn’t we measure those, too?)

So, there’s a research program for the taking! If you’re a super-rich patron looking to make a big contribution to the science of human well-being, well, you know how to reach me!

Thanks to commenter Conchis for bringing this important paper to my attention.

Heterogeneity in Reported Well-being: Evidence from Twelve European Countries by Andrew Clark, Fabrice Etilé, Fabien Postel-Vinay, Claudia Senik, Karine Van der Straeten

CONCLUSION. This paper modelled the relationship between income and self-reported well-being using random-effect techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. We show that people are different, and in more complicated ways than just having different intercepts. We are not able to distinguish between heterogeneity in the utility function (translating income into utility) and heterogeneity in the expression function (turning utility into reported well-being). We can, however, strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals carry out these joint transformations in the same way.

We identify four classes of individuals, and show that the “marginal well-being effect of income” is very different across these classes. In particular one class is satisfied and has a high marginal well-being effect, while another is dissatisfied and has a low marginal wellbeing effect. Descriptive statistics reveal demographic and country patterns between classes. This has at least two important implications. First, in a political economy sense, as the effect of income differs sharply across classes (and classes are not independently distributed between countries), we would expect average opinion regarding economic policies to differ across countries. . . This is a subject for ongoing research.

Perhaps more importantly, our results suggests that aggregating data across diverse populations may be a dangerous practice. Individuals, who seem to fall naturally into a number of different classes, differ in ways that are far more complicated than those picked up by a simple fixed effect. The trend towards comparative research in social science, whereby data from different countries are compared, is laudable. Nonetheless, our results suggest that the blind aggregation of diverse populations risks producing empirical results that are false for everybody.

The econometrics in the happiness literature is clearly edging its way toward adequacy. What we have had is not quite useless. But now, minimally credible statistics that take into account individual variation throws a huge wrench into attempts to ground highly specified policy on happiness studies. Heterogeneity is very problematic for would-be benevolent technocrats. First, they’re stuck with a big information problem. They’d need to know about dynamiclly shifting individual differences at a finer grain of detail than is possible. Second, heterogeneity prevents you from basing policy on the welfare of an “representative” agent. If it is true, and it is true, for example, that income has a big positive effect on some people’s happiness, or that simply keeping very busy has a big positive effect, then tax policy aimed at incentivizing the consumption of leisure against the production of wealth is going to cause a lot of immediate micro-harm, not just the delayed macro-harm of slower growth. “Truces” in income/status “arms races” are very unlikely to be pareto improvements. (Which means the situation is not accurately characterized as an “arms race.”) This may not bother a Benthamite technocrat willing to overlook individual harms if the net utility is positive. But the Benthamite is still stuck with the informational problem. And ignoring the separateness of persons is terribly wrong, which is why Benthamism is false. Morally legitimate policy is left having to take pluralism and the separateness of persons into account, which generally means worrying primarily about the structure of the basic framework of interaction, trying to ensure that it is sufficiently general and neutral between reasonable sets of beliefs and preferences.

Also, back to the paper, note the inability to “distinguish between heterogeneity in the utility function (translating income into utility) and heterogeneity in the expression function (turning utility into reported well-being).” The recognition that there is a distinction between real well-being and self-reported well-being has big implications. We don’t know to what extent talk tracks fact unless we know how talk relates to fact. The recognition of variation in the expression function throws in a further wrinkle. If the expression function was homogenous, discovery of that function would allow us to infer real well-being from talk. But if there is variation in the reporting function, and that variation cannot be accounted for by a general law-like principle, then aren’t we getting pretty close to empirical proof of the near-uselessness of self-reports as a proxy for real well-being?

For Bob, income has a big positive effect on well-being, but, despite growing happiness from growing riches, Bob in his modesty won’t ever put himself in the highest category of reported well-being. Karen is sort of miserable, and higher income means almost nothing to her. But she’s a shallow, ideological, free-market economist, and worries that there must something wrong with her for not being happier given her wealth. So she says she’s “pretty happy” even though she’s not. Bob and Karen report themselves as being in the same category of self-reported well-being. What do we know about well-being? What do we know about the relationship between income and well-being?

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

ABSTRACT. In this paper we investigate how life satisfaction (or happiness) is affected by a substantial increase in real income. Our context is East Germany in the decade following reunification, and we implement a new fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction and develop a decomposition approach that accounts for new entrants and panel attrition. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we find that 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.

The great thing about this paper is not that it tells us that money matters, but that it is better statistics, doing something to take into account individual fixed effects.

I also highly recommend Frijter’s and Ferrer-Carbonell’s paper comparing various statistical methods for analyzing happiness data. The thing that really sticks out in their comparisons is that methods that take into account individual differences, like personality, produce quite different, but more likely accurate, results. “We call for more research into the determinants of the personality traits making up these fixed effects.” Me too! It’s also fun to note that the various methods disagreed a lot about whether kids were good or bad for self-reported happiness. Almost every method shows that money is good for SWB, by the way, albeit weakly so (better than being married, or having kids, not as good as being healthy.)

I liked the concluding thought in the methodology paper:

Finally, a note on the unimportance of income for happiness. The coefficient of 0.11 of log-income in the OLS individual fixed-effect model, implies that an individual would need an income increase of over 800000% to achieve an increase of one for general satisfaction on a (0,10) scale. This in itself raises the question of why individuals expend so much effort on obtaining more income to the extent that most economists since Jevons (1871) have taken this as the main human motivation. The psychologists Brickman and Cambell (1971) long ago answered this question by proposing that humans can be on an ‘hedonic treadmill’ in which they are constantly chasing objectives that cease to be satisfying once reached. This often repeated argument would fit the finding that average satisfaction hardly increases in countries where incomes increase (Diener and Suh, 1999; Kenny, 1999), but it would seem to need a high degree of imperfect forecasting and self-delusion on the side of individuals to be true. Is there perhaps more to individual choice than happiness?

Now, as you know, I think the self-report data is quite unlikely to accurately track individual or average increases in objective well-being, so I think the correlation between the self-report and income understates the correlation between real well-being and income. That said, I like their concluding thought. Even if folks do have some problems with forecasting how they will feel, surely you’d need to be pretty silly to have the experience of something failing to satisfy you hedonically over and over again and yet keep doing it because you’re looking for hedonic satisfaction. Donald Davidson would not accept this! The best explanation is that people keep doing it because they’re looking for something else.

Can People Feel Happy and Sad at the Same Time?, by Jeff T. Larsen, A. Peter McGraw, John T. Cacioppo

ABSTRACT. The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. M. Carroll’s (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model ( J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994 ) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated and extended past research by showing that whereas most participants surveyed in typical situations felt either happy or sad, many participants surveyed immediately after watching the film Life Is Beautiful , moving out of their dormitories, or graduating from college felt both happy and sad. Results suggest that although affective experience may typically be bipolar, the underlying processes, and occasionally the resulting experience of emotion, are better characterized as bivariate.

This is a cool paper. It suggests lots of interesting hypotheses. They mention that co-activation of positive and negative affect is likely to be dissonant, unpleasant, and short-lived. It strikes me that good literature, for example, may turn on the artful co-activation of negative and positive affect systems. Might an “interesting” life have to do with relatively often occupying complex precincts of the evaluative space? Worthwhile.

I nominate Andrew Oswald of Warwick University as the new champion of the egregiously bad happiness policy op-ed. In this Financial Times piece (unfortunately behind paywall) Oswald touches on every worn trope of politics-masquerading-as-social-science happiness studies, and in the process reveals himself to be less than honest.

Oswald writes:

The hippies, the Greens, the road protesters, the downshifters, the slow-food movement–all are having their quiet revenge. Routinely derided, the ideas of these down-to-earth philosophers are being confirmed by new statistical work by psychologists and economists.

He is clearly excited by this.

Oswald goes on unreflectively to accept the quality of the survey data, and then gives badly undersupported interpretations of that data in order to reach his desired conclusion. This is a problem given things Oswald has said elsewhere, as we shall see. For now, let me stress, as I’ve pointed out on this blog, the happiness surveys and the depression data prima facie contradict one another. Either this hasn’t occurred to Oswald, or it doesn’t bother him, for he jumps, in the usual style, straight from the survey data to the depression data:

Using more formal measures of mental health, rates of depression in countries such as the UK have increased.

As I’ve also emphasized, the depression data are so corrupted by the arbitrary boundaries of the diagnostic category with which these “formal measures” are made, and by the structure of perverse incentives encompassing pharmaceutical companies who would like to sell anti-depressant drugs, people who may or may not be depressed who would like to get them, and doctors who would like to be reimbursed by insurance companies for prescribing them. And, again, allegedly rising rates of depression do not show up in the percentages of people who report themselves in the lowest category of happiness on surveys.

Fourth, suicide statistics paint a picture that is often consistent with such patterns.

Check that sentence out. I like the “often consistent.” In the hedge there is a glimmer of conscience. But here we go anyway:

In the US, even though real income levels have risen sixfold, the per-capita suicide rate is the same as in the year 1900.

I was just looking at the suicide rates the other day. First, it is true that they are remarkably stable. The only big spike detectable in the 20th C. US data came at the Great Depression. Speaking of depression, wouldn’t you think that severe depression was a contributing cause of suicide? And so wouldn’t a stable trend in suicide be prima facie evidence against an explosion of depression? Well, you would think. And isn’t the assumption of Oswald’s proposition simply baffling? That increases in real income ought to decrease the suicide rate? Has anyone ever thought that not enough money was the main cause of suicide? Might it not be just as likely that that the stability of the trend has to do with the stability in the trend of jilted lovers, frustrated dreamers, number of people with organic mental disorders, sudden losses of status, etc. The statistic in isolation means exactly nothing. “Often consistent.” And so very often not! Why mention it at all, as if you know something? The data is also “often consistent” with the hypothesis that the suicide rate remains steady at a very low proportion of overall deaths during times of high economic growth, but spikes during times of no growth, or constriction, such as the Great Depression. I don’t know that that’s not true. Does Oswald?

Toward the end Oswald writes:

Economists faith in the value of growth is diminishing. That is a good thing and will slowly make its way down into the minds of tomorrow’s politicians.

And thus it is clear what Oswald’s aim is. I know a number of economists read this blog? Tell me, is your “faith” in the value of growth diminishing? Do you think the world would be a more happy or a less happy place if world GDP growth slowed, such that the incomes of all the billions of people living in abject poverty (for whom the effect of income on happiness appears to be profound) grew at slower rate? I wonder Benjamin Friedman thinks!

The real kicker here is that it is quite clear that Oswald knows that the survey data are too ambiguous to actually sustain the interpretation he puts on them, and therefore too weak to actually support his politics.

In this short, stimulating paper, Oswald makes an excellent point about the self-report surveys:

The key point is that we do not know the shape of the function relating ‘reported happiness’ to actual happiness. This is a serious problem when researchers try to make statements about the curvature of relationships — though not as serious when we talk, as most of the happiness literature does, about the direction of relationships.

To put this in a different way, happiness survey answers tell us which way is up or down. They do not persuasively tell us the speed of the rise or fall.

It seems reasonable — given only mild assumptions — to argue that we have established, say, that greater income buys greater happiness, ceteris paribus. But in my judgment we have not done sufficiently more than this to allow us to be confident about rates of change. [emphasis mine]

What is Oswald saying? He’s saying that the survey data are an incredibly blunt instrument, and may be useful for detecting gross relationships, but otherwise not so useful because we don’t even know if there is a lawlike relationship (the kind necessary to support valid scientific generalizations) between the way people talk about happiness and the way that we actually feel.

(Oh, and it is reasonable to say that we have established that other things equal greater income buys greater happiness. I don’t think the readers of the FT were informed of this.)

Later in the same short paper, Oswald throws out a quite plausible hypothesis about why rates of self-reported happiness might not increase, even if the objective quality of subjective experience was improving. While he doesn’t draw this out, if true, the surveys would under some conditions obscure even the direction of the relationship between talk and fact by obscuring that there is a direction of the relationship.

Imagine, for example, that there is constant marginal utility of income, but that people, as they get happier, mark themselves happier on a questionnaire scale but do so in a way in which they are intrinsically reluctant to approach the upper possible level on the questionnaire form (the 5 on a 1-5 scale, say). Then the reporting function itself is curved, and we will have the illusion that true diminishing marginal utility of income has been shown.

Which is just to say, Oswald knows perfectly well that happiness surveys may systematically fail to track increases in well-being. And so we must conclude that he is pretending in public to know things that he does not know; that he is representing to the public mere conjecture as “scientifically proven” fact in order to serve his already settled political convictions. It is no doubt inconvenient to be fully honest about your own methodological objections to data you would like to use to foist the politics of “the hippies, the Greens,” etc. upon the unwilling. But, in the end, it is also inconvenient to sully your reputation by torturing data to fit your dogmas.

This article in the NBER Digest presents a nice summary of Oswald and Branchflower’s paper Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia in which they criticize the UN’s Human Development Index for failing to incorporate SWB data.

Happiness measures, Blanchflower and Oswald add, “can tell politicians and others how citizens value the different effects upon well-being of diverse influences such as unemployment, the divorce rate, real income, friendship, traffic jams, crime, health, and much else. If we can learn to exploit the power of statistical happiness equations, it should be possible to make public policy choices in a more coherent way than before.”

Branchflower and Oswald seem to make the apparently common error of seeing averages of the way lots of people filled out happiness self-report surveys with “how citizens value” this or that. It just doesn’t follow.

For example, divorce rates. Do people really value the effects of the divorce rate? (”Why so sad, Barry?” “Oh, the divorce rate went up this year.” WTF!?) What people want to know is whether their divorce (or their sister’s or friend’s) will make them and/or their kids happier. And, of course, it depends. For some, divorce is a huge relief, a new chapter, etc. For other’s it’s the end of the world. If we toted up the self-reported SWB of all divorced people to tell whether, on average, divorce makes you happier or not, we’d know almost nothing worth knowing, given the likely high variance in the sample. What’s worth knowing is whether YOU are the sort of person who will gain or lose. We couldn’t care less if the extremes of misery are more acute than the extremes of elation, producing a mildly negative average.

And, anyway, how happy a divorce is going to turn out for you just isn’t that important. Maybe it’ll make you miserable, but unless you get a divorce from the controlling creep, you’ll never become the person you need to become. Maybe the problem is precisely that you like the lack of responsibility that comes from being controlled. The fact that you’re NOT going to like leaving is why you should. Or maybe you’ll be miserable if you stay in the marriage, but you should just suck it up, because the kids need you there, and you made a promise that you should keep. Knowing the happiness averages helps us frame divorce policy how? And what does the self-reported SWB of everybody—divorced, affected by divorce, totally untouched by it—correlated to the divorce rate tell us. Probably nothing, and certainly not how “citizens value” the effects of the divorce rate. Definitely nothing that enhances our ability to make more coherent policy choices.

Will I ever tire of noting that happiness and value can come apart? Probably not. Will I ever tire of noting that self-reported well-being, which is a poor proxy for happiness, may have only an extremely tenuous relationship to value? Probably not. Will you tire of being reminded that poor proxies for things that may or may not be morally relevant in particular cases are unlikely to be extremely useful tools in our efforts to engineer a better society. Probably. But until you do . . .

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.

Speaking of Darrin McMahon, here’s a review of his Happiness: A History by philosopher Gordon Marino. I’m really looking forward to picking this up. I think historical works like this should help would-be social scientists to see that happiness is a cultural conception that has evolved a great deal over time, and continues to evolve. The cultural boundedness of happiness implies that it is not particularly scientific to pluck our current conception of happiness out of history, pickle it in a jar of formaldehyde, and pretend that happiness studies are plumbing the timeless essence of a universal natural psychological kind, which, it just happens, uniquely exemplifies moral value.

But let me gripe some about the review. About halfway through, Marino mentions “our own age of near-pandemic depression,” and then, later writes:

. . . McMahon seems convinced by recent studies indicating that we are each endowed with a kind of emotional set point. According to this view, most humans are existentially unflappable. Whether it be winning the lottery or losing our jobs, after an initial reaction we settle back down into the same old repertoire of moods. As the scientists of happiness have it, we are both amazingly resilient against tragedy and remarkably resistant to radically positive change. In a footnote, McMahon concedes that depression stands as an exception to this rule — and quite an exception it is, because, according to an article cited in “Happiness,” millions of people are on antidepressants. I have had my boat rocked a few times in life and I have watched a few others go over the falls, and my experience roils against the view that, emotionally speaking, nothing ever really changes, or at least not for long.

And millions of people take Vitamin C supplements indicating . . . what? A near-pandemic of scurvy? Again, I’ll point to my depression posts here, and here, my depression op-ed, and the Horwitz and Wakefield essay that got me on this kick.

In yesterday’s NYT, Darrin McMahon, an historian at Florida State, has some good advice about the pursuit of happiness: don’t pursue it. That’s a wortwhile lesson I associate mainly with Bishop Butler and Henry Sidgwick. However, despite the good advice to “just do it,” as it were, McMahon also repeats a happiness studies chestnut that deserves to die a brutal death. Or, at least, deserves to be confronted with enough skepticism that people will stop repeating it without further explanation or justification. Or a brutal death.

Sociologists like to point out that the percentage of those describing themselves as “happy” or “very happy” has remained virtually unchanged in Europe and the United States since such surveys were first conducted in the 1950’s. And yet, this January, like last year and next, the self-help industry will pour forth books promising to make us happier than we are today. The very demand for such books is a strong indication that they aren’t working.

Should that be a cause for concern? Some critics say it is. For example, economists like Lord Richard Layard and Daniel Kahneman have argued that the apparent stagnancy of happiness in modern societies should prompt policymakers to shift their priorities from the creation of wealth to the creation of good feelings, from boosting gross national product to increasing gross national happiness.

McMahon doesn’t say whether or not he is concerned, or sign on to the Kahneman/Layard program, but he does repeat the peculiar illogic by which one is tempted to move from the fact that self-report numbers are stable to the idea that we ought to shift priorities from creating to wealth to creating good feelings. I wish I’d stop seeing this sort of thing in the New York Times. So let us review the numerous reasons why the stability of happiness self-report surveys need not imply some kind of policy failure that needs correction.

FRAMING

The main explanations for the lack of increasing happiness are also explanations for the lack of talk about increasing happiness. So the self-report data may be reflecting the psychological processes that determine the avowal or self-ascription of subjective states, rather than reflecting the objective character of the subjective states themselves.

The main explanations for the “very happy” flatline are (a) adaptation and (b) social comparison. Now, if people don’t have a reliable “hedonometer,” which we can consult through introspection to discover the objective quality of our subjective experience, then we should expect that self-reports will be subject to habituation and comparison effects.

ADAPTATION. If you ask someone who has been wearing rose colored lenses for a week what color things appear, they will underestimate the objective rosy quality of their subjective experience, due to habituation. If you switch lenses the next week to an even more intense rose, the judgment of the rosiness of experience will likely stay pretty much the same. There is no reason to expect judgments of the hedonic quality of experience to much differ.

SOCIAL COMPARISON. The lack of a hedonometer requires a social rather than a private, internal standard for self-reports. When asked how happy one is, one will compare one’s narrative about one’s inner life, and one’s behavior, against a widely accepted cultural conception of what it means to feel and behave happily. If the entire population is becoming objectively happier over time, then cultural meaning of “very happy” will shift. Our talk about happiness is the result of comparing our representation of ourselves with our representation of the happiness scale, and our representation of where others lie on that scale. So even if people are getting objectively happier (whatever we take that to mean), we should expect self-reports to remain stable due to the shifting goalposts of the social meaning of happiness. It’s the same process by which people who make 150 large a year come to claim that they are middle class.

LIMIT AVERSION. This is closely related to what I’ll call “limit aversion.” Since there is no hedonometer, people have no way of telling whether there is an upper bound to happiness, or where the upper bound might be. So they don’t know if they are at the upper bound. Yet it is natural to believe that there are others who are happier, or to suppose that one might become happier still. So people who are at or near the upper bound may be hesitant to report that they are in the highest category of happiness. An illustrative anecdote: I’m pretty sure that, overall, I’m rather better off now than I was ten years ago. I know that I probably would have reported myself as “pretty happy” and not “very happy” then, and I would report that I’m “pretty happy” now, since I just don’t think I’m the happiest kind of person. And I suspect that I’ll feel the same way in another ten years, even if my well-being improves to the same degree. I know that I dislike the idea that my happiness level may have maxed out. I don’t suspect that others are that different.

UPPER BOUNDS

The idea that humans have some kind of happiness bank that could possibly have an ever-increasing balance is just silly.

However, the happiness bank assumption seems to be behind all the “paradox of prosperity” books, in which the authors pretend to find it alarming that the balance in our happiness accounts does not have a linear relationship to the balance in our bank accounts. Yet, as far as I can tell, no one has ever really defended the happiness bank hypothesis.

HOMEOSTATIC HAPPINESS. It turns out that no one really has a good account of what happiness really is. The best explanation of the nature of certain kinds of positive affect, which some somewhat vulgarly identify with happiness, is that it is a homeostatic mechanism designed to readjust after achieving a goal in order to keep us always wanting more. The prospect of happiness-as-pleasure is a Darwinian carrot that keeps us pulling hard in harness, and it just wouldn’t work if we stayed happy as clams when we got what we wanted. The homeostatic conception of happiness explains why hedonic adaptation may be adaptive. And it also suggests, to use the dumb analogy, that there may be something like a balance limit to our happiness accounts. Additionally, each person’s limit is likely a largely a function of their individual psychological disposition.

The fact that the wealthy liberal democracies are all toward the top in cross-country comparisons of average self-reported happiness, and that the “very happy” numbers aren’t rising, might indicate that these societies are close to as good as it gets—with a large proportion of their populations at their limit–not stalled and in need of a policy jump start.

And, back to something McMahon said, the fact that self-help happiness books continue to fly off the shelves does not really imply that that they do not work. It may tell us that self-help books are part of what have helped us achieve so much abiding happiness for lo these many decades. Or that people just like reading them. Given the simply embarrassing lack of longitudinal studies (it is, of course, hard to get tenure while waiting 20 years for the data to come in), for all we know people who read self-help books generally are happier, but they are offset in the aggregate by people miserably addicted to Us Weekly. If the happiness bank hypothesis was true, then a flat happiness trend line plus high self-help sales might speak volumes. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.

So, it may be that we are in fact getting happier, and that the surveys can’t track the shift, due to adaptation, social comparison, limit aversion, and other phenomena governing the self-reporting of subjective states. Or it may be that some form or other of market-based liberal democracy is pretty the best we can do from a policy perspective, happiness-wise. Many of the policies that Layard pefers, for example, are already in place in this or that Scandinavian social democracy. And the difference in happiness between these countries and other wealthy basically liberal market societies is trivial or non-existent.

I’ve obviously gone way off the McMahon hook. But let me take the occasion to share my own conclusions about happiness and policy so far:

• Many people in rich market liberal societies are getting happier and the surveys miss it.
• Many people in these societies are at or near their hedonic limits. (Note: I think it may be possible for some people to push the limits through the right combination of diet, exercise, meditation, counseling, adventure, simplification, etc. But there are many others for whom this kind of stuff is pretty much impossible without fundamentally altering the kind of person they are. And I think most people, once they hit a certain threshold, are happy enough that they could just care less about further maximizing the positive qualitative character of their background affect. Dharma just wasn’t that much better off than Greg, once he loosened up a little.)
• Even if everyone was maxed out, there would still be a distribution of people through all the survey categories due to individual psychological differences. A society in which everyone is as happy as they are likely to get is not a society in which everyone reports that they are “very happy.”
• There is very little policy-wise that will have a large impact happiness-wise in societies that are already have advanced market institutions and liberal-democratic political institutions.
• The people who are least likely to be maxed out, and most likely to benefit from upward hedonic mobility in any society, are the poorest people.
• The policy lever most likely to help poor people out is whatever lever maximizes GDP growth. So prioritizing the creation of good feelings requires prioritzing the creation of wealth.
• If a society has a class of people who appear economically stuck, such that they tend, generation after generation, to see little benefit from growth, even if benefits are otherwise widely distributed, try to unstick them by removing things like bad welfare policy, or labor policies that price low skilled workers out of the market. Often it is crucial to break down informal cultural norms that discourage the accumulation of human capital, but there’s not much liberal policy can do here.
• Since most people in rich societies are already pretty happy, people who care about happiness ought to worry less about marginal policy changes in the US and Europe and worry more about people who do not already live in rich societies. The best thing we can do for them is free trade, more hospitable immigration policies, and fiscal policies that maximizes world GDP growth.
• Races for positional goods shouldn’t concern us.
• Happiness as we tend to think of it is not a natural kind, but a culturally loaded syndrome of feeling and behavior. It is far from the only moral and political value, and shouldn’t be our sole standard for evaluating policy.

In conclusion . . . You don’t need to be a philosopher of science to know that theory is undetermined by data. But it appears that lots of happiness studies folk either don’t know, or need to be reminded. The most plausible interpretation can’t simply be read off the data, and, to my mind, the most plausible interpretation probably isn’t one that supports actively trying to design policy that prioritizes creating good feelings over creating wealth. An obvious surface reading of the data that requires no fancy framing effects rigmarole says that we are, as far as we can tell, at least as happy as we have ever been, which is very happy. Why prefer “we are getting no happier” over “we have been, and remain, extremely successful at creating happiness?” The main reason why, I take it, is that it’s impossible to use the happiness data to drum up demand for one’s favorite unpopular policies without framing it in a way that makes it look like there’s some kind of problem that needs to be fixed. If you say that data show that we’re just as happy as our grandparents in America’s nuclear family, bowling together, Leave it to Beaver golden age, we’ll never socialize medicine! Anyway, the point is: at the very least, you need to at least tryto eliminate the most plausible competing interpretations of the data before you move on to try to use happiness data to mount your favorite policy hobby horse. No. At the very least, you need to acknowledge that there are alternative interpretations. Until they do that, people trying to sell policy on the basis of happiness research don’t deserve to be taken very seriously.

It appears that happiness is a topic unfit for fact-checkers. You can apparently say whatever you like! For instance, Bae Myung-bok, the international affairs editor of Korea’s JoongAng Daily (which is apparently distributed by the IHT/NYT), writes:

Whenever I live or travel abroad, there is something I feel anew: That material possessions are not in proportion to happiness. When it comes to gross domestic product, Americans should be tens of times happier than the Vietnamese but this is not so, at least in my experience. On the contrary, Americans seem to lead harder lives and live in less comfort. Surveys also show that the happiness index of Bangladeshis is higher than that of people in advanced nations like the United States and European countries. Economic abundance is only one component of happiness.

It’s true: economic abundance is only one component of happiness; and material possessions are not proportionate to happiness. People who are ten times wealthier are not ten times happier. But, then again, no one has ever even suspected that that could be true.

Now, Vietnam. Kim Kahn, Ai Nu, Bich Lan, and Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese refugees who stayed in my family’s basement for a few months in Marshalltown, Iowa when I was a kid, would, I suspect, be quite surprised to discover that they had moved into a harder, less comfortable life. Say what you will about Marshalltown, Iowa, but “hard and uncomfortable” aren’t going to leap to mind. (You can live like a king in a large, well-appointed house with a big yard there on well less than the median American annual income. As an aside, this house—well-known in Marshalltown—really is a mansion, with 8 bedrooms 5.5 baths and about 9000 sq. ft. The same price—1/2 mil.—will get you maybe 2000 sq ft in a neighborhood just past the borderlands of gentrification in DC. Trade offs! Here is a more typical Marshalltown house, and price, in the neighborhood I grew up in. Mortgage much less then my half of the rent in a cheap house in DC. But boy do I digress.)

The last I heard of them (we’ve lost touch) they were doing quite well by Iowan and American standards, which means they were doing very well indeed. I recall asking them when I was a kid whether they wanted to go back to Viet Nam. They said they missed the rest of their family, but would rather bring them to the U.S. than move back. (I’m pretty sure they did succeed in bringing a number of family over.) So there’s a data point for you.

Now, Bangladesh . . . These surveys are available to anyone with an internet connection. For instance, here is some world values survey data. Here is the subjective well-being rankings of 82 societies. [doc] I’m not sure exactly how the scale works on this one, but the high score is 4.62 (that’s Puerto Rico! — Rico in happiness! The italics on the list denote the “Latin bonus.”). The low score is -2.40 (that’s Indonesia). The U.S. scores 3.47, comfortably in the “High” category. And Bangladesh? 0.54, on the low end of the “Medium-Low” category.

Clearly, the U.S. could bring up its happiness score a bit by finally making Puerto Rico a state. And look at Mexico! Here’s my public policy idea for maximizing average SWB in the U.S.: build a wide, wide bridge over the Rio Grande! Make it 12-lanes, one-way. So, clearly, the money isn’t everything. But Bangladesh, Mr. Myung-bok, doesn’t even come close. Consider yourself fact-checked.

Now, Myung-bok also discusses Friedman’s Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, and seems sympathetic to its point, which I’m glad to see. But he seems confused about the application. After observing that Vietnam’s high rate of growth seems to have done them good, he says:

But a high growth rate like that in Vietnam cannot be expected of a country like France that has already entered a stage of maturity. If this is the case, where should people in advanced countries look for happiness? I think they should find it in establishing fair game rules by removing social discrimination and expanding transparency.

Friedman’s thesis just is that goals like removing discrimination and expanding transparency are more socially and politically feasible when growth rates are healthy and steady. True, France is an already developed economy, and isn’t likely to see 7% annual growth rates. However, the French are in the bottom quarter of OECD countries growth-wise, and could certainly improve by following the lead of Ireland, cutting taxes, freeing up labor markets, repealing onerous regulations, etc. And, if Friedman is right, that’s what they need to do in order to ease the social unrest they’re experiencing.

Myung-bok writes, in conclusion:

If everyone in a society could accept that he or she did not lose in competition because of a difference in skin color, religion, race, gender, region or school, wouldn’t the sense of happiness in that society increase even if its economic growth were slow?

And the response is that this kind of acceptance is least likely when growth is slow, and it therefore seems to many that they are competing just to keep their portion of a shrinking pie. Tolerance for mobility from below—and for difference and equality—is greatest when people have a sense that things are getting better all the time and that there’s more than enough to go around.