Happiness Police

Mainly and solely CDs, etc., for entertainment. Other outlets are fairly funded as desired, though I tend to eat out more than I desire. lgl

I think “self-actualization” would have been a fairly foreign concept to people 300 years ago. There was much less sense of self apart from a social context. Because of that, we tend to look at life 300 years ago–skewed through the lense of our modern, more dominantly self-centric (I don’t mean selfish) worldview–and conclude that they lived unfulfilled and therefore unhappy lives. I am neither arguing that life was so simple and uncomplicated (and therfore happy) then nor am I arguing that life is more fulfilling (and therefore happy) now. I am simply saying that the rules of human existence and the means by which we become happy as humans have not really changed that much over the years if at all.

I think I would have to agree with the “findings” of the thought experiment and conclude that all our tangible goods DO, in fact, contribute little to our happiness. Of course, we have to remember that there would probably have been large demographics left out of such a survey taken 300 years ago because many people would have been considered by the pollsters (who would have simply been trying to capture prevailing attitudes) as less than human.

I think Lueck is right on. In Kling’s essay, the question “Would it be fair to conclude that the tangible goods that we have today contribute nothing to happiness?” is supposed to be met with an “obviously not”, but if happiness really hasn’t improved over 300 years, I think the answer, to a first approximation, really is “yes”. (I am personally confident that people 300 years ago would, in fact, be measured to be less happy than those today.)

Let’s not forget that compared to 300 years ago, many times more people are alive today. The total amount of happiness is much higher, even if the average has increased only a little. To some this is a trivial argument, but I think it’s crucial. For example, until the industrial revolution, essentially all growth in productivity was “spent” on higher population, not a higher material standard of living for the average person.

Of course, Robert Frank’s conclusions that government should intervene to improve our collective happiness are ridiculous and (literally) sickening. But I don’t think they’re implied by his happiness research at all. In fact, people (without intervention) automatically make the sort of happiness-increasing changes Frank advocates in their life as their incomes increase.

To a large extent, human happiness is defined not by circumstances, but by genetic predisposition. There are serious holes in happiness research, which confuses correlation and causation over and over again. Just because people who spend more time with friends or work fewer hours are happier, it doesn’t mean that if you force hard-working and anti-social people to work less and talk to more people, that they’ll be happier – they’d probably be less happy.

And why is it implicit that we should want to maximize average happiness (as it’s measured in these surveys) anyway? This seems obvious to everyone but me.

I think the fairer question is not “what do you buy because others buy them?” but rather “What is the effect of what you buy?”. For example, I don’t own a cell phone. I don’t notice a particular need for one – and everyone did without 20 years ago. I have observed that folks who do buy one go through three stages:
Stage 1: They love it, and use it.
Stage 2: They get used to it.
Stage 3: They can’t imagine how they lived without it, and feel out of touch without it.

If you were to assign “util” happiness values to these three states, using “0” as the “stage zero” pre-phone state, they would be, say, Stage 1 is 2 utils, Stage 2 is 1 util, and stage 3 is 0 utils. That is, they regress back to the original state, only with another expense – the monthly phone bill. The relevant model is drug addiction – you get acclimatized (or develop a “tolerance”) and need something new, or “stronger” in drug terms, to get the happiness/high.

They do get a short run “kick” out of it, but at the cost of a long run expense. TV works the same way – before TV, then black and white, then color broadcast, then cable, then digital cable – each generation can’t imagine living without “their” innovation, and show in surveys as no happier than the one before.

What to do? Nothing, in my opinion, at least by government. The temporary gains give positive social utility, the “fade” spurs innovation and productivity, to produce the next “hit”. Regulation is likely to slow or stop the “hit” cycle, lowering total social utility. The environmental cost of this cycle is minimal – A modern TV with cable is, if anything, lighter and more efficient than its 50 year old counterpart.

In fact, environmental cleanliness may be one of the goods on this cycle – the air today is obviously cleaner and safer than it was in the 70s, when leaded gas still ruled, but it is PERCEIVED as needing to be cleaner, so we innovate, get a “hit” out of reducing emissions, cleaning a site, whatever, then get used to the change and need a new environmental good.

Which goods and services do you buy because other people buy them, not because they make you happy?

Social networking software and memberships. “Haha”

…who thinks living in the past is preferable to the present…

wishes he lived in the future when he knew how to edit his own comments 🙁

The fundemental error that Frank makes is to assume we all seek the same things from life (a sign of a true socialist). Life is not a zero sum game. We don’t all aspire to attend the same universities, perform the same occupations, etc.

Finally, wealth is NOT distributed on the basis of IQ. As a matter of fact, one could argue with facts (can you believe that) that wealth and IQ are not highly correlated. Thus, the education example presented by Franks is just a contrived thought experiment better suited for a socialist love fests than for real thinkers.

I am afraid that “happiness research” amounts to nothing but a flimsy excuse for left-wing academics to claim that they should be given control over how the rest of us live.

I think that’s an overly broad generalization. J. Bradford de Long, a “left-wing academic,” writes:

Keynes’s predictions have not come to pass. He expected society to undergo a profound change as attention shifted from working hard to keep the wolf from the door to living a good life. But we today do not feel that material acquisition is about to go out of style, we do not appear to be on the threshold of converting en masse from full-time to half-time or quarter-time work, and we have not begun to rank and applaud people by how they spend their leisure as opposed to what they do at work. The dividing line between useful necessity and pointless luxury always comes at roughly twice one’s current standard of living. After all, Americans could subsist – healthily – off of wheat flour, evaporated milk, cabbage, spinach, and navy beans for less than fifty cents a day. But, as George Stigler wrote:

“such a diet would not be to the satisfaction of either the population or the students of nutrition…. Man insists upon luxuries such as meat, and should we somehow fully address his desire (despite his penchant for shifting from sow belly to pheasant), he will no doubt insist upon shifting to another and more expensive food…. [T]he economic system has as its purpose forcing people to find new scarcities… the alteration of a host of circumstances and policies that deprive large numbers of people of eminently desirable things that a more efficiently organized society could afford.”

So there is no real reason to expect “satiation” at any level of per capita income that I can foresee. The level of luxury at which people imagine satiation is always three times the value of their current consumption.

It is significantly more pleasant to eat broiled sole at Chez Panisse than to munch on a tuna sandwich while sitting on the concrete wall by the North Gate to the Berkeley Campus. It is more fun to write on a powerful laptop PC, while sitting at a tile table in an air-conditioned cafe and drinking cappuccino, than to write on a manual typewriter in a small, hot office while drinking a combination of dishwater and sludge made from instant coffee–or to write with bad ink on parchment by the light of a single candle.

We cannot approach utopia in terms of material welfare because we can always imagine how increased resources could give us a more comfortable and rewarding life. Or perhaps it is better to say that from the standpoint of every previous century we have surpassed utopia, but failed to stop and properly appreciate the accomplishment.

An equally important answer, of course, is that Utopia does not require merely command over nature. It requires command over self, and command over society as well. Command over self is a matter of psychology. [W]e have not achieved utopia–in spite of immense material wealth–because we have approached it as a problem of engineering, and it is in fact a problem of psychology.

Be careful when painting with a broad brush, because the paternalism you accuse Frank of, can just as easily be be applied to you. Who are you to decide what falls wholesale into “left-wing” thought to be summarily dismissed, as if “right-wing” academics were the only ones capable of serious thought. Afterall, “right-wing” academics would never fall into the trap of selective sampling, whilst ignoring evidence that contradicts their arguments. That’s called religion, not science; just ask the president’s bioethics council.

I would prefer knowing the answer to the question, “Why are poor people so happy?” They should be miserable, dammit, but instead they keep enjoying life. Its unforgivable.