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The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel
Worse, by Gregg Easterbrook. Random House, 2003, 400
pages.
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,
by Barry Schwartz. Ecco, 2004, 288 pages.
Happiness Is Overrated, by
Raymond Angelo Belliotti. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, 192 pages.
You Can Buy Happiness
by David Ramsay Steele
I can remember the day I learned to ride a bike. I must
have been about eight. In those days, at least in that part of England, there
were no such things as training wheels and the smallest bicycles had
twenty-four-inch wheels. I just kept pushing, wobbling, and gliding along,
and suddenly, I could do it!
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David Ramsay Steele is the author of "From Marx to Mises."
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The sun came out from behind a cloud and the entire world shone with
warm and radiant delight. Every day for the next few weeks, I spent hours
just cycling up and down or round and round in circles. Could there be
anything to beat this?
Six months later I was still pleased I could ride a bike, and I still got some
direct fulfillment out of this activity, but I would not have dreamed of riding
around just for the sheer pleasure of it — not for more than a couple of
minutes, anyhow. Cycling had become about 98 percent instrumental, a way
to get from one place to another, and only about two percent intrinsically
gratifying.
This well-known phenomenon, called "adaptation," is key to the thinking
of psychologists who maintain that our level of happiness is a "set point" to
which we always tend to return, largely irrespective of our circumstances.
Typically, we look forward to some consummation, and when we achieve it,
we're pleased. From that moment on, the glow of gratification dims like
dying embers. It's essential to being human that the joy resulting from the
attainment of any goal starts to fade as soon as it begins.
Most people believe that if their real income were to be suddenly
doubled, they would feel a lot happier. And so they would, for the first week
or two. After that, the happiness would have perceptibly diminished, and six
months or a year later, they would be only slightly happier than before their
financial improvement.
And it works in reverse. People who go blind or deaf, lose their limbs, or
become paralyzed are usually acutely miserable for a month or two, after
which the gloom begins to evaporate. A year later, they are approximately
as happy as they were before they were afflicted. Research indicates that
people with extreme physical disabilities are, on average, slightly happier
than the general population.
We were made by millions of years of natural selection of genes. From a
gene's point of view, the happiness of the organism which temporarily
houses the gene is not an end in itself. The gene "wants" its host organism
to reproduce, which entails surviving for at least a while, the longer the
better if repeated reproduction is possible. |
| There prevails a
strong tradition for intellectuals to believe that ordinary people are
incapable of happiness, or at least of "true" happiness, as well as being
wretched and not even truly alive. |
|
It's advantageous for pleasure to be associated with successful action,
and pleasure often tends to promote happiness. But pleasure too intense
and too prolonged might be detrimental. If we now have something we have
wanted, and we know we can keep it, what would be the point of perpetual
euphoria? It could distract us from the immediate tasks of survival and
reproduction. Continual misery would be pointlessly distracting too. It's
entirely authentic, as well as poignant, that the slave-labor camp
inmate-protagonist at the end of the harrowing "One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich," reflects that, all in all, this has been a pretty good day.
Is Progress Pointless?
All this is straightforward, and not even controversial, but it does raise
an interesting issue with political implications. Liberals, and especially that
subspecies of liberals known as libertarians, tend to accept as a premise
that it's good for people to be able to get what they want. If asked why,
we are apt to say, with the framers of the United States Constitution, that
only then can people pursue happiness. This can easily lead to the
reasoning: it's good for people to be able to get what they want, because
if they get what they want, they will be happier than if they don't.
But what if having more of what we want does not ultimately add to our
happiness? What if the pursuit of happiness is a "hedonic treadmill," as
some psychologists have contended? In recent years a lot of research has
gone into finding out how happy people actually are and what makes them
happy or unhappy. Some of the conclusions of this research suggest that
increasing real incomes — increasing ability to get what we want
— does not make us very much happier, once we have passed a certain
minimum level of comfort. What, then, is the point of further industrial and
technological progress?
This question has been raised in a number of recent
writings, most influentially in Lane's book, "The Loss of Happiness in Market
Democracies."* Easterbrook's
work is a more popular treatment of the same issues. Both Lane and
Easterbrook start from the finding that Americans in the 1990s were no more
happy, and perhaps even a bit less happy, than they were in the 1950s,
although real incomes had way more than doubled in that period. Lane
refers to the "paradox of apparently growing unhappiness in the midst of
increasing plenty" (Lane, p. 4), a theme echoed in Easterbrook's more
popular work. Contrast this with the 1930s complaint of "poverty in the midst
of plenty." It's hard to uncover real old-fashioned poverty in 21st-century
America, but it's easy to find any amount of dissatisfaction.
Ascertaining how happy people are is mainly a question
of asking them, and it may be doubted whether this is always perfectly
reliable. However, the results of numerous questionnaires, painstakingly
designed and scrupulously interpreted, exhibit a consistency, a stability,
and a clear pattern which suggest that people's happiness self-ratings are
generally quite accurate.*
Various attempts have been made to check the results (for instance by
comparing individuals' self-ratings with the ratings of those individuals by
people who know them) and they look quite solid. I'm convinced that the
data emerging from these studies do indeed measure happiness (or SWB,
subjective well-being, as it's known in the trade).
| The bigoted "Just
Say No" zealots of our day strive to replace drugs which give people
enjoyment with drugs which deaden people's sensibilities.
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If these studies of SWB are at all accurate, then there has been little, if
any, gain in happiness in advanced industrial countries of the West over the
past half-century. In the United States, people are no happier than they
were in the 1950s. To be more precise, the percentage reporting themselves
as just "happy" is close to identical in the 1990s and the 1950s, while the
percentage in the "very happy" category has fallen slightly, and the
percentage classified as "depressed" has increased.
The Specter of Futility
Easterbrook starts out with impressive boldness and clarity. He makes
two assertions: (1) that in almost every measurable respect, life for nearly
everyone in the Western world has been getting better at a spectacular
rate, and (2) that people's happiness or satisfaction with their lives has
stayed about the same or slightly diminished. Both of these claims are well
documented by an accumulation of interesting and often surprising facts,
which Easterbrook presents skillfully and entertainingly.
Easterbrook poses his "paradox" bravely, but as his argument proceeds,
its thrust falters. Just over halfway through the book, Easterbrook switches
to throwing out a number of conjectures about influences which might
account for the loss of happiness, along with his policy solutions. He voices
the usual leftist gripes about consumer capitalism, though the relation of
these to the findings of SWB research may be tenuous. He is furious at
greedy CEOs, and favors raising the minimum wage, imposing universal
health insurance, and increasing foreign aid. These chapters are still
well-written and they contain nuggets of fascinating information, but they
do not resolve or even seriously confront the ominous "paradox" he has laid
out at the beginning.
Easterbrook, like Lane, makes the most of the startling juxtaposition of
declining happiness and increasing affluence, and doesn't want to spoil a
good story by drawing too much attention to considerations which might
blur the stark drama of this incongruous outcome. Neither author gives the
reader even an outline of the basic facts from which a few items have been
plucked for close attention.
Lane actually volunteers that he does not place any
reliance on the declining SWB trend, and wouldn't be surprised to see it
reversed.* This admission
contrasts strangely with the strident rhetoric of decline and
loss in Lane's book. Granted, the fact that the amount of happiness has
been roughly the same and has not increased, while incomes have made
spectacular gains, is notable enough to be well worth discussing. But if we
take "The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies" and substitute some
word like "conservation" or "stability" for "loss," it would not have the
requisite quality of "man bites dog." The same applies to Easterbrook's
subtitle, "How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse." "How Life Gets
Better While People Feel About the Same" would be more defensible, and
still quite intriguing, though less of a shock.
Most People Are Happy!
By far the biggest and most imposing
fact to emerge from the empirical studies of SWB is that a substantial
majority of people in advanced capitalist cultures are happy.* In Easterbrook's and Lane's books, and a
number of other writings, there is so much emphasis on the disquieting fact
that the amount of happiness has not increased, and may even have slightly
declined, that one is apt to lose sight of the mundane fact that over 80% of
people in advanced industrial countries rate themselves as more happy
than unhappy.*
| Substituting these
newfangled concoctions for the tried and trusted intake of good old alcohol,
good old tobacco, good old cocaine, and good old opiates does not increase
happiness. |
|
This is worth emphasizing because it is so frequently
denied. Down the centuries, innumerable sages have opined that most
people were not happy. In his 1930 classic, "The Conquest of Happiness,"
Bertrand Russell asserted that very few people were happy, a fact he
inferred from the expressions on the faces of people in the
street.* From all that we know
now, it seems inescapable that the majority of the readers of that book were
happier than its author, at least in the 1930s. (In his 90s, convinced that the
world was overwhelmingly likely to be destroyed in a thermonuclear
conflagration, Russell became extremely happy, illustrating both adaptation
to a set point regardless of perceived circumstances and the common
pattern of individuals growing steadily more serene with age.)
Thomas Szasz has famously defined
happiness as "[a]n imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to
the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children and by children to
adults."* Most readers take
this as an amusing overstatement of a truism. There prevails a strong
tradition for intellectuals to believe that ordinary people are incapable of
happiness, or at least of "true" happiness, as well as being wretched and
not even truly alive.*
Facts About Happiness
Another downplayed fact is that people in rich
countries are, on average, much happier than people in poor
countries.* How many
readers of Lane or Easterbrook come away with a clear grasp of the fact that
"market democracies" are way more conducive to happiness than any other
known form of society?
Surely it is in the light of these huge general findings — that the
great majority of people are happy and that people in developed countries
are happier than people in less developed countries — that we ought to
look at the extremely interesting possibility that aggregate happiness in the
United States may have declined slightly.
Here are some other assorted facts to emerge from the SWB
research.
Older people have higher SWB than younger
people,* a fact all the more
significant because it is an aggregate outcome which presumably has to
include gains in SWB more than enough to compensate for some cases of
acute misery caused by terminal disease. Men are almost exactly as happy
as women, though women experience more extremes of happiness and
misery (one of the exceptional cases where women go to extremes more
than men do). American blacks are just about as happy as American
whites.
Consistently cohabiting married people of either sex are happier than
the divorced, the separated, or the never-married. Analysis of the data
suggests that the causality runs in both directions: being married makes
you more happy and being happy makes you get and stay married.
Churchgoers are slightly happier than non-churchgoers. Ethnic diversity
within a country is not associated with higher or lower happiness.
The happiest populations in the world are the people in Scandinavia,
Netherlands, and Switzerland, though the United States and most other
wealthy countries are not very far behind. From all that we know, it seems a
reasonable surmise that the present populations of Scandinavia,
Netherlands, and Switzerland are very close to being, and may actually be,
the happiest sizable populations that have ever existed in human history,
and not very distant from the maximum aggregate happiness attainable in
any large population, absent some future biological or other revolutionary
breakthrough.
| Veenhoven
classified three kinds of freedom: economic, political, and private. He found
that all are correlated with happiness, but economic freedom much more so
than political or private freedom. |
|
Both within and between countries, high-income people are happier
than low-income people, though the advantage becomes very slight above
a quite modest level of income. Although "more money" is definitely
associated with high SWB, individuals preoccupied with money-making tend
to be less happy than those who seek fulfillment in other ways. Gregarious,
extroverted types are happier than loners.
There are wide variations in SWB among different populations,
independent of income. Some very poor tribal cultures, such as the Masai of
East Africa, are not far below the affluent world in SWB, while within that
affluent world there are very sizable differences between countries. The
populations of Japan, Italy, and France are distinctly less happy than their
level of income would predict. People in the Irish Republic have been
consistently happier than people in Germany, which until recently had twice
Ireland's real income per head. (Rapid growth in Ireland and slow growth in
Germany have been closing the gap in incomes.) Adjusting for income,
Hispanic people are the happiest broad segment of world population, while
Asians are the least happy.
Within countries, very low-income people are on average decidedly less
happy than people of modest income or above, but high-income people are
not tremendously happier than middling-income people. The very rich are
indeed happier than the average for the population, but only by a small
margin.
A common prejudice among intellectuals is that
people generally want higher incomes primarily because this will improve
their status relative to other people. While many writers are so convinced of
this theory that they often assert it in blithe disregard of the facts, the SWB
research does not afford the theory much comfort. For instance, poor people
in rich countries are decidedly happier than poor people in poor countries.
In fact, living in a rich or poor country has a stronger effect on your SWB than
being rich or poor yourself. "Inequality" does not reduce happiness (Diener
and Oishi, in Diener and Suh, pp. 205–07)* Detailed studies show that, for example,
people of moderate income are equally happy whether they live in
predominantly poor or predominantly affluent areas.
A view compatible with the data is that if you're poor, more income will
enable you to become appreciably happier, but once a quite modest level of
income has been achieved, further increases will bring very little greater
happiness. (Money does buy happiness, but for most people in advanced
industrial cultures, it takes a lot of money to buy a tiny increment of
happiness.) This general result could be explained in a number of different
ways. For instance, it could be that all the components of real income begin
to plateau, as regards conduciveness to happiness, once a modest income
level has been reached. Or it could be that one or two key components of
income do all the heavy lifting with respect to happiness, and once
consumption of these goods has reached a certain point, any further income
increments go to goods which don't add to long-run happiness. As with so
many puzzles in this area, empirical work may soon provide a definitive
answer.
| Rich or poor, people
feel better if they are more free. They do not suffer by being cut loose from
traditional folkways or from the kindly direction of their betters.
|
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Liberty Promotes Happiness
It used to be thought that people in "individualist" cultures are happier
than people in "collectivist" cultures, but one major study has failed to
confirm this and it is now in doubt, though most SWB theorists still seem to
hold to it. Individualism and collectivism in this context do not relate to the
system of industrial ownership or administration. They are terms employed
by sociologists and social psychologists to distinguish cultures which value
individual self-realization from those which lay more emphasis on group
solidarity. Thus, Japan and South Korea are classed as collectivist
cultures.
At any rate, people in individualist countries, contrary to the folklore of
intellectuals, don't appear to be any less happy than people in collectivist
countries (though it could reasonably be contended that people in
collectivist cultures would be more inhibited about highlighting their own
feelings, and would therefore tend to have a downward bias in rating their
own happiness).
Freedom generates happiness. Veenhoven classified three kinds of
freedom: economic, political, and private. He found that all are correlated
with happiness, but economic freedom much more so than political or
private freedom. Veenhoven candidly remarks: "This is a pleasant surprise
for the right-wing free market lobby but a disappointment for liberals like
me" (Veenhoven, in Diener and Suh, p. 276).
Economic freedom does not merely contribute to happiness by raising
incomes; controlling for income, economic freedom still clearly promotes
SWB, a fact that seems to puzzle Veenhoven. To most people economic
freedom is the very substance of their lives as creative, purposive beings.
Compared to the option of living and working where you please, at whatever
occupation you wish, doing what you choose to do without permission from
anyone on high, the liberty to vote in elections or to pass out leaflets on the
street is, for the great majority of folks, rather a minor consideration,
especially in poor countries.
As Veenhoven suggests, the strong positive association between
freedom, especially "economic" freedom, and happiness will very likely turn
out to be even stronger, because his results are heavily affected by the
temporary situation in post-Communist countries, which possess some
freshly-won freedoms but are currently undergoing a historically brief,
acutely painful industrial transition.
Veenhoven's results refute the familiar conservative contention that
freedom reduces human well-being by atomizing individuals, by inducing
anomie, by imposing a crushing burden of responsibilities, by removing the
security of fixed status, or by offering a vertiginous variety of choices. The
findings also refute the related view that people cannot benefit from
freedom until they have been sufficiently prepared. Rich or poor, ready or
not, people feel better if they are more free. They do not suffer by being cut
loose from traditional folkways or from the kindly direction of their betters,
or if they do, they somehow find more than adequate consolations for these
losses.
Some popular legends have become casualties of the SWB research. The
"midlife crisis" is a myth: on average, emotional crises get steadily fewer
and less severe as people grow older, and there is no blip at midlife. Neither
is there any such thing as an "empty nest syndrome": middle-aged people
whose children have moved out are, in fact, happier than those whose
children stick around.
| Thanks to the
valiant efforts of helpful souls like Hugo Chavez, we will not run out of
examples of countries with falling incomes.
|
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Happiness and Economic Growth
The fact that joy of attainment always fades suggests that happiness may
be pursued by keeping a succession of new attainments coming, just as the
fact that every note sounded on a piano declines in volume very rapidly from
its inception does not prevent a piano piece maintaining a high, or even an
increasing, level of volume. This would mean that at any time some
attainments were close to their maximum in terms of contributing to
subjective well-being.
That line of thought might suggest that the rate of growth of income is
more relevant than the current amount of income. Some such notion may
have influenced the great proponent of economic growth, Adam Smith, who
evidently held that higher incomes do not make people happier, but that
fast-growing incomes do. Before reading any of the recent research I would
have bet on this Smithian view, but the facts now appear to be exactly
contrary: there is a high correlation between absolute level of real income
and happiness, and no significant correlation between rate of economic
growth and happiness (Diener and Oishi, in Diener and Suh, p. 203).
All the same, I still feel that something like this ought to be true. Perhaps,
for instance, people in countries with positive GDP growth are happier than
those in countries with zero growth, who are in turn happier than those
experiencing negative growth. Few countries have experienced zero or
negative growth over the last few decades and SWB research has not made
a special effort to focus on these places, so there is presumably insufficient
data to test this. But thanks to the valiant efforts of helpful souls like Hugo
Chavez, we will not run out of examples of countries with falling incomes,
and perhaps this theory can be tested before long.
In Defense of Progress
What are the implications of SWB research for those who favor progress,
and in particular for libertarians? I believe that the liberal, progressive, and
libertarian commitment to ad-vancing technology and indefinitely
expanding material prosperity can be defended against the new attack
based on the SWB findings.
My defense is in two parts. First, I claim that these findings, properly
understood, are less disturbing for advocates of progress than the
popularizers of SWB research have reported. Second, I point out that
happiness, though important, isn't everything, and I maintain that modern,
high-income, capitalist cultures score higher on most of the other salient
values than do traditional or pre-industrial cultures.
We should separate two theses: (1) that for comparatively high-income
people the level of happiness has remained approximately the same while
real incomes have expanded enormously, and (2) that there has been a
slight, long-term decline in happiness in the more affluent countries. While
the first of these now seems to be strongly indicated by the data, the second
looks dubious.
Most of the evidence for the decline in happiness over the past
half-century comes from the rising incidence of "depression." This invites
the obvious response that what 50 years ago was called being down in the
mouth is now called "depression," "depressive disorder," "unipolar
depression," or, forsooth, "clinical depression." Easterbrook dismisses such
objections as follows (p. 165): "though the rising rate of Western depression
may relate to some extent to better diagnosis and the loss of taboo
associated with this topic . . . a tenfold increase in two generations is far too
great to be an artifact of improved diagnosis alone."
This is the reader's first introduction to the statistic of a "tenfold
increase" in depression (no source is cited for the factor of ten).
Easterbrook later discloses (p. 181) that "tenfold" is the upper limit of a
range of controversial estimates, the lower limit being twofold (or, as he
puts it, "on the order of two- or threefold"). Twofold still sounds like a lot, but
the likelihood that an increase is due to "better diagnosis" (meaning
greater readiness to apply the label "depressed") has little to do with the
size of the increase as a multiple of the starting point and much to do with
the size of the increase as a proportion of the total population. This, of
course, is small.
| It's better to have
high rates of depression than to have a world so poor that people are so
caught up with survival they have no time to become depressed.
|
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It's often claimed that 25% of Americans undergo an experience of
depression at least once in their lives, and that 6–7% have experienced
depression at least once in the past year. These numbers can't easily be
compared with the statistics for SWB, which tend to focus on how people are
feeling at one point in time or how they feel on average over a period of
time. We typically don't ask people whether they have been blissfully happy
at least once in their lives or at any time during the past year. And someone
who currently feels fine but at one time felt sad and fell into the clutches of
the mental health profession may now be classified as depressed and
"managing" his depression.
Where such small shifts in numbers are at issue, it's
remarkable that so little attention is paid to two great demographic trends:
aging of the population and immigration. How many of those labelled
"depressed" are over 80?*
Millions of people from the less developed countries have come to the
United States recently, and have prodigiously amplified both their real
incomes and their SWB. Still, they are genetically and culturally products of
countries with much lower levels of SWB than the United States (all the data
point to a major genetic component in the determination of SWB). These
folks might well be immensely happier than they would have been in
Guatemala or Cambodia, and still embody a decline in United States SWB.
Improvement could thus possibly masquerade as deterioration.
Another element usually undiscussed in this connection is the enormous
growth in the ingestion of mood-modifying substances like Prozac. At first
blush, we might suppose that this collective swilling of antidepressants and
tranquilizers must be counteracting a powerful tendency for misery to
increase. I am more inclined to the view that these drugs, on average and in
the long run, do not increase happiness, or more precisely, that substituting
these newfangled concoctions for the tried and trusted intake of good old
alcohol, good old tobacco, good old cocaine, and good old opiates does not
increase happiness. The bigoted "Just Say No" zealots of our day strive to
replace drugs which give people enjoyment with drugs which deaden
people's sensibilities, and regrettably they have had some success.
I discount the suggestion that there's an inherent tendency for
happiness to decline in industrially ad-vanced countries. But I think it has to
be admitted that the level of happiness in these countries is either roughly
stationary or climbing very, very slowly. This does raise the question of
whether further increases in incomes can be defended as additions to
human well-being.
It won't be a practical issue for at least another couple of centuries.
There are still hundreds of millions of people in the world who are
desperately poor, and whose SWB will be greatly augmented by raising their
incomes. It's not a feasible option to increase the incomes of the poor while
holding the incomes of the well-off at a constant level: hold down the rich
and you ineluctably hold down the poor. It's not possible to have economic
growth in the less developed countries while halting it in the more
developed.
Since modern, affluent, high-tech lifestyles are demonstrably highly
conducive to human happiness, to oppose further gains in material
prosperity from free trade and globalization is objectively to favor the
perpetuation of wretched misery for hundreds of millions of poor people.
Extrapolating from the SWB data, the conversion of the entire Third World to
First-World standards will generate an enormous gain in happiness.
At a more general level, it's fallacious to conclude that because
increases in already high incomes yield only very slight benefits for SWB,
therefore only those very slight gains would be lost if we froze incomes at
some arbitrarily high level (supposing this were feasible). Humans are
plan-pursuing entities who achieve fulfillment from striving to improve
their condition. What happiness they have now is an attribute of this broad
purposive framework. If this framework were to be destroyed, there could
be a major reduction in happiness. That this might be so is corroborated by
Veenhoven's demonstration that economic freedom confers happiness
independently of its income-raising role.
| The Abrahamic
religions, aside from being composed mainly of untruths about nonexistent
entities, are not well-suited to a culture of real abundance, security, and
glorious opportunities. |
|
On this argument, then, the very existence of free-market capitalism
would in itself add substantially to long-term happiness, and it's just an
inseparable concomitant that free-market capitalism indefinitely increases
median real income, which does not add very much to long-term happiness
for the already well off. In short, even if having more of what we want
does not add greatly to our happiness, being able to pursue more of
what we want may still add greatly to our happiness.
What certainly has to be acknowledged is that it is
false to suppose that every increase in GDP represents an actual gain in the
joyfulness of daily experience, or that in some future high-income world
every quotidian moment will be lived in a perpetual state of bliss. But I do
not know of anyone who has ever held this view.* Probably those who came closest to it were
Marxists around 1890.
Happiness Isn't Everything
The second part of my defense is to point out that happiness, though
important, isn't everything. As many have insisted, happiness is not the
summum bonum (all-important good). Other values are vital in setting
our requirements for a good social order.
Easterbrook repeatedly states that it is "far better" to have high incomes
even if these are not matched by high SWB. He even says that it's better to
have high rates of depression than to have a world so poor that people are
so caught up with survival they have no time to become depressed
(Easterbrook, p. 165). I agree, and I applaud him for saying it, but he does not
make explicit the values which may legitimately compete with
happiness.
If you could convince me that a return to a world of recurring plagues
and famines, children without shoes, their ribs poking out because of
malnutrition, most of them dead before the age of ten, and the average
woman requiring to give birth about nine times to maintain a stable
population, would somehow leave people no less happy than today, I would
still feel that you had not made a case for returning to that pre-industrial
world. Dignity, charity, intelligence, and exploration of new opportunities
are values which, though of course most often conducive to happiness, are
in principle independent of happiness and may occasionally clash with it.
The realization of these values is far more in evidence in today's Europe and
America than in medieval Europe, medieval Islam, or the Third World.
Although happiness is extremely valuable, it is not the
only thing of value, nor can it measure the value of every other thing. The
arguments here are as familiar as they are sound. A cheap and infallibly
happiness-inducing drug, added to the water supply, would not make us
lose all interest in justice or human betterment. Most people would not
choose to undergo a kind of brain damage which would make them
simultaneously a lot happier and a lot more stupid. "Ignorance is bliss" can
be uttered with many shades of emotional tone, but never admiringly. As
Nozick's argument from the "experience machine" brings
out,* most people do not want
a happy life in a state of comprehensive delusion. A survey has found that
less than 1% of people would choose to be plugged in to an experience
machine.
Possibly neither "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" nor "The Bucket Rider" could
have been written by a happy person — at any rate they weren't —
yet the creative lives of John Keats and Franz Kafka are enviably worthy. It
can even plausibly be argued that a certain modicum of suffering is
essential to the best possible life, though I would add that one can get too
much of a good thing, and I have it on the best authority that my suffering
quota has been filled.
| It used to be
thought that people in "individualist" cultures are happier than people in
"collectivist" cultures, but one major study has failed to confirm this and it is
now in doubt. |
|
Happiness: The Final Frontier
How much further can we go in raising SWB in affluent modern cultures?
My view is that people do have a set point which is most often on the happy
side of neutral, but which varies individually, and which is largely but not
entirely genetic. Once certain sources of acute misery are removed, which
they generally are by industrial development, the set point rules. Thus,
although I see abundant opportunities for augmenting happiness, I don't
see the scope for anything that could again repeat the staggering
achievement of free-market capitalism in raising SWB to its present high
levels.
Modern society is a marketplace for lifestyles, religions,
psychotherapies, and interpersonal arrangements. There's a continual
process of discovery by trial and error, which may lead over a long period of
time to an approach to the optimum in these areas, yielding some gains in
happiness.
In the area of religion, I see much hope in replacing
the Abrahamic creeds (which, in one of their recent manifestations, can
make millions of people think it inspiring to watch a movie of a man being
tortured to death for a couple of hours) with a new synthesis of Buddhism
and other religions of enlightenment.* The Abrahamic religions, aside from being
composed mainly of untruths about nonexistent entities, are not well-suited
to a culture of real abundance, security, and glorious opportunities.
In psychotherapy, which I expect to eventually become one with religion,
all psychodynamic doctrines, derived from Freud, which seek to terrify
people by imagining a world of inscrutable unconscious forces, are rapidly
being replaced by an effective cognitive-behavioral approach of the sort
pioneered by Albert Ellis, which effectively teaches people how to reduce
their sources of unhappiness.
It's unclear whether the general tone of the culture or the reigning
ideology can have much effect on people's happiness, but if it can, there is
certainly room for improvement here. To take one simple example, the
modernist movement in the arts, and its various offshoots and successors,
have driven a wedge between music, fiction, drama, and pictorial
representation as readily appreciated by the mass of the population and as
sanctified by the approval of intellectual elites. This wedge was not always
there, and will not always be there. It's largely a matter of intellectual
fashion. But as long as the wedge is there, opportunities to develop great
works of art with a popular audience tend to be closed off, and a potential
avenue to the enrichment of the lives of the majority of people is not
explored.
| Money does buy
happiness, but for most people in advanced industrial cultures, it takes a lot
of money to buy a tiny increment of happiness.
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Ultimately, drugs may be helpful for some, not because of the
questionable notion that "depression" is an "illness," which can be
"treated" by "medication," but rather because of the fact well known to
Fitzgerald's Khayyam and to countless others down the ages, that taking
drugs can make you feel better. If you belong to the 1%, or 5%, or 10% of the
population genetically most prone to melancholy, maybe some drug or
other will help you to be happier.
Surfeit of Options
Barry Schwartz is an avowed enemy of the free market (one of his earlier
books is subtitled "How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life"). But
most of "The Paradox of Choice" is advice about making the best decisions
within a free market. To the extent that people take his advice and find that
it works, his antimarket complaints lose some of their force.
He thinks that we are overwhelmed by too many choices. But he accepts
that how many choices confront us is itself a result of our choices. It's easy,
for example, to adapt our shopping habits so that the number of purchase
decisions is greatly reduced. It would even be feasible to join a club, like a
book or record club but concerned with all kinds of consumer goods, so that
we had to make almost no further choices at all — we would simply
accept the groceries and other provisions selected for us each week by the
club. Perhaps this is why some people join cults with apparently absurd
dietary and other restrictions, because in this way they reduce the need to
consider too many options.
Schwartz begins the book with an anecdote about his visit to The Gap in
search of a pair of jeans. The salesperson asked: "Do you want them slim fit,
easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy? . . . Do you want them
stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or
zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?"
I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition! What a burden to drop onto the
shoulders of a mere college professor! Buying the jeans, he says, became "a
daylong project." The jeans he ended up with "turned out just fine." But,
reports Schwartz, "it was a complex decision in which I was forced to invest
time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread."
Forced? He could have just left and gone to Penney's.
People can choose to make fewer choices. Schwartz gestures a few times
in the direction of the brainwashed zombie theory, the victim of consumer
capitalism who cannot choose to make fewer choices because he's addicted
to consuming. But it wouldn't do to elaborate that theory, as it would
undercut 80% of Schwartz's book, which gives you advice on how to choose
to make fewer choices.
Much of this advice is quite sound. There's plenty of experimental
evidence that most people typically make wrong-headed decisions. For
instance, they erroneously count sunk costs. Schwartz gives many of these
examples, some of which have no bearing on overabundance of choices.
There's certainly scope for educating people in fallacies of practical
decision-making, but this aspect would be more helpful if detached from his
preaching about the baleful influence of too many choices.
Another anecdote refers (pp. 18–20) to a study in which either 24 or
six varieties of jam were displayed. Schwartz says that 30% of people who
visited the display of six varieties bought jam, while only 3% bought jam
from the display of 24. Problems of this kind tend to solve themselves: sellers
of jam have an incentive to display the smaller range. Managers of stores as
a matter of course do limit the number of varieties of all goods they offer for
sale.
Schwartz is perturbed (p. 9) that his local supermarket carries 285
varieties of cookies, but evidently if all 285 keep taking up shelf space, all 285
are selling. Anyone upset by the spectacle of 285 types of cookie can go to a
corner or specialty store where the range is far more limited. Costco or
Sam's Club attracts people prepared to buy in bigger quantities at bargain
prices, from a more limited range. What many people do, of course (p. 19), is
to settle on a cookie they like, and then always look for just that one, tuning
out the other 284. Atkins dieters tune out all 285. Taking this further, you can
request the supermarket to send you the same list of groceries every week,
and give no more thought to choices. Some busy yuppies use services like
Peapod in this way.
Schwartz's advice is to adopt a "satisficing" rather than a "maximizing"
strategy. Settle for what's good enough without looking for the very best.
Most people do this anyway, instinctively adjusting their searches among
goods to take account of the opportunity cost of their own time (satisficing
is only a special case of maximizing). Some others, mainly women, seem to
derive intense gratification from the actual activity of researching what's
available. Who, aside from the Taliban, would want to deny them this
indulgence?
| At any rate, people
in individualist countries, contrary to the folklore of intellectuals, don't seem
to be any less happy than people in collectivist countries.
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If some people find the multiplicity of options irksome, the benefit they
derive from having that many options may more than compensate them for
the irksomeness. Therefore, it's possible for people to dislike the situation of
having so many choices and still be net gainers from the availability of those
choices, a possibility Schwartz never mentions. He thus confounds some
specific loss from more choices with net loss from more choices, and
wrongly supposes that by making a case for the prevalence of the former, he
automatically makes a case for the prevalence of the latter.
For those stressed-out shoppers who really do find choosing oppressive,
much of Schwartz's advice may prove helpful, and the free market will then
work even better. Thank you, Barry Schwartz!
Happiness in Its Place
Raymond Belliotti evidently started out to write a work with the
challenging title, "Happiness Is Overrated," and when he was well into it,
suddenly realized that his crucial argument is misconceived. Instead of
scrapping that book or turning it into a different kind of book, he went ahead
and published the thing.
The problem becomes clear when we ask: just who has overrated
happiness? It turns out that there are two broad ways of defining
"happiness," the way it is defined in ordinary English, as subjective
contentment or good feeling, an enduring pleasant state of mind, and the
way it is defined by some philosophers, as encompassing much more than
that, perhaps a merited, or worthy, or virtuous pleasant
mental state.
As Belliotti must have realized late in his composition of the book (see
Belliotti, p. 93), those philosophers who have defined the word "happiness"
in the normal vernacular manner have generally stated that happiness is
not the summum bonum, but that other values are independently
important, and may trump happiness. And those philosophers who have
proclaimed happiness as the summum bonum have generally
proposed an expanded definition of the word "happiness."
Consequently, Belliotti cannot name anyone around today who really
overrates happiness, in the sense he specifies. A possible historical
exception is Bentham, but on this point Bentham has no following. Belliotti's
own views, while often correct, are equally often much more commonplace
than he supposes them to be. In an effort to come up with a real "target" for
his "thesis," he finally identifies "those who formally define happiness as a
relatively enduring, positive state of mind and who take happiness to be (at
least) a great good" (p. 94). This is indeed a popular position — I adhere
to it myself — but I cannot find any arguments in Belliotti's book
directed against it. The most he seems able to claim is that happiness is "not
always a personal good," which presumably means that there are some
situations where happiness is not a relevant value.
While he does not advance happiness as the summum bonum,
Belliotti does recommend an expanded definition of "happiness." His
attempt to argue for an expanded definition is bedevilled by the problem
that he apparently does not understand that the meanings of words are
conventional, and therefore writes as though there is a correct meaning of
"happiness," independent of actual usage or of usefulness in argument. So
he sets out on a wild goose chase to discover the true meaning of happiness
or what happiness really is. He maintains, for example, that defining
"happiness" in the normal way ignores or slights values other than
subjective contentment. This is like saying that we had better define a car's
"maximum speed" to include its comfortable seats or fuel economy, and if
we don't, we are ignoring or slighting these other desirable attributes.
Belliotti provides a readable survey of philosophers' views on happiness
and finding meaning in life, but sheds little new light on these topics.
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| * | Robert E. Lane, "The Loss of
Happiness in Market Democracies" (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000). |
BACK
| * | Ed Diener and Eunkook M.
Suh, eds., "Culture and Subjective Well-Being" (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 2000), pp. 5–7. |
BACK
| * | "My argument does not
depend on the evidence of growing unhappiness in the postwar period
(which may be a mere blip in a long-term curve)" (Lane, p. 5). The rhetoric of
"growing unhappiness and depression" is heavy throughout his book, but if
his argument really does not depend on this, it must depend on the mere
fact that there is some remaining unhappiness in "market democracies,"
even though this is less than in any other kind of social
order. |
BACK
| * | A good source for recent
findings in this area is Diener and Suh, which I draw upon freely in the text.
Useful background for some of the psychological and methodological issues
is Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwartz, eds., "Well-Being: The
Foundations of Hedonic Psychology" (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1999). |
BACK
| * | Eighty-five percent of
people in the U.S. are above the neutral mid-point between unhappiness
and happiness (Ed Diener and C. Diener, "Most People Are Happy,"
Psychological Science 7 [1996]), and the corresponding number for several
European countries is higher. |
BACK
| * | Bertrand Russell, "The
Conquest of Happiness" (New York: Liveright, 1930), p.
13. |
BACK
| * | "The Untamed Tongue"
(Chicago: Open Court, 1990), p. 139, though this bon mot had appeared
in print earlier. |
BACK
| * | See John Carey, "The
Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 1880–1939" (Chicago: Academy Chicago,
2002). |
BACK
| * | Diener and Oishi, in Diener
and Suh, pp. 198–201. |
BACK
| * | According to some
studies, older people are slightly less "happy" but more "satisfied with life."
SWB usually averages different entities like this. I skip over these
distinctions here. |
BACK
| * | The data actually show
that there is more happiness with greater inequality. Diener and Oishi
decide to abstain from any casual inference on this
point. |
BACK
| * | Both average overall life
satisfaction and the small percentage of "depressed" increase with
age. |
BACK
| * | "Utility" in economic
theory is not happiness. It is an abstract concept defined as
want-satisfaction. This is not unconnected with happiness but shouldn't be
identified with it. |
BACK
| * | Robert Nozick, "Anarchy,
State, and Utopia" (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp.
42–43. |
BACK
| * | See the remarks by
Andrew Rawlinson in his "The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western
Teachers in Eastern Traditions" (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), pp.
33–36. |
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