Michele

“innovation on happiness (which is what wealth really amounts to).”

Can’t really buy this, since a question I have been thinking about is whether an Egyptian pyramid worker of a Gothic Cathedral builder was really less happy than we were. In other words, has 4000 years of technological progress really brought happiness? I do see a difference, however, between individual wealth and social technology, tho according to your study, the difference isn’t that significant as to happiness.

If happiness is genetic, could we be becoming happier or less happy over the last few millenia, as we have been getting taller?

One might not be any happier, per se, but they are equally happy over a longer time-horizon. Thus any policy that can extend life in the aggregate would ostensibly appear to be one that increases happiness.

This could be used as justification for wealth-increasing policies insofar as increased wealth can lead to longer lives, or as wealthier societies tend to live longer (as it has been historically).

This does not, of course, address whether individuals change their happiness “set point” based on their expected life expectancy. They may in fact compensate as their life expectancy goes up or down, or rather peoples may compensate as their life expectancy as a society goes up.

Philosophical point about introspection: you can’t really compare your current subjective state with past states. You can compare your current state with your memory of your past state, but our memories about past states are extremely unreliable. If you’re happy now, your assessment of past states will be much nicer than if you’re sad now. So, basically, current state blinds us to what past states where really like at that point in time.

About your last point: isn’t that really just the same as saying that you don’t feel any different? Or, is there any sense of talking about an “objective” scale of a subjective phenomena if two points on that scale turn out to be subjectively indiscernible?

Looked at the point of view of the genes: it is not necessary for us to have “permanent” happiness changes to motivate us; a simply happy moment (or a happy hour or two, or day) is plenty motivational. You’re unhappy because you have no friends; well, you go out and make one. You’re happy for a little while over your new buddy, but then you drop back to your baseline. The point is, the friend remains; thus the evolutionary function of friend-making (whatever it is, if it is still operative) is served.

More mathematically, consider a graph of happiness level over time. It’s not the area under the curve we are optimizing (that’s basically constant according to what you’re saying). Rather we are trying to create upspikes and desperately trying to avoid the downspikes.

I don’t agree that this changes much of our reasons for acting. Sure, if it were possible to do something that would make me permanently more happy, I might do that (people marry, have kids…). [Would you do it if it were a "false" happiness, a wire installed in the pleasure center of your brain?] But mostly I do things for short term happiness, knowing it is so, and this is the vast majority of my action. I buy lunch and eat it - this makes me temporarily happy, but I know I won’t even remember it a week from now.

Also, people can seem a lot happier than they actually are. Somebody I knew committed suicide last year, but she always gave the impression of being a very positive, happy-go-lucky person, even to her closest friends and family. When she died, nobody had any idea why she did it. But something tells me that she wasn’t quite as happy as she seemed. After this I can’t be but very skeptical about judging people’s happiness by their outward behaviour.

Of course, these are just single cases but I would imagine that they’re far from unique until I’m given strong evidence to the contrary.

The lesson, I think, is not that hedonic consequentialism is wrong, but merely that we need to focus our effots more intensely on the things that really cause suffering.

Along those lines, I’ve been teachin “Luxury Fever” by the economist Robert Frank. His basic claim is that conspicuous consumption does nothing to increase the overall happiness of a group of people, but various forms of inconspicuous consuption (like more time off work) do.

I want Frank’s claim to be true. My hunch is that we’d be better off economically, as well as in terms of happiness if people worked less and played more. But from what I’m reading, I can’t tell whether it is true.

I tend to agree with Tim about self-report measures of happiness or subjective well-being. The corroboration checks you mention have been applied in only a tiny percentage of the studies that used the self-report measures; the degree of convergence with physiological measures has been challenged by some knowledgeable people (e.g., Jerome Kagan); and so on.

Doesn’t self-reported happiness fall prey to a lot of the same distortions as self-reported self-esteem? In many societies, including our own, high self-esteem is considered better than low self-esteem, and apart from cultural norms, some people may be “defending against” feelings of low self-esteem–or just plain kidding themselves. If you give the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale to a bunch of Clemson students, the average score will be around 70 out 90–which looks like very high self-esteem. Yet some of these students don’t act as though they think all that highly of either their competence or their worth.

The measurement problems are really tough. Self-esteem researchers are starting to introduce procedures that get around social desirability and various defenses; I suspect that those who study happiness or subjective well-being need to be doing similar things.

I also rather doubt that happiness is a single dimenson, just as I doubt that utility is a single dimension, but that’s fodder for another discussion.

Robert

You refer to Objectivism as having a “subjective-happiness-as-barometer-of-objective-life-success-view.” (Hey, isn’t it a lot easier to say that kind of thing in German?)

But Rand’s point of view wasn’t strictly consequentialist. Note those qualifiers like “happiness is the purpose, not the standard” and “man’s life qua man.”

These days, the people with the big investment in who is an Objectivist and who isn’t seem to be tilting toward a duty ethic, albeit with context-dependent rules. I think they are also tilting toward an a priori mode of argument that pushes to the side empirical evidence about happiness, or any other outcomes in life.

In any form of eudaimonism, you’re going to encounter arguments of the form “So-and-so claims to be happy, but here is evidence that maybe he isn’t.” It gets dangerous when the eudaimonist starts resorting to “So-and-so claims to be happy, but he is obviously isn’t living by Rand’s ethic, or Aristotle’s, or the Stoics’, or whoever’s, *so he can’t be happy.* What more do you need to know?”

Of course we need to know more. And good social science–the kind that will enable us to know more, social science that manages a balance between theory development and empirical work–is really hard to do.

Robert Campbell

I’m pretty skeptical of self-reports, but what I was reading made it seem not as bad as I thought. But I am perfeclty willing to believe that it is as bad as I thought. Can you point me to the Kagan discussion?