Yglesias provides the best argument yet for Canada-style socialized medicine: socialized medicine makes it easier for young folk to make music popular with wealthy American white kids! Sounds good to me. But is it even true?

A very quick glance at the Pitchfork best recent list reveals (without actual counting) something like 10% Canadianness. Is that high or low? I think Canada’s population is just shy of 10% the US’s. So that doesn’t strike me as Matt’s “indie rock dominance.” Oh well.

It’s true, though, that socialized medicine is probably the best deal when you you’re young and don’t actually need medical care. As Canadian medical entrepreneur Dr. Brian Day put it this New York Times article about Canada’s hungry uptake of newly legal private service:

This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.

Russ Roberts has more on the demise of the Canadian model.

I recently wrote a review of Friedman’s Moral Consequences of Economic Growth for the forthcoming edition of the Cato Journal, and I wrote a lot of notes that I didn’t use. And what good are blogs if not for publishing your discarded book review notes!

A main weakness of the Friedman book is that he becomes increasingly fuzzy about what he takes to be the specifically moral consequences of growth. Toward the end, you strongly suspect “moral” in Friedman’s mouth means something like “egalitarian welfare liberal.” As much as this undermines the credibility or interest of his overall case, this move has been, I think, a rhetorical success for Friedman. His resolute sloppiness about the normative side of the equation gives him a lot of room to move. And he gets credit (though not so much from me) for avoiding the standard economist moral argument for growth. And here’s what I have to say about that.

Which consequences of growth count as moral consequences? This is no small question. The answer naturally turns on one’s moral theory. According to the utilitarian philosophy (sometimes just called “consequentialism”) morality is entirely a matter of consequences, and the consequences that matter are those that increase the net quantity of pleasure or happiness. If economic growth increases the net sum of happiness, then that’s all we need to know in order to endorse it morally.

In fact, a kind of simple utilitarianism is the house philosophy of the economics profession. In the orthodox neoclassical theory, utility just is a measure of the satisfaction of an agent’s preferences, and it is a logical consequence of the definition of terms that an increase in income leads to the choice of a more preferred combination of goods, thereby increasing utility. It should be emphasized that the formal notion of utility as preference satisfaction, is, well, formal, and is not a substantive psychological notion at all. Formal utility implies nothing whatsoever about subjective experience and is not synonymous with pleasure or happiness, just as “preference” in the formal theory implies nothing about liking or wanting. Preference is nothing more than that which is revealed by what an agent has done, and utility is the notation for representing it.

Nonetheless, economists are generally all-too-happy to shuffle back and forth between the two notions of utility according to convenience. The slide from formal to substantive utility, combined with utilitarian moral theory, leads to what I call “economic folk morality.” According to economic folk morality, the moral desirability of economic growth is close at hand. Broad-based growth makes almost everyone wealthier; wealthier people can satisfy more of their preferences; satisfying preferences just is happiness; and happiness just is the moral summum bonum. So growth is morally good. QED.

But economic folk morality is false for at least three reasons. First, preference satisfaction does not entail happiness. It is possible to want and get things that will make us miserable. Second, the pleasure or happiness a life contains does not exhaust its value. The value and quality of our lives depends not only on how we feel, but also on how much of our human potential has come to fruition, the content of our characters, and the objective nature of our behavior. Third, morality is not primarily a matter of adding up a quantity of anything. A person who achieves her ends, honors her obligations, and contributes to her community has lived a moral life, regardless of the quantity of happiness she added to it.

Part of the interest of Friedman’s book is that he does not lean on the economic folk proof for the morality of growth. Insofar as the folk proof is unsound, that has to be to Friedman’s credit. However, the folk proof is tantalizingly close to a profound truth about the morality of economic growth. My complaint is that Friedman’s list of the moral consequences of growth are in fact moral consequences only because they are instrumental to some further state of affairs that is good.

Democracy, tolerance, openness are not good for their own sakes, but for what they enable. But what they enable—an increase in the scope of opportunity and the realization of meaningful human ends—is what economic growth enables, too. Friedman’s moral favorites are not things of independent value with which to justify growth. Rather these liberal desirables are part a package of political-economic goods that already includes growth. These elements are part of the same package in virtue of the fact that they each make life more secure, more satisfying, and more worth living. Growth has better consequences when it occurs within a liberal system. But liberalism is worth having in very large part because it enables economic growth and its consequences. Friedman’s moral desirables are in fact desirable because they enable and magnify the life-enhancing powers of wealth. If it is true that growth in turn enables the conditions that enable it, then we will have a virtuous circle. But we have to get out of the circle to morally vindicate growth. And the folk proof shows the way: growth makes life better.

Most of the literature on positional preferences emphasizes the downside. But what if the upside is bigger?

Becker and Murphy in Social Economics argue that without a taste for status, there would be too little entreprenuerial activity, because the expected monetary payoff of an entrepeneurial gamble would often be too small. However, if you add the expected status payoff to the monetary payoff, entrepreneuial gambles become rational. We would all be poorer if we didn’t have a taste for status.

Today, Tyler points to a number of papers by Rick Harbaugh. His “Falling Behind the Joneses: Relative Consumption and the Growth-Savings Paradox” is a beautiful example of the possible upside of positional preferences. Here is the introduction:

Consumers in rapidly growing economies should borrow against future earnings to smooth consumption, or at least should save at a lower rate than consumers in countries with stagnant or falling incomes. Instead, multi-country studies show a strong positive correlation between income growth and savings rates (Bosworth, 1993). Such a correlation could result from high savings rates inducing high growth rates (Lucas, 1998), but the pattern in most rapid-growth economies has been for rapid income growth to precede sharp increases in household savings rates. Of the possible explanations for this growth-savings paradox, the Duesenberry (1949) relative consumption model, which assumes utility comes from individual consumption relative to societal per capita consumption, seems an unlikely candidate. Rising incomes would appear to induce excessive consumption as consumers attempt to “keep up with the Joneses”. This notion is examined with a simple two-period model. Rather than increasing consumption, concern for relative consumption can induce a fear of falling behind which raises precautionary savings. As societal income growth increases this fear intensifies, allowing for a positive effect of growth on savings rates and potentially explaining the growth-savings paradox.

Benjamin Friedman argues that growth is a public good and, as is the nature of public goods, individuals will underinvest in it unless the government does something about, in this case by mandating or rewarding savings relative to consumption. Could it be that our fear of falling behind just is the “tax” that motivates investment in growth?

Glad you asked! If you have yet to check out the February issue of Cato Unbound, which asks, “Is ‘Old Europe’ Doomed?” then now’s a great time to catch up. All the formal replies to Theodore Dalyrmple’s lead essay are in, and the informal conversation has just begun with a response by Dalrymple. (Choice line: “Multiculturalism is not couscous: it is the stoning of adulterers . . .”)

Before the free-for-all conversation heats up, take a look at Timothy B. Smith’s careful elucidation of the economic problems of the traditional Western European powers, and the distinction between these and the healthier Scandanavian welfare states. Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan vigorously dissents from Dalrymple’s dour economic diagnosis, but argues that the problem of integrating immigrants may be even more serious than Dalrymple made it out. Last, but far from least, Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum writes a prescription for what ails Old Europe.

And keep an eye out for details about next month’s issue featuring David Schmidtz, Peter Singer, Jacob Hacker, and more on equality.

If there’s one thing that happiness research makes clear it is that commuting makes us miserable. This story in the Washington Post makes the “affective ignorance” literature plausible. Check this:

Ockershausen reported the conditions from the scene last night and said he wasn’t moving. “It’s gridlocked all the way across the bridge,” he said, speaking on his cell phone. “I guess I’ll listen to the radio. It’s the only choice I have.”

He awakes at 4 a.m. to come to work and often waits until after 7 p.m. to leave so he can miss the heaviest traffic. His 48-mile commute typically takes two hours or more, and he gets home so late, he usually heads straight to bed.

That makes no sense to me. Why would he do that to himself? There may be a good reason. But it is very possible that there is no good reason. If I was this guy, I would be willing to accept a 100% increase in housing costs to reduce my commute to 10 minutes, or a 50% pay cut to work 10 minutes from where I already live. This wouldn’t only buy him about a month a year of time to do things more meaningful than sitting in a car, but would diminish his stress level magnificently.

My sense is that commuting nightmares are often a function of two earner families. They make a mistake and think of a huge metropolitan area as a single “place” and one takes a job in Gaithersburg and one takes a job in Alexandria. Maybe they live in Gaithersburg and mom has a 10 minute commute. But it takes dad two hours during rush to get to Alexandria. Isn’t it just bizaree that people do this. In Iowa, for example, practically no one lives in Cedar Rapids and drives to Des Moines every day. Because that would be crazy. But people from Gaithersburg are willing to drive two hours to Alexandria because, why? It’s the same sprawling metro area? The Washington Post classifieds make it look like a single labor market? No doubt this is sometimes worth it, but my guess is that a lot of people are just being imprudent.

My ideal commute is about zero minutes. I think my optimal happiness balance would have me work from home in a quiet, rural location (the studies are unequivocal in showing country as less anxiety inducing than town — and, anyway, I am not at heart city folk) and then, maybe once every other month, spend a week in Washington DC or New York City or some such place maintaining a high-status instititutional affiliation and high social capital urban social network. And then I could go back home to the quiet and the dogs and the good warm people of Meadow Junction (with a sack of gourmet groceries from the city). This is, of course, the sort of thing you need some money to do. (House in the country, apartment in the city…)

And that’s precisely how money makes you happy: by financing an otherwise infeasible happiness-producing lifestyle. You know, I would also get a personal trainer who would ensure that I excercised more,  and take more Yoga classes, if I could afford them. And this would very likely give me a happiness bump, too. Of course, money per se doesn’t do much for you (except insofar as simply having money produces a sense of higher status), and you can spend it in ways that will make you miserable. But not having more money certainly rules out doing more stuff that could make you happier. Its the consumption pattern that matters. If the better patterns are available with more money, then money matters.

Do you think your hedonically optimal consumption pattern is available to you at your current income? If you think not, what do you think the probability is that you are wrong?  (Keep in mind, the higher your income, the higher the probability that you are wrong!)

Not against the idea that growth is good (heaven forbid), but against what Friedman says is good about it.

(Cogency warning: this is a sketch, and only sketch. Blog as dialectical scratchpad.)

Friedman argues that economic growth “fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy,” and that these are moral goods.

This is a varied list, is it not? Let’s just assume that Friedman is arguing that growth actually produces more fairness and democracy and not just “commitment” and “dedication.” Anyway, many of the things on the list strike me as the vehicles through which growth creates moral consequences.
This of course all depends on what you think “morality” is about. What do I think morality is about? I think morality is, on the one hand, about people realizing the ends that make their lives meaningful and, on the other, about the constraints on individual and collective opportunistic behavior that enable individuals to realize their meaningful ends in cooperation with others.

It turns out that my foundational theory of what morality is FOR says that the function of morality is, by and large, to enable gains from cooperation. That is, the point of morality is to produce cooperative surpluses. (That morality does enable gains from cooperation is an evolutionary possibility condition for morality. If it didn’t enable cooperative gains by constraining opportunistic behavior, morality wouldn’t exist.) But economic growth just is periodic expansion in the overall size of the surplus in the broader network of cooperation. So, the way I see it, economic growth is more or less what morality is for.

For instance, fairness matters because cooperative surpluses matter. If we cannot divide the gains from cooperation according to terms that each party finds mutually agreeable, then we will not cooperate, and so there will be no gains to divide. Fairness is morally desirable because gains from cooperation are morally desirable. If growth produces more fairness, then great, because fairness leads to cooperation, which leads to cooperative surpluses, and better cooperation leads to bigger surpluses, which is what we want! The moral consequence of fairness is: growth! And if Friedman is right and fairness is a moral consequence of growth, then growth is a moral consequence of itself. Growth is its own reward!

Surplus is desirable because we’re individually better off with a piece of the surplus than without a piece. That’s why we cooperate. And by “better off” I mean: helps us realize our meaningful ends. I actually mean more than that. The surplus often opens up the space of ends, making formerly infeasible ends feasible. Some of these ends will be more meaningful for us than the ends in the pre-surplus feasible set. So surpluses can make available more meaningful ends, and therefore more meaningful lives. And meaningful lives is the real bottom line.

If increasing cooperative surpluses in the service of meaningful lives is what morality is for, then it may seem that growth is basically what morality is for. Maybe we’ve got a scalability issue here, and surpluses arising from huge impersonal networks of cooperation have too many negative external effects, and so defeat the ability to put our shares of the surplus to use in building meaningful lives. Morality collapses in on itself at a certain scale. I doubt it. But the real point is that this is a question about whether morality is scalable or self-defeating. If we can point out that growth has moral consequences, but all we’re doing when we point that out is that growth helps consolidate the preconditions for growth, then we will have gotten exactly nowhere.

Either growth facilitates our ability to live ever more meaningful lives in cooperation with one another or it doesn’t. If it does, that’s the worthy moral consequence of growth. If growth does that in part by promoting itself through increasing cosmopolitanism, broadening opportunity, increasing demand for liberal political institutions, etc., then great. But we should just take the argument straight home to meaningful lives rather then getting hung up in the socio-political instrumentalities. If growth doesn’t facilitate our ability to live ever more meaningful lives in cooperation with one another, then growth is immoral, even if the antecedents of growth are morality itself. Then our task would be to pick out where the scale problem begins, and try to refurbish morality, and our moral sensbility, to reflect its own limitations of scope.

Well, I’ve got some real problems with that, but it was fun! What’s your beef?

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.
Here 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 in the article 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.)

My meditation on solidarity as a social ideal is up today at TCSDaily. Here’s a bit:

Solidarity is tricky. There is a feeling of solidarity, fraternity, and belonging that can pervade the gut and bring a tear to the eye. There is also a system of solidarity in which we can be embedded and enmeshed. As joint participants in the market, relying constantly on far-flung partners in a mind-boggling network of specialization, vying to cooperate with one another on increasingly beneficial terms, we are, in fact, in it together. We are part of the system of solidarity, whether we know it or not. One of the paradoxes of modern life is that the system of solidarity does not necessarily produce or even encourage the feeling of solidarity. I need not feel warmth for, or even recognize the existence of, the Chinese laborers running the machine that made my socks (nor they for me) in order for us to be participants in a needful common enterprise — to be related parts of an interdependent whole.

Check it out.

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

So, just the other day, I discovered that we have a view of the Washington Monument! It’s not amazing, but you can see it. (The graininess is due to the electronic zoom.)

More pictures below the fold. (more…)

Don Boudreaux in the course of a nice post on Jane Jacobs’ anti-nationalism quotes her thusly:

Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for the rise and decline of wealth.

This is right. But it’s complicated, isn’t it? The more economically open a nation’s institutions are, the less significant is the nation as a unit of analysis. That is, once the political entity gets its institutions right, the economic entity becomes absorbed in a much larger economic network. When the institutions are all wrong, the nation gets cut off from the larger network. The circumstances in which it really makes sense to take the nation as the unit of analysis are those in which the nation is pathological. Sort of like, you don’t pay that much attention to your liver until you get cirrhosis.

Political philosophy suffers from a paralell error. Normative mercantilism? The nation-state does require normative justification. But it is not therefore the primary or largest unit of social interaction demanding normative consideration. I think we’ve been retarded philosophically be the overemphasis on the nation. I’m certainly not sure how to reformulate the main questions of political-social philosophy for a super-nationalist context. So start thinking!

In the Washington Post’s account of the resuscitation of Social Security reform in the president’s budget proposal, Allan Sloan writes, of progressive indexing:

This means that although progressive indexing is an attractive idea from a social-justice point of view, it would reduce Social Security’s political support by making it seem more like welfare than an earned benefit.

Matt Y. characterizes Social Security reform as a zombie that won’t (really truly) die. Sure. But how about Sloan’s undead item of liberal faith about political support, which keeps rearing its dessicated head despite the lack of any good argument.

As far as I can tell, there is little to no evidence that converting social security to a means-tested benefits program would reduce political support for it. It is true that former Social Security administrator Wilbur Cohen’s assertion that a program for the poor will be a poor program is repeated endlessly. But truth is not established by repetition. Unemployment and disability insurance, unlike Social Security retirement benefits, kick in only in conditions of necessity. Nevertheless, or perhaps due to that fact, they are very politically popular, well-funded, and face no apparent political threat of reduction.

Indeed, there is compelling evidence that means-tested retirement benefits would be too generous creating a perverse incentive for workers to save too little in order to qualify for a beefy means-tested benefit.

Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Casey Mulligan have written a fascinating account of the political economy of “gerontocracy” or rule by the old. Their key point is that during their working years, workers have fractured political interests. Teachers plump for teacher’s unions. Manufacturers lobby for price-supports. Investors fight for lower capital gains taxes. Etc. Many of these interests cancel each other out. In any case, there is no unified front. However, when people retire from their particular occupations, they leave behind a narrow sectional interest and move into a much broader interest group, retirees, who have highly unified interests, and, moreover, very low opportunity costs to political participation.

The demographic problem of social security is precisely that a very large portion of the population is soon to make the transition into this group. There is every reason to believe that retirees would lobby for big retirement benefits, and there would be no other political interest as large and unified to keep them from getting them. One of the chief economic reasons for mandatory retirement savings accounts is to guard against this much more likely contingency. (More likely than too little political support, that is.) If workers are required to save for retirement in protected accounts, they will not be able to prematurely consume their savings in order to qualify for predictably over-generous means-tested retirement benefits.

I agree that progressive indexing is attractive in terms of distribution. But since there is little reason to believe that a more means sensitive program will lack political support, why not just go all the way to a progressively designed means-tested program for the poor elderly complemented by mandatory personal retirement accounts to buffer against moral hazard?

This is, I agree, not a particularly libertarian proposal. But I think it is the best feasible option from almost every perspective with an interest in feasibility. For the life of me, I still can’t figure out how a liberal could possibly prefer the status quo over a cushy retirement safety net plus mandatory accounts.

My prediction is that nominal liberals actually won’t be able to hold out that long against the overwhelming liberal sensibleness of this, and so if Republicans can’t get the job done, Democrats will soon enough.

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.

[Cross-posted from Happiness and Public Policy.]

Here are a few thoughts about what I’ve learned from interdisciplinary research.

The more interdisciplinary investigation I do, the clearer it becomes that different disciplines have quite different standards for evidence and argument. Some very traditional analytical philosophy papers on happiness (or whatever) are next to useless, so thoughtless are they, despite their impressive dialectical rigor, in the assumption that philosophers’ intuitions about the meanings of words, or about our judgments in counterfactual cases, is any kind of reliable guide to truth. Thankfully, this is dying in philosophy. Economists are exceedingly careful about their formalisms, but exceedingly careless about what their formalisms are supposed to be about. Psychologists are (well some of them) very careful about experimental design, on one level. But they are often stunningly naive about the interpretation of the data they have gathered. It is perhaps my own disciplinary prejudice, and perhaps I am being self-serving, but I find that the most enlightening work is often by analytically trained philosophers who are skeptical of traditional analytical methods, and apply their diaectical and analytic skills to the interpretation of scientific results. I’m thinking of philosophers like Daniel Dennett, Stephen Stich, the Churchlands, Kim Sterelny, Paul Griffiths, Andy Clark, Jesse Prinz, David Buller, J.D. Trout, etc. There are a bunch of philosophers of biology and physics that one could add here, but they don’t leap to my mind, since those aren’t my areas. But I think it’s worth pointing out that philosophy and philosophical training really are good for the advancement of real knowledge. And I think we’re going see more and more philosophers, armed with a kind of conceptual training that scientists do not normally get, making the transition into primary empirical research, and making major contributions. Here for example is a paper of U of Maryland philosophy professor Chris Cherniak. Where did the “philosophy” go? Who cares!

I think we see similar value-adds from other disciplinary fusions. Economists like Kevin McCabe who have moved into neuroscience are making real contributions to neuroscience as well as economics. It is getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some forms of political science and economics. This kind of convergence is very, very good. Despite the stupid institutional impediments caused by the departmental structure of universities, we’re on a track to see the resurgence of the old fashioned “moral sciences.” It is getting and harder harder to tell the difference between philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, political science, and the worthwhile branches of anthropology and sociology. There is considerable value in disciplinary differences in the precise way questions are tackled. But there is even greater value in the fact that all these disciplines are increasingly tackling overlapping sets of questions with increasingly compatible intellectual tools.

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!

[Cross-posted from Happiness and Public Policy.]