Best wishes,
John Imam

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By way of introduction, we met briefly at the recent IHS seminar at Stanford. I’m generally interested in Happiness issues, so we talked a bit after your presentation….

Now then — I had a comment on the issue that certain forms of behavior are “illusions” to the extent that they don’t tend towards the maximization of happiness. To be sure, people can define their own life goals in terms other than the maximization of “happiness” or “subjective well-being.” They may for instance, take honor or some religious ideal as their own personal maximand. And, importantly, unless we want to render the term “happiness” completely vacuous by saying that the universe of possible idiosyncratic maximands (e.g. honor, religious ideals, best hair) are only meaningful to the extent that they promote happiness, these other goals remain analytically distinct.

Nonetheless, it seems helpful to know where our hardwired intuitions fail us if, in fact, we do seek happiness. Just as it might be helpful to know that our desire for sugar can be harmful if it is left unchecked, Kahneman’s project seems useful to the extent that it reminds us that our drive to work more (or whatever) may not yield the net benefit that we thought it would. In this sense, the “arms-race” (or “rat race”) that largely defines our professional culture can be seen as a collective action problem.

It doesn’t help much to say that “we may have a REVEALED preference for something other than happiness” because revealed preferences are mere patterns of behavior to which some motivating factor must be ascribed. Alone, they are pretty much meaningless — they could be systematic mistakes, after all, but we have to know what the endgame is in order to define them as such. Economists explain revealed preferences through utility-maximization and Kahneman uses happiness. One might imagine another study that shows how our hard-wired intuitions lead us to sub-optimal levels some other maximand, such as honor. Either way, this type of study seems pretty important to me.

If I read you right, your point is not that this type of information about our “illusions” isn’t helpful as far as it goes, but that one shouldn’t design public policy by assuming that people’s only goal is happiness. I’m definitely on board with this, though I think (having scanned a number of your posts on the site) that we diverge a little bit on how common it is to place general happiness high on one’s own life goals. I actually think it’s quite common, but this depends on how we define happiness (which leads us to the aforementioned, bottomless debate about whether all other goals can be subsumed into some sort of happiness).

Do you really think that there are (many) people out there who want to, for instance, work hard for it’s own sake if some policy-level alternative (taxes or otherwise) could give us more leisure and yield the same amount of happiness? Is the race for positional superiority a “good in itself”? If the quest for pretty girls really does harm us — to frame the issue in a way that hits home for many of us — should we let it proceed unchecked? And, finally, are “revealed preferences” — as opposed to the ideal of happiness maximization — the proper unit of analysis when measuring freedom, liberty or the like?

I don’t mean to suggest an answer to these important questions — just want to see what you think.

Let me know what you think — again, nice meeting you at IHS, and I look forward to corresponding more in the future.

David D.