“Establish Happiness:” Not a Duty of Government
Jason Kuznicki on Apr 16th 2007
I’ve been following the recent Cato Unbound discussion about happiness with much interest. It occurs to me, though, that the attempt to measure happiness quantitatively — and to mold public policy based on research findings — is more deeply misguided than even lead essayist Darrin McMahon would admit.
Of course, McMahon is right to condemn the new happiness paternalism…
In the first place, we would probably do well to remind ourselves that worrying about happiness is a luxury — the privilege of peoples whose more pressing needs have been satisfied already. With longer lifespans and more abundant food supplies, greater security and more creature comforts than ever before, we are free to contemplate what those exposed to the miseries of famine, chaos, and disease can only dream.
On one level, then, we worry about happiness today with such single-minded focus because we can: Inhabitants of the world’s developed nations are the most fortunate creatures to have walked the face of the earth. And yet for all our focus on happiness it is by no means clear that we are happier as a result. Might we not even say that our contemporary concern is something of an inauspicious sign, belying a deep anxiety and doubt about the object of our pursuit? Does the fact that we worry so much about being happy suggest that we are not?
This strikes me as quite correct, as does is invocation of Brave New World, a book that all libertarians (and all educated people) should read:
[W]hereas 1984 can now seem a somewhat dated, if no less masterful, reflection on the concerns of the Cold War, Huxley’s Brave New World remains very much on the horizon of our future. Its denizens live with unflinching “faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good,” consuming in abundance, indulging their desires without guilt or inhibition, distracting themselves with the virtual reality of films with simple plots and the cult of youth. Forgetting the past and all things unpleasant in an effort to minimize pain, they maximize pleasure with mood-enhancing drugs and genetic manipulation. Everybody in the Brave New World is “happy nowadays,” and yet the world is a nightmare. We are, I trust, still very far from that. But what a shame it would be to dream only of happiness and then wake up in a world in which we are miserable.
I agree entirely. Yet to me the deeper problem with government happiness initiatives is that by the time we get around to taking them seriously, we have already wandered far from the real reason for government, which is not happiness, but justice. It isn’t damning, but it is evocative, that the word “justice” appears nowhere in this month’s submissions to Cato Unbound. What if a just government would make us, on average, slightly more unhappy, as measured by multiple choice responses on anonymized cross-national standardized tests? What if we achieved justice — perfectly, or as close to it as humans can reach — and, on filling in certain blanks with our #2 pencils, a few more chose “happy,” instead of “very happy” or “extremely happy?”
I hope I don’t sound like too much of a wild-eyed radical when the first thing that comes to mind is the old phrase “Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.”
Examples are easy to imagine: Although it’s deeply unpopular to allow the Ku Klux Klan to air its views in public, justice still demands it. A government might make people happy if it forbade the Klan from marching, or recruiting, or publishing. Now multiply the examples; persecute all those who are hateful, kooky, unpopular, or just generally mistrusted. We might then have a government that made the majority happy. We might even be able to measure their happiness on that all-important standardized test. Yet we would not have a government worthy of our allegiance.
It is not merely that happiness is an unmeasurable ideal, although this is certainly the case. Nor is it merely that pursuing happiness may be a civilizational dead end, as with Brave New World. It’s also that happiness is an ideal for which government is not instituted, and for which the government’s tools are particularly ill-fitted. Happiness is a quintessentially personal attainment; it cannot be levied, conscripted, or doled out — as with taxes, armies, or welfare. (It’s worth pondering that none of these are known for inducing happiness.)
The same quibble about the absence of justice might easily be applied to Will Wilkinson’s policy report on happiness research. Now I do think he’s done a fine job of critiquing the new psychology of happiness. As Wilkinson argues, even defining “happiness” remains a serious and growing problem, and much of our best empirical evidence seems to confirm the commonsense understanding that “happiness” does not refer to any one measurable state of mind (or brain) at all. Different things are called “happiness” by different people, and increasingly we know this to be the case based not merely on individual lifestyles, but on rigorous psychological study.
Confronted with the question of satisfaction in economics — a closely related matter — the Austrians of course had an answer, one which cut the Gordian knot more convincingly than anything before or since: Unhappiness, or unease, is whatsoever causes us to act in pursuit of a goal; happiness is the state of inactivity we arrive at when we have achieved our goal. And that is that. End of story. Do you want us to be happy? Then set us free to achieve our goals, and establish justice to frustrate those who would stop us. We’ll figure out the rest.
Filed in The Bookshelf, The Bureau
Yeah, I largely agree — the state should help enable us to pursue our goals (whatever they may be); it shouldn’t presume to direct us.
Two minor quibbles: (1) I’m not so sure that you can specify what justice requires without any reference to actual circumstances, the broad consequences of adopting various rules, etc. (You know, that “institutional” stuff I’m always harping on about.)
(2) I reckon happiness is more like a byproduct of activity than a state of inactivity. *shrug*
Richard,
On your first quibble, I entirely agree. Institutional design and attention to consequence are essential. (They’re just beyond the scope of this post.)
On your second quibble, you may well be right, but it’s difficult for an economist, or anyone else, to measure this happiness byproduct. The Austrian School presumes that people act in a purposeful manner, and that their inaction indicates that, relative to other concerns, they are satisfied regarding the matter in question. This is not enough to do psychology (as they freely admit), but it’s quite enough to do economics.
Quibble first, followed possibly by some more substantive criticism post-lunch:
Say it ain’t so, Mises!
Previously you’ve criticized Austrian economics for not paying attention to the life of the mind. I wonder why then you trot out their woefully inadequate account of what happiness is — that “state of inactivity we arrive at when we have achieved our goal” — in this instance.
Happiness is not goal-satisfaction, or the glow that follows, it is introspectively, obviously, a first-person subjective emotional lift that is experienced. Sure, it correlates highly with achieving one’s ends, but it is certainly not just just that!
Zach,
You write,
If it’s the post I’m thinking of, I do not believe that I actually criticized Mises for taking this view. I noted that one could criticize him along these lines, and I implied that many have. (See here, but if you’re thinking of another post, let me know.)
Personally, I agree that happiness seems to encompass many other things besides goal satisfaction. Some people do apparently have higher and lower baseline levels of self-reported happiness, and while there is some evidence to think that many of them are systematically misrepresenting things, there is no evidence suggesting that we are all born equal in terms of our potential happiness, and that it’s simply a matter of how well we reach our goals.
(Examples, from Will Wilkinson’s paper: Latin Americans tend to self-report happiness at levels that are surprisingly high given their demographic circumstances; Asians tend to skew lower. Neither result suggests that intrinsic factors are irrelevant, but both do suggest that people might approach and/or interpret test questions differently. Example, from my own life: Many people seem to conclude that I’m a rather unhappy person. This puzzles me, because they are wrong.)
Meanwhile, if you want to get past pure solipsism, and if you mistrust standardized tests, there’s an entirely obvious method of studying happiness: Look at what people do. So while I agree based on introspection that there is more to happiness than one’s actions would indicate, studying actions alone is still instructive and manages better than most other ways to surmount the barrier between my mind and the minds of others.
Looking at what people do will not quantify happiness, but it will reveal what they are unhappy about. It will also reveal the extent to which they are unhappy.
Yet because of the incommensurate nature of value hierarchies, we cannot measure happiness across different individuals. And because of changing marginal utility, we can’t even standardize units of happiness across different acts by the same individual. The first chocolate chip cookie may make me very happy; the second, happier than before, but less so than the first. The first and second are therefore not substitutes for one another, and it is meaningless to ask “How much does a chocolate chip cookie make me happy?” We must ask how much each individual cookie makes me happy.
Meanwhile, the only way to measure this happiness is by comparison to other choices, and my hierarchy of values will often be quite different from those of others. Someone who hates chocolate may despise the very same cookies and find that getting rid of them is a value instead. Still, there can be no common scale of values between the two of us, because there is never a common standard that is precisely equal among all people.
Revealed preference is therefore an enormously powerful tool for measuring happiness, but it’s also enormously limited. One way of thinking about economics which seems (to my mind at least) consonant with the Austrian approach is to think of economics as the science of happiness, working under the constraints that I have just set forth.