Abstract
In this chapter, I’m going to discuss the current “hot thing” in policymaking—happiness—and use that as a springboard into other approaches to policy based on well-being. As we’ll see, happiness (or subjective well-being) seems to have clear advantages over more traditional measures of economic welfare (such as gross domestic product, or GDP). According to advocates, it respects the subjectivity of individuals’ goals and tracks their actual well-being much more closely than GDP does—and it may even be the same as well-being itself, in which case measuring happiness would be the perfect tool for the job. However, the reality is more complicated than that: given the nature of the concept of happiness, it is difficult to define it, measure it, and implement policy based on it without additional complications, problems that prove fatal to the entire enterprise. In addition, there is reason to doubt that happiness is the most important basis on which to make policy—or even an important one at all.
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Notes
Amartya Sen, “The Economics and Happiness and Capability,” in Luigino Bruni and Pier Luigi Porta (eds.), Economics & Happiness: Framing the Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16– 27, at 16.
For starters, see Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005); Bruni and Porta, Economics & Happiness
and Bruno Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), in addition to the many books and articles cited through this book.
If you think economists make unlikely happiness experts, then you’ll love to know that legal scholars are also in the game; for instance, see the chapters in Eric A. Posner and Cass R. Sunstein (eds.), Law & Happiness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
And there is some interest from sociologists, too: see Ruut Veenhoven, “Sociological Theories of Subjective Well-Being,” in Michael Eid and Randy J. Larsen (eds.), The Science of Subjective Well-Being (New York: Guilford, 2008), 44–61.
Those of a certain age may remember the term gross national product, a similar measure that counted the output of domestically owned firms overseas but not output produced domestically by foreign-owned firms. GDP, on the other hand, is geographically defined in that all output produced within a nation’s borders, regardless of the ownership of the firms producing it, is included in national output. GDP has many advantages; for instance, it avoids the issue of large corporations held by investors in various countries, and it also accounts for all domestic production, which contributes to local economic growth (even if some of the profits themselves go to overseas owners). Two recent books explore the history of GDP: Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)
and Zachary Karabell, The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014).
For a concise and policy-oriented treatment of these issues, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010), 10–15; see also Frey, Happiness, 158–69. Economists aren’t the only ones aware of these shortcomings: psychologists have emphasized them as well, and this has prompted them to apply their concepts of happiness and subjective Well-Being to economics.
See, for instance, Ed Diener and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5 (2004): 1–31.
Robert F. Kennedy, address at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, March 17, 1968, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7 -G3PC_868; quoted in Marc Fleurbaey and Didier Blanchet, Beyond GDP: Measuring Welfare and Assessing Sustainability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xi.
Karma Ura and Karma Galay (eds.), Gross National Happiness and Development (Thimphu: Center for Bhutan Studies, 2004). Some in Bhutan have come recently to doubt the measure’s efficacy, though; see “Bhutan PM Casts Doubts over Gross Domestic Happiness,” BBC News Asia, August 2, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23545641.
Rebecca Black, “Northern Ireland to Measure Wellbeing in Bid to Emulate ‘Happy’ Nation of Bhutan,” Belfast Telegraph, January 22, 2014, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/ local-national/northern-ireland/northern-ireland-to-measure -wellbeing-in-bid-to-emulate-happy-nation-of-bhutan-29938690.html.
Layard, Happiness, 147 (italics added). This need for multiple or comprehensive statistics is also defended (usually with qualifications) by other scholars, such as Frey, Happiness, 161–62; and Carol Graham, The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011), ch. 5.
Daniel Kahneman et al., “Toward National Well-Being Accounts,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 94 (2004): 429–34. See note 38 for more on Kahneman’s method for measuring instant utility.
For a fantastic introduction to the implications of happiness for welfare economics— and the paper that got me thinking about writing on this topic in the first place— see Daniel M. Hausman, “Hedonism and Welfare Economics,” Economics and Philosophy 26 (2010): 321–44.
Daniel Gilbert describes this well in Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2005), 34. (He uses yellow, but hey, to each his own.)
For a philosophical expansion of the idea of subjectivity, see Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435–50.
On interpersonal comparisons of utility, see Jon Elster and John E. Roemer (eds.), Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
There are those who don’t reject them completely, such as Yew-Kwang Ng, “A Case for Happiness, Cardinalism, and Interpersonal Comparability,” Economic Journal 107 (1997): 1848–58.
Sissela Bok, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 57.
Ed Diener, Christie Napa Scollon, and Richard E. Lucas, “The Evolving Concept of Subjective Well-Being: The Multifaceted Nature of Happiness,” in Assessing Well-Being: The Collected Work of Ed Diener (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 67–100, at 68.
In her foreword to Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Secrets of Psychological Wealth (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), psychologist Carol Diener (wife of Ed and mother of Robert) explained that after surveying philosophers’ takes on happiness, her husband “mapped out an ambitious plan for the serious study of happiness which he termed ‘subjective Well-Being’ to lend it an air of scientific legitimacy to a skeptical academic world” (x).
L. W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 139. This closely resembles psychologists Elizabeth Pollard and Patrice Lee’s characterization of Well-Being: “a complex, multi-faceted construct that has continued to elude researchers’ attempts to define and measure.”
Pollard and Lee, “Child Well-Being: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” Social Indicators Research 61 (2003): 59–78, at 60
quoted in Rachel Dodge et al., “The Challenge of Defining Wellbeing,” International Journal of Wellbeing 2 (2012): 222–35, at 222.
Richard Easterlin, “Income and Happiness: Towards a Unified Theory,” Economic Journal 111 (2001): 465–84, at 465
quoted in Luigino Bruni, Civil Happiness: Economics and Human Flourishing in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2006), 8–9. (Bruni’s book is a fascinating history of the study and treatment of happiness by economists over the years.) Others who treat happiness and Well-Being as equivalent include Frey, Happiness, 3
and Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9.
Luo Lo and Robin Gilmour, “Culture and Conceptions of Happiness: Individual Oriented and Social Oriented SWB,” Journal of Happiness Studies 5 (2004): 269–91 (described in Suh and Koo, “Comparing Subjective Well-Being across Cultures and Nations,” 416).
See Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), from which this three- part classification is adapted. Most other happiness scholars have similar lists, such as Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 33–40.
Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Free Press, 2011), 10–12.
Martin E. P. Seligman, See also his earlier book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
On flow, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).
For an overview of many of the tests used to measure happiness or subjective Well-Being, see Frey, Happiness, ch. 2; for more technical details, see Randy J. Larsen and Barbara L. Fredrickson, “Measurement Issues in Emotion Research,” in Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (eds.), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 40–60; and William Pavot, “Successes and Shortfalls of Assessment,” in Eid and Larsen (eds.), Science of Subjective Well-Being, 124–40.
For a terrific introduction to the issues of interpretation regarding survey questions, see Fred Feldman, What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–5. Furthermore, while I focus on happiness surveys in this section, there is another well-known approach to measuring subjective Well-Being that should be mentioned— one that harkens back to economist Francis Edgeworth’s idea for a “hedonimeter” to track feelings of pleasure and pain (see Bok, Exploring Happiness, 92– 96). Daniel Kahneman has argued for the measurement of instant utility as a direct measure of hedonic feeling, which can then be summed up and tracked over time. Individuals are asked at regular intervals to report their level of pleasure or pain on a scale of 0 to 10, avoiding many of the problems with the interpretation of the concept of “happiness” discussed in this chapter.
For more, see Kahneman, Peter P. Wakker, and Rakesh Sarin, “Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997): 375–405; and Kahneman, “Objective Happiness,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz (eds.), Well-Being, 1– 25. (For critique, see Feldman, What Is This Thing Called Happiness? ch. 3.)
Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want (New York: Penguin, 2007), 32; Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 35.
Believe it or not, whether there is a middle option (say, out of five) or not (such as when there are four or six options) has a significant effect on survey results (because people are drawn to the middle option when there is one); for an example from opinion surveys, see G. Kalton, Julie Roberts, and D. Holt, “The Effects of Offering a Middle Response Option with Opinion Questions,” The Statistician 29 (1980): 65–78.
Deirdre McCloskey, “Happyism,” The New Republic, June 8, 2012, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/magazine/103952/ happyism-deirdre-mccloskey-economics-happiness.
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 36; see ch. 1 in general for concerns about scales and rankings of Well-Being.
See Graham, Pursuit of Happiness, ch. 4; as well as Carol Graham and Stefano Pettinato, Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Hardship in New Market Economies (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002).
Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 45–46. In applying this concept, both Sen and Nussbaum pay particular attention to women’s poverty, and they have both developed alternative measures of welfare, Nussbaum’s in particular being a prime example of objective Well-Being, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 2.
Fleurbaey and Blanchet, Beyond GDP, 202; they present a technical discussion of the issues of scale, boundaries, and calibration on 177–201. For more on the calibration of surveys, see Mary Steffel and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Happy by What Standard? The Role of Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Comparisons in Ratings of Happiness,” Social Indicators Research 92 (2009): 69–79.
See, for instance, Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being,” Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 141–66. For a critique of these linkages, see Martha Nussbaum, “Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology,” in Posner and Sunstein (eds.), Law & Happiness, 81–113.
Flavio Comim, “Capabilities and Happiness: Overcoming the Informational Apartheid in the Assessment of Human Well-Being,” in Luigino Bruni, Flavio Comim, and Maurizio Pugno (eds.), Capabilities and Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 140–59, at 140.
Randy J. Larsen and Michael Eid, “Ed Diener and the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” in Eid and Larsen (eds.), Science of Subjective Well-Being, 1–13, at 4. The study they cite is Ed Diener et al., “Positivity and the Construction of Life Satisfaction Judgments: Global Happiness Is Not the Sum of Its Parts,” Journal of Happiness Studies 1 (2000): 159–76.
For an intense treatment of this question, the possible incommensurability of these two values, see James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 5. There are some who maintain that, in the end, there is only one type of happiness or pleasure: for instance, see Layard, Happiness, 20–22 (a section titled “A Single Dimension”).
Jerome Kagan, Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), xviii–xix; chapter 2 (“Happiness Ascendant”) elaborates on this point, while chapter 1 focuses on the role of context in psychological research. See also Feldman, What Is This Thing Called Happiness? 233–240 for an extensive critique of life satisfaction measurements.
Angus Campbell, The Sense of Well-Being in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 23. For more on the role of judgment and context in happiness survey responses, see Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack, “Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz (eds.), Well-Being, 61–84 (from which the Campbell quote was drawn).
Layard, “Measuring Subjective Well-Being,” Science 327 (2010): 534–35.
For instance, see Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert, and David Donaldson, “Intertemporal Population Ethics: Critical-Level Utilitarian Principles,” Econometrica 63 (1995): 1303–20
John Broome, “The Welfare Economics of Population,” Oxford Economic Papers 48 (1996): 177–93
and Gustaf Arrhenius, Jesper Ryberg, and Torbjörn Tännsjö, “The Repugnant Conclusion,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion.
Looking at happiness as a contributor to Well-Being rather than as simply a component of it, Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener, and Richard Lucas consider the possibility of an “optimal level of happiness,” finding that happiness has different effects on different parts of a person’s life (“The Optimum Level of Well-Being: Can People Be Too Happy?” Perspectives in Psychological Science 2 [2007]: 346–60). More generally, see Oishi and Minkyung Koo, “Two New Questions about Happiness: ‘Is Happiness Good?’ and ‘Is Happiness Better?’” in Eid and Larsen (eds.), Science of Subjective Well-Being, 290–306.
Prioritarianism is usually traced to Derek Parfit’s paper “Equality and Priority,” Ratio 10 (2002): 202–21. Richard Layard endorses a version of this idea in Happiness, 136– 37.
See H. B. Acton and J. W. N. Watkins, “Symposium: Negative Utilitarianism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 37 (1963): 83–114.
See, for instance, Seligman, Authentic Happiness, ch. 4; Lyubomirsky, How of Happiness, 20–24; Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 90–94.
Ruut Veenhoven discusses this paradox (and offers explanations for it) in his chapter “Happiness in Hardship,” in Bruni and Porta (eds.), Economics and Happiness, 243–66. For more on the strange relationship between suffering, happiness, and Well-Being, see Havi Carel, “‘I Am Well, Apart from the Fact That I Have Cancer’: Explaining Well-Being within Illness,” and Mike W. Martin, “Suffering in Happy Lives,” both in Lisa Bortolotti (ed.), Philosophy and Happiness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 82–115.
Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” in M. H. Appley (ed.), Adaptation- Level Theory: A Symposium (New York: Academic, 1971), 287–302. For an in- depth discussion, see Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein, “Hedonic Adaptation,” in Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz (eds.), Well-Being, 302–29; and for implications, see Graham, Pursuit of Happiness, ch. 4; and Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, 84–90.
Richard Easterlin, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence,” in Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramowitz (New York: Academic, 1974), 89–125.
For a skeptical reexamination, see Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2008): 1–87.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974), 42–45 (this quote from 42, including the term “super-duper”); for a more approachable treatment, see his book The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 104–8. If you think this sounds like the film The Matrix and its sequels, you would be right— these movies make us wonder not only if the experience machine is preferable but also whether we’re in one right now. Philosophers have examined these movies in depth for their philosophical relevance
for instance, see the essays in William Irwin (ed.), The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago: Open Court, 2002).
Ronald W. Dworkin, Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006). (This author is not to be confused with the legal and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin, cited elsewhere.)
Luigino Bruni, “Back to Aristotle? Happiness, Eudaimonia, and Relational Goods,” in Bruni, Comim, and Pugno (eds.), Capabilities and Happiness, 114–39, at 121–22. For a thorough investigation of the relationship between relative income and happiness, see Andrew E. Clark, Paul Frijters, and Michael A. Shields, “Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles,” Journal of Economic Literature 46 (2008): 95–144.
Finally, Ruut Veenhoven criticizes the idea of relative happiness in “Is Happiness Relative?” Social Indicators Research 24 (1991): 1–34.
Don’t laugh! This argument is used to justify a much steeper (more progressive) income tax system on the basis that at higher levels of income, people derive most of their happiness from competitive consumption, not from “true” joy with their lives. For instance, see Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: Free Press, 1999); for a counterargument, see McCloskey, “Happyism.”
While some (such as Richard Layard) consider happiness to be the unquestionably ultimate good, others treat it at least partially as a contributor to a full and successful life. Ruut Veenhoven’s classic article “The Utility of Happiness,” Social Indicators Research 20 (1988): 333–54
Ruut Veenhoven, and book How Harmful Is Happiness? Consequences of Enjoying Life or Not (Rotterdam: Universitaire Pers Roterdam, 1989) ask us to consider the effects of happiness
and Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener investigate these effects in “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 803–55. (See also Oishi and Koo, “Two Questions about Happiness.”)
Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 245–46.
See, for instance, Griffin, Well-Being, 8; Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, 92–93; and Pierluigi Barrotta, “Why Economists Should Be Unhappy with the Economics of Happiness,” Economics and Philosophy 24 (2008): 145–65, at 151–53.
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© 2014 Mark D. White
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White, M.D. (2014). Happiness. In: The Illusion of Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361158_2
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