Happiness & Public Policy

Not all people would say that happiness is the highest good, Some would instead assert that a meaningful life is more important. Still others would posit different values. A thoughtful consideration of the matter does reveal that happiness, broadly construed, best serves the public weal. To benefit a nation, policies must define the public good and provide instruments for implementing it. This is not easy in part because people are widely adaptive to bad situations. They can ignore smog, accept TV schlock, endure traffic jams, shrug off global warming because that’s the way things are. This acceptance is rather akin to a frog in a pan. Dump it into boiling water and it will immediately jump out. Place it in luke warm water, then slowly turn up the fire, and it will cook to death. We are cooking as I write.

Happiness has recent history as public policy. In antiquity Aristotle wrote of happiness for the individual amidst an elite. In the Nineteenth Century John Stuart Mill espoused a system to promote it. As a classical empiricist in a society with slaves to do the work, Aristotle maintained that happiness was inseparable from leisure and that labor was a vice. On the cusp of the British Industrial Revolution, Mill proposed Utilitarianism--the greatest good for the greatest number--as public policy.

World-wide surveys repeatedly reveal that people regard happiness as indisputably desirable. It consistently ranks at the top in surveys all over the globe. Whatever the values of various societies and cultures, humans almost universally grade happiness as an extremely important value.

In the United States, William James and others developed the philosophy of Pragmatism, which evolved out of the ideas of Mill. Both Utilitarianism and Pragmatism did not aim at happiness for the individual in particular but for society in general--happiness as part of public policy. Broadly speaking, in the United States such policy is a feature of liberal agendas, which conservatives roundly curse while favoring dollar democracy. In Europe, the notion of public weal has remained as a larger feature of public policy, although economics and government belt-tightening challenge the policy.

If surveyed, most people would endorse public policies that promote happiness for the greater number of people. Implementing such policies would not be easy. Planners must agree upon sources and causes of happiness. Having done that, the devil follows in the details. How to implement a public policy for happiness? In the United States, liberal policies have been increasingly deconstructed by conservatives who have called them failures, although a scholarly study of the matter reveals an equal share of intellectual muddle on both sides, liberal and conservative.

Despite this wrangling, a major question is ignored in public policy. Do degrees of happiness consistently correlate to income or do they depend on societal, cultural, and individual situations?

This wrangling partly occurs because in America money is confused with happiness. The conditions for individual happiness are identified by that which is believed to support it, which in the United States is almost exclusively the dollar. American studies of happiness reveal high incomes as correlated with happiness. People associate more money with a better life. Elsewhere on the globe, this association does not occur as noticeably. To be sure, people everywhere agree that happiness is difficult in extreme poverty, but definitions of poverty vary, and high income is not universally ranked as important. Indeed, in Western, materialistic, societies, happiness is associated with greater "stuff." Those who have things are presumed to be happier. And there is some truth to this. Some, but not all.

Global surveys continue to reveal that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor, average happiness levels change very little in index to people’s incomes.

War-ravaged Japan was still reconstructing in 1960 when surveys were taken to determine the average level of happiness. By 1988 Japanese per capita income increased four times above its 1960 level. People had more cars, shoes, clothes, cameras, stereos, washing machines, and yet the average happiness remained constant with 1960. This pattern was not unique to Japan. It repeats itself in other countries.

Other elements of happiness polls suggest something about human nature--that people don't really know what is good for them. Put differently, they may say one thing and do another. * Higher incomes do not necessarily promote greater happiness, why, then, do people want more money?

* ( In some circumstances, this is labeled as blatant hypocrisy, but often it reveals that people don't understand the workings of their own minds, or have not sorted through their conflicting beliefs.)

A related question--in order to buy more stuff and reduce tax burden, is steady, persistent per capita income growth desirable in terms of happiness?

In Daedalus, (Vol. 133, Issue 2, spring 2004) Robert H. Frank (author of Luxury Fever) casts an interesting light on the subject. He offers two scenarios, one with a people living in 4000 square foot homes, totally isolated from another people living in 3000 square foot homes. He calls each Society A and Society B. Because separated from one another, each people is equally satisfied and do not question the square-footage norm. Further, the larger houses do not provide advantage in terms of longevity or health.

He observes that "it takes real resources to build larger houses." The difference between 3000 and 4000 square feet implies a difference in resources. His question: "Are there alternative ways of spending these resources that could have produced lasting gains in human welfare?"

Society B (smaller home) residents use saved resources for the commonweal. They spend the money and material to promote specific changes in their living conditions. ". . . cost savings from building smaller houses are sufficient to fund not only the construction of high-speed public transit, but also to make the added flexibility of the automobile available on an as-needed basis." (Frank) In short, they don't need a car but can drive it if they want to. They simply don't have one thousand additional feet of floor space.

Because all income goes toward stuff, Society A residents have no excess resources for improvement of their situation. They cannot fund pubic transit and must depend on the automobile. Their cars continue to cause traffic gridlock and high stress levels. Although nicer to live in, is the larger home more valuable in the context of longer commute times, traffic jams, and traffic noise?

These are factors demonstrably correlated to reduction in happiness. When a new, noisy highway was opened, people living next it were studied. Shortly after its opening, 21 percent said the noise did not bother them; a year later, the figure dropped to 16 percent. Prolonged exposure to noise elevates blood pressure lastingly. Auto commuters are subject to various noises. Things are out of their control. They cannot predict bottlenecks or accidents. They get cut off by drivers even more tense. "A large scientific study documents a multitude of stress symptoms" from daily commuting. The stress is known "to suppress immune function and shorten longevity." (Frank) This is aside from the risk of accidents or the inhalation of carcinogenic exhaust fumes.

Frank points out that a rational person would choose Society B in order to promote his own happiness. Americans, in pursuit of happiness, still do not turn from the norms of Society A. In the meantime, we frogs are in the pan and the water is becomingly increasingly uncomfortable . . . .

Notes on The Relationship of Capitalism, Happiness & Leisure

These are just some random thoughts, and I jot them down as a reminder to myself and readers of what we already know—as a reminder because we make our way in a world that remains largely ignorant of the values within the thoughts.

One of the oldest rules of political science is that (1) human beings come together to keep alive. (2) Then they stay together to live a good life. In the United States people have never budged from number one. As a society, they still behave as if they had a wilderness to conquer.

A motto found on an ancient Roman sun dial: Horas non numero nisi serenas; the hours don’t count unless they are serene. Western society rejects leisure, mistaking it for free time, but it rejects what it doesn’t understand. Leisure cannot exist when people don’t know what it is, and it is not recreation—not movies, not TV shows, not rock concerts, not water skiing.

In his Politics Aristotle pointed out that the Spartans were secure so long as they were at war, but collapsed when they acquired an empire. They didn’t know how to use leisure with their peace. They didn’t understand that war is waged to gain peace, which in turn is used for leisure.

In his Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle argued that wisdom is a virtue that can only be obtained in leisure. Scholé is Greek for leisure, whence the English word scholar, as well as school. For the Greeks scholé implied freedom, both freedom from and freedom to. From: it meant that one did not have daily struggles and worries over food, shelter, and clothing. To: that this security enabled him to develop himself.

Aristotle would disagree with modern materialistic society on the truly valuable. He would not regard anything useful as the highest good. Utility merely provides a means to gain something else. The highest good does not point to anything beyond itself. It is a good for its own sake. Happiness is not useful. It is a good unto itself. People want to be happy. Full stop. It is a highest good and as such has no utility in it.

For Aristotle, happiness can only appear in leisure. The happy person looks upon the world with no schemes, no intrigues. The unhappy person engages in work in order to avoid boredom. The happy person is not bored.

With the advent of Christianity, the view toward leisure changed because the idea of work altered. Work became a means of self-purification, of repentance, and through it one had hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Max Weber’s (1864-1920) classic The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism helped explain religion as an engine of the Industrial Revolution and a free market society.

Happiness Anyone?

In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce provided a definition of happiness: "An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.'' I can imagine Jay Leno saying of the definition that maybe it explains why the Founding Fathers guaranteed the pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself. A nation of perfectly happy bastards and bitches would be a miserable nation indeed.

People say they want to be happy. But do they? Why, then, do they hurt themselves? Why do they kill one another and wage war and, even torture others? Some might argue that all this occurs because they want to be happy. Perhaps they think that happiness comes with a sense of power over others, which they confuse with a greater sense of control over their own lives. Physically hurting themselves can be regarded as a form of dominating psychological pain; hurting or killing others can also be seen as a desire for domination. Thus with domination they unconsciously associate removal of obstacles to happiness.

In last month's Psychological Science researchers describe their findings that angry people make more negative evaluations when judging members of other social groups. This is news? Well, no, but they found the same to be the case with happy people. The happier people are, the more bigoted their judgments of others. A minority group member is guilty of something or other because he is a minority group member. Researchers speculate as to why this phenomenon occurs and have several hypotheses, one of which is that happy people tend to be complacent, which does not promote analytical thinking. It's easier to shove opinions into pigeon holes--to stereotype people.

This presents a difference with the writings of Martin Seligman, who argues that happiness is imbued with a rational perspective because it is optimistic. Seligman says that optimists take problems and set-backs as temporary and local rather than permanent and universal, unlike pessimists. Optimists don't say "It's all my fault," while pessimists tend to do so.

In the United States, the pursuit of happiness is a god-given right and Americans have a document that tells them so. Perhaps that is why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn left the states to return to his native Russia. He regards happiness as a shallow and selfish goal. In Psychological Science, the researchers might agree with him. Their findings suggest that, in some way not yet fully discernible, happiness may be bad for society.

Seligman has another approach. In the last few years he has been looking at how mentally healthy people think, and has turned away from relieving mental misery. As he would put it, he wants to help people move from +3 to +6 rather than from -5 to -3. His concern is with methods to promote happiness, as inferred from those who are happy. He wants to develop the condition rather than study its effects on interactions within society. I mention this because an unanswered question remains, To what extent is happiness good for the well-being of society? Some evidence suggests a kind of selfishness in those who are happy; consider the research associating bigotry and complacency with happiness.

The new science of happiness looks at causes and their signatures, some of which are satisfaction with life, and episodes of joy. Perhaps not so surprisingly, among the causes are genes and good marriages. Having children does not correlate well to it, nor does money. Religious people are happier, probably because of support from church and friends they make there. ( I have friends who say they are not religious but attend church because of its social connections.) Men become happier as they age; women, less so.

Certainly happiness has physical effects. Research evidence indicates that it buttresses the immune system, lengthens lives, and buffers stress.

Novelist Aldous Huxley's happy folk take a drug, soma, which, in his Brave New World, makes them complacent, dim-witted, and indifferent to the suffering of others and certainly to the totalitarian state that controls them. Yet, they are happy, so they believe.

British psychologist Richard P. Bentall puts the matter of happiness in another light: "There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others." Bentall proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

This fits with much research that finds pessimists as better judges of situations. Rather than looking through rose-colored glasses, they tend to see darkly, yet see face to face. The optimist acknowledges that disasters happen, but only to others. Pessimists feel that the deck is stacked against them, that if something is to go wrong, it will likely befall them. They are more realistic in the sense that they prepare themselves for misfortune.

Vanitas vanitatum, says the pessimist--vanity of the vain, all is vanity. Death renders our best efforts as futile. The pessimist perhaps lives more safely than does the optimist who risks more, his expectations subject to frustration. Still, the optimist gives meaning to his life by his efforts in trying to make the best of it. Further, to the extent they are depressed, pessimists compare reality to a happiness that is out of reach, which deepens depression and leads sometimes to suicide.

In The United States, a widespread and unrealistic view of happiness contributes to depression. Happiness became bound up with possession. An unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness? Well, this was code for the so-called natural aristocracy in which Thomas Jefferson believed. John Locke had a different phrase, from which the Founding Fathers borrowed. His was akin to the pursuit of property, if not that precise phrase. Property was a bit too blatant, because many of the colonists had none. By this means, the conflation of ownership with happiness crept into the culture.

Happiness has remained tied to materialism. To acquire is to be happy. The most acquisitive are the happiest, so the culture teaches. And blessed are these, for the happiest among them are corporate executives in their mansions.

Aristotle would not have accepted this view. In his Nichomachean Ethics he holds happiness as wedded to virtue, not possessions. The virtuous man is not bigoted nor complacent. He does not find satisfaction in the misery of others. He exercises his mind and enjoys its philosophical fruits. He is bound to be happy because he holds the highest good, the integrity between his happiness and his virtue.

Today we have Doctor Feel Good and his pharmacopeia as well as his many prescriptions for our well being. Rather than asking themselves, people take his mood-level tests to find out if they are happy. Happiness becomes gauged in relation to other people. They consider whether they are better or worse off than others are, then tell him how they feel.

Somewhere in his writings, Seligman makes a very good point. He maintains that true happiness derives from meaning and no drug, no personality test, can provide that. Meaning does not come from pleasant feelings. It derives from a life given to something bigger than the ego and making money. The pharmacist cannot be the attendant for meaning. It must come through the development of integrity, character, sense of control, and efforts on behalf of a cause greater than oneself. Even if one is no Mother Theresa, it can be built, this meaningfulness. No matter where we end up, the starting place is always where we find ourselves. We begin through doing any job with honesty, helpfulness, and concern for others.