DISQUS

Andrew · 4 years ago

Not to mention that, in general, people are not happier when they get what they want. Most people have an "equilibrium happiness level," from which they fluctuate up and down when good and bad things happen to them, but it tends to regress to the mean. The famous example of this is when psychologists ask people who are about to have their limb amputated to predict how happy they will be after the amputation. Usually they say they'll be terribly unhappy (unsurprisingly), but as it turns out, a few months after the operation, they're back to their original level of happiness. Something similar happens with lottery winners.

In fact, people are notoriously irrational and erratic about happiness. I remember reading about one experiment where subjects called in for an dummy experiment and asked to fill out a questionnaire reported feeling happier about their life if they had found a quarter (planted by the experimenter, of course) in the waiting room than if they hadn't.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Layard was very much against the set-point view of happiness. He seemed to think he had some grounds for this, based in the literature, other than the fact that it renders Benthamite social engineering mostly pointless.

Andrew · 4 years ago

Hm, I was under the (I guess mistaken) impression that the set-point view of happiness was pretty well accepted by psychologists. I don't suppose you remember the reasons he gave?

Keelay · 4 years ago

Sigh.

(In my best Terrence McKenna voice)

There are some pretty decent evolutionary reasons for not being able to maintain a persistently high level of happiness. But we are stumbling toward a moment in history where we will overcome nature and physically induce a higher state of euphoria (first with pharmaceuticals, then with genetic engineering).

(hits the bong)

Boy howdy - economics is in for some fun. Can't wait. For now - it is hard to enjoy my hedonistic lifestyle when my friends won't slow down. I am indeed a "smaller" man.

Bob McGrew · 4 years ago

Why does this argument suddenly seem less convincing when you substitute "widgets" for "poetry"?

McClain · 4 years ago

Poems aren't widgets?

McClain · 4 years ago

No, I'm pretty sure a poem is just another sort of widget.

I give up: why do you find it less convincing, Mr. McGrew?

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Because you don't have an intuitive sense for the value of widgets, because there is no such thing as a widget?

Micha Ghertner · 4 years ago

I defend the intrinsic aesthetic value of widgets here. Well, not really, but kind of.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

See, although we don't know what widgets are, we know, for Postrellian reasons, that they will be increasingly attractive.

monkyboy · 4 years ago

" I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto that to live well you must live unseen " - Descartes

Blar · 4 years ago

There are two problems with the first half of your argument, that we shouldn't be concerned about the happiness findings because people value higher position for its own sake. First, it may be true that people want status independently of its effects on their happiness, but that does not mean that the high status that they strive for is good for them. There are obvious evolutionary reasons, for instance, why people would seek status: it is (or at least used to be) good for your reproductive success, if not for your quality of life.

The second problem is that, even if relative position is good for the individual, that doesn't solve the problem of the arms race. The game of seeking higher relative position is zero-sum, so lots of people are pouring resources into changing positions with each other without causing any net improvement.

The second half of your argument is that what matters is a sort of excellence, like transcendently good poetry, not happiness. If we accept that, then of course the happiness data isn't troubling. But we still need to worry about how well our society's rat race is tuned to producing the kind of excellence that you claim to be valuable. We ought to find some way of measuring how well we're doing at it, analogous to the hedonic studies which show that we're not doing well at producing happiness. Poets and other artists are often thought of as stepping outside of society's arms race in order to pursue their own aesthetic goals, so maybe we're not doing as well as we could be.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

I agree that status-seeking may not be good for you. The question is: if people want it, and they are willing to bear the trade-off between happiness and status in their own lives, why impose the value of happiness by designing the value of anti-status-seeking social policy?

I wasn't promoting a view that excellence is the summum bonum. It is one good among many. I was implicitly arguing for a kind of value pluralism according to which some values may conflict with others, and according to which it makes no sense whatsoever to frame policy in a way that maximizes value along a single dimension.

keelay · 4 years ago

It is a good among many.

This is not at all how it is internalized. At least not in my particular mind. I believe that is precisely the point. Excellence doesn't really scale.

I don't think it is too hard to imagine pathological human chracteristics that are great for "society" and rotten for the individual. I, for one, would include the entrepeneurial spirit and the "Protestant work ethic."

I mean how can I really enjoy the all the fruits of capitalism when I am racked with jealousy over your prodigious posting.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Actually Kyle, I'm doing it to spite you.

Matt · 4 years ago

Mr. Wilkinson-
Your post has revealed a profound injustice in the world of popular urban entertainment, where the "arms race" has reached truly catastrophic levels. Today I plan to file a class action suit on behalf of all sucker MCs who can demonstrate that the microphone skills of their rivals have caused them to be "frozen," "crushed," "knocked out," "paralyzed," "murdered," no longer able to "touch the mic," or otherwise subjected to emotional duress due to their rivals' lyrical flow. If you or your readers think you may been harmed due to someone else's irresponsible microphone skills, please contact my office.

-Lionel Hutz, Attorney

Krybo Amgine · 4 years ago

I might be opening a can of worms with this comment, but...

What role does sex play in this? Does the need to be the biggest, baddest, Alpha male have anything to do with our desire to be better off relative to others? IMHO, many (desireable) women are attracted to status and not some baseline level of prosperity.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

My glib asking-to-get-crucified just-so story take on gender differences and status is that men compete for status because it improves their inclusive fitness and women compete for status because it improves their inclusive fitness, though not to the same degree as it does for men (and for many woman the main route to increased status is through pair-bonding with high-status men), and because their fathers did and their sons need to. I agree in spirit with Camille Paglia's contention that civilization is largely due to male status competition, as is most violence and war.

It's a little like humor. Men are funny because women like funny. Women are funny because women like funny, and women are the children and mothers of men.

Lastly, I retract all of this in advance of hostile criticism.

Ryan · 4 years ago

Even assuming Layard's moral framework, he needs to convince me that the negative externalities produced by status competition are larger than the positive externalities (which include faster economic growth and technological progress, at a minimum). We don't generally capture all the surplus that our labor produces, so much of it redounds to the benefit of society generally. Since Layard agrees that increasing absolute income increases happiness (albeit in a concave fashion), I don't think he can ignore this point.

Anonymous · 4 years ago

Precisely, Ryan.

Why isn't Layard content to know better and freeride off the hard work of the deluded?

Frikkin' hippie.

monkyboy · 4 years ago

Well, Americans have a savings rate of practically zero. High rates of personal bankruptcy, also.

On the national level, if Bush gets his latest budget passed, we will have reached a dubious milestone:

The United States will be spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

And its doing it on money borrowed from foreigners.

Gareth · 4 years ago

My take away point from Layard isn't that we should abolish capitalism. It is that, as a society gets richer, the utility cost of redistribution is less, even if the cost in lost income/wealth is the same.

If you have a prior commitment to the paramount value of liberty in comparison to utility, Layard can be right, and it won't matter to you. At most, his research generates self-help advice about valuing status less and family time more.

But if you are a Chicago-style libertarian (economic liberty is good because it increases aggregate utility), then you can't just ignore Layard because maybe it doesn't. Vast differences in status may generate more unhappiness than the wealth they make possible is worth. Which is not to say it is either possible or desirable to eliminate differences in status, but is to support a social democratic amelioration of them.

Benson Bear · 4 years ago

WillWilkinson, I don't think you have successfully answered Blair's points, but with respect to your attempt to do so, the point is that people are only willing to take the tradeoff between status and other goods in their lives because they would be worse off given that *only* they did not take this tradeoff. I am surprised that you don't see that this has the structure of a prisoner's dillema, and that it is simply collectively irrational and inefficient (as Blair points out). Did not this author mention this fact? That is why it is argued that there has to be some form of *collective* action to solve this problem.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Gareth, Strictly speaking, Chicago guys don't care about happiness per se. They care about revealed preference, and it doesn't matter what people prefer. Happiness, status, whatever.

You can have a collective action problem only if there is a problem. My point is that there isn't a problem.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

More for Blar, I agree about evolutionary reasons. But I didn't say that status is good for us, in the sense that it makes us happy, only that we value it. My point wasn't that we shouldn't value happiness, too, just that when there is a conflict between values, we can't just beg the question and demand that we evaluate one in terms of the other.

Arms race. Yes and no. It's zero sum with respect to relative position. It's positive sum with respect to absolute welfare. Wealth is produced in the process. More resources come out than went in. And this does make us a bit happier. Layard's just saying that it's an inefficient positive sum game,from the perspective of hedonic maximization, given diminishing marginal utility. It's a waste of TIME we could be spending on vacation.

Blar · 4 years ago

Will - I meant to use "good for us" in the most generally sense, to refer to anything worthwhile, not just happiness. You seem to be talking about "what we value" and "what people want" in such a general sense, but the way that you're using "value" and "want" risks conflating what people actually do seek with what is worth seeking for them. They are not the same, as can be seen if we consider how evolution can "program" us to seek things that help us make copies of our genes but are not particularly valuable for us as people.

"The question is: if people want [status], and they are willing to bear the trade-off between happiness and status in their own lives, why impose the value of happiness by designing the value of anti-status-seeking social policy?"

One answer is that the arms race is "zero sum with respect to relative position." A bunch of people are sacrificing the creation of new happiness for themselves in order to bring about the transfer of some existing status to themselves. Now, to the extent that the arms race promotes the creation something else of ultimate value, or the creation of happiness via something other than status, this waste of time and effort in status-seeking is less troubling. But it is an inefficiency that suggests opportunities for improving the system.

A second answer is that people are sometimes mistaken. They aren't all that good at predicting what will make them happy, and they have mistaken ideas about how good it will be once they have more status, so they make decisions that they wouldn't make if they had superhuman predictive ability and rationality, unclouded by the dictates of inclusive fitness.

I think that the government could make gradual changes to the structure of society that reduce how enticing the status-seeking arms race is and result in people being more likely to end up living lives that are good for them (in the general sense).

McClain · 4 years ago

"The United States will be spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

And its doing it on money borrowed from foreigners."

That's hilarious! The rest of the world are massive chump suckers to let us screw them over that badly.
Sucks to be them....
:-)

monkyboy · 4 years ago

Hehe, McClain. Do we really care if some guy buys a hairpiece or leases a car they can't afford to try and get laid? Not really.

The more interesting point is how countries compete for status. North Korea and Iran seem to think that nuclear weapons, the country equivalent of hair plugs, is the way to go. And the rest of the world is trying to stop them. Should make for an interesting decade...

Marcus Stanley · 4 years ago

Well, McClain, the rest of the world is mercantilists, actually, which you can argue about but has historically been a pretty effective path to economic development. But what definitely will suck for *us* is when we have to start living within our means again.

McClain · 4 years ago

Okay, doom'n'gloom boyz!
America's going to hell in a handbasket, boo hoo.
Read a little history, do a little traveling, and get back to me on that, OK?
Wish I could bet money against that sort of wishful pessimism. Oh wait: I do! Stock market's lookin' pretty good this year....
;-)

McClain · 4 years ago

Oh, and 'monkyboy:' in your eagerness to play the troll, you've tripped over your own metaphor.
What's the difference between a hair plug and a nuke?
I'm sure you'll be able to puzzle out that riddle if you sit still and think about it a little bit....

monkyboy · 4 years ago

McClain, the word 'warhead' springs to mind.

Both nukes and hair plugs are painful and expensive to aquire. If you got 'em, interested parties are more like to agree to a treaty with you...

I give up, what is the difference between hair plugs and nukes???

McClain · 4 years ago

Fear of hair plugs is funnier than fear of nuclear annihilation.
Also, you can get all the hair plugs you'll ever need with a single nuke.
But one hair plug won't even get you on the subway.

kevin quinn · 4 years ago

Layard is a little late coming to this: Robert Frank has a huge body of work on this, starting with the brilliant *Choosing The Right Pond.* back in the eighties. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith also analyzed the frustrations of the attempt to "better one's condition" where that is interpreted as a desire for relative success. He goes on to comment, Will-like, that this competition for status revolutionizes the material world, allows for the creation of Culture, and improves the (material) lot of the ordinary workman. I think that to make this postion tenable, one needs to reject a subjective theory of well-being in favor of an objective one. (I am not averse to doing so, but it seems to me libertarians would hesitate to pay such a price.) Otherwise, as Blair rightly emphasizes, the Prisoner's Dilemma here is devastating. Neither Layard is saying the desire for status is a bad thing; the problem is that we cancel ourselves out in pursuing it. We value both income and status, but reforms such as Layard suggests could give us more income with no reduction in status. For a subjectivist, how can that be a bad thing?

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Kevin, If we don't go the objective route, then the question is whose subjectivism? My argument about revealed preference theory is in effect that revealed preference is a more neutral form of subjectivism.

Gareth · 4 years ago

But Will, what if we don't meta-want to have what we want as much as we meta-want to be happy? Or, maybe we meta-prefer to pay some price in happiness to get what we want, but not any price? How neutral is revealed preference then?