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till you get your back burned
Workin' 'neath the wheel
till you get your facts learned
Baby I got my facts
learned real good right now
You better get it straight darling
Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king
And a king ain't satisfied
till he rules everything
-Sir Bruce, Philosopher
Question: How do you get a philosopher off your porch?
Answer: Pay for the pizza.
-Elizabeth Hoppe
Happiness has increased significantly in the past few decades. The reason is simple: life-expectancy has, within the past half century, increased by about 10 years in the United States. If people are as happy now as they were then, then, ceteris paribus, they should now live even happier lives overall because they live longer lives. For example, suppose that I live 5 years and these are very happy years. If I live 5 more years in addition to the first 5, then overall I've lived a happier life: the total sum of happiness has gone up. Thus, people are getting happier by living longer.
http://static.flickr.com/25/54022653_947adb6765_o.jpg
This is only referring to life satisfaction, it appears that "negative affect" increases slightly after the age of 60.
Anyways, to the extent that the happiness researchers only focus on how happy people are on average, they are missing out on something that makes happiness more valuable--namely, the additional years we now have to enjoy it. And it is precisely in this respect that society as a whole has been getting significantly better off.
Here is the paper [doc]:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~easterl/Lifecyhapsour.doc
Here is a useful summary power point presentation [ppt]:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct;=res&cd;=6&url;=http%3A//www.usc.edu/dept/socialwork/SFCCC/pdf/happiness.ppt&ei;=E4BWQ5vZA6ji-AGdsISiBw&sig2;=dsnoZn_NFrUzf1Ckw2AsNw
Easterlin's conclusion is still that happiness is very stable throughout people's lives on average. Even past 80, it appears that most people respond that their lives are "very happy" or "pretty happy." So the people that make it into their late old age seem to be enjoying additional years of happiness.
An interesting corrolary. Suppose we are just looking at the average happiness level. If the proportion of elderly in the population grows, it might seem that happiness levels are trending down. But again, this method overlooks what is fundamentally a good thing: people are enjoying more years of happiness.
The Easterlin study is not armchair. It does not, however, provide any information on whether what subjects meant when they said they were "not happy" or "very happy" refers to preference satisfaction, desire satisfaction, an experiential state independent of either, eudaimonia, etc.
More generally, note that claims like "happiness is rising 'very slowly'" or that we're "at least as happy as we've ever been" presuppose not only (a) interpersonal utility comparability, but also (b) that average utility is a meaningful and very relevant concept.
Many interlocurers on this blog have denied that interpersonal utilities are comparable when they argue against redistribution that would promote higher total utlity. If these arguments are right, which I obviously do not think that they are, then it cannot be the case that we can demonstrate that (for example) capitalism promotes happiness better than Stalinism or Sovietism.
As for taking average utlity as the relevant measure for social policy analysis, that method runs counter to the view that individual rights must be respected even if violating them increases average utlity.
Easterlin does not assume interpersonal comparablity OR the relevance of average utlity!
The evidence showing a slow rise is in other studies. Veenhoven's database shows a small increase over the last few decades in most wealthy market societies.
Whatever the case may be, whoa.
I agree, very odd this search for paradoxes everywhere. I suppose there would be fewer books to write about life being kind of happy and kind of unhappy in varying degrees and patterns. My greater interest in this thread goes a different direction, one hopes not too OT.
Not being a professional economist, may I assume that a Big Grad Student Opportunity exists to define what study subjects mean by "happiness" and to put the tools in order? Bill Korner's comment wondering whether ' "not happy" or "very happy" refers to preference satisfaction, desire satisfaction, an experiential state independent of either, eudaimonia, etc.' would seem to suggest a standard is needed in studies of this kind, to spell out the assumptions of researchers and subjects. Its absence should get a study marked down for vagueness.
Different kinds of people are made "happy" by different narratives and undertakings, as brig observes. Hitler need not be referenced; there is the advertisement attributed to Shakleton:
One basic task in defining happiness is distinguishing between
<ul><li>"What does the subject believe makes him/her happy?"</li>
<li>"How does the subject know when s/he is happy."</li></ul>
The matter can be further unpacked by eliciting and analyzing a report of multiple circumstances in which the subject now remembers being happy. As a coach and blogger especially interested in maximizing happiness (with special attention from time to time about how it relates to the virtues), I suggest at least these 3 stages of inquiry.
Well, presumably people call what they want, when they have it and it satisfies them (whether internal or external), "happiness." Or some cognate term. My approach is perhaps more rough-and-ready than strictly conceptual, but since the topic here is human experience, the keystone is accepting people's own evaluations and criteria for their own experience, then respectfully probing those reports for some kind of uniformity, systemic clues, classes of experience, and whatever else may present itself to the alert observer. Self-reporting problems notwithstanding, the person is the authority on his own experience.
I'm quite interested in someone's comments about what makes him happy. Less so in his absolutes about what makes everyone happy, without breaking a sweat to bridge the subject-object gulf for anyone else. So then, could we apply curiosity to each subject, rather than the researcher imposing his Not-Even-Defined theory of happiness on the material?
For one thing, if we discovered what constitutes happiness for another, and honored it, utopian tyranny would be impossible. To some that is a bug, to some a feature.
"Indeed, we're about as happy as people have ever been, as far as we can tell." Yes, as far as we can tell, that is some qualification, no doubt based on careful studies of Mayan survey research.
Will says on the one hand something perfectly reasonable: more material wealth is not happiness. But then he says: but marginally, imperceptibly, it is happiness. It is increasing total happiness by that tiny amount every day that adds up to exponential leaps in happiness measured over centuries and millenia. And if you don't feel the effects of this imperceptible increase, which is almost nothing, well that's because it's imperceptible.
Which amounts to, we have no idea what it is, but we do know it's increasing every day.
It's always struck me that Will represents the ideology of an angry middle aged man wrapped in the appealling packaging of exciting liberation. And if some say it's not very exciting and it's not really liberation, he'll respond: yes, and it's increasing every day!
I'm happy my to hear that my ideology is wrapped in an appealing package!
(1) Ecomomists have a ridiculously unrealistic model of utility, in that what they talk about has nothing to do with actual happiness.
(2) Its not the least bit paradoxical that studies of self-reported happiness do not find that it is furthered by the wealth increases that mainstream welfare economics demonstrates should produce greater "utility".
OKAY!
But the possibility remains open that (1) an individual does not reliably get happier when their income increases above $10-15K BUT YET
(2) having wild income inequality in our society reduces the well-being of everyone including the super rich.
(1) The individual with the least wealth has more wealth in a high-inequality system than in a low- inequality system.
(2) The one with the lowest wealth and the one with the highest wealth both are better off in an achievabble low-inequality system than in the actual high-inequality system.
The insight that getting what we want doesn't make us happy isn't startling and isn't a contradiction, but I don't know why we can't call it a "paradox." Is there some technical meaning of paradox I'm missing here?
The possibility remains open, within Easterlin's framework, that people would like to "get happy" by other (more reliable) means besides increased wealth.
My conjecture is that most people would like to get happier (and could) by doing other things. But we are encouraged (by mighty economists among others) to do whatever we want to do by getting more wealth. And, in addition, wealth inequality and the norm in favor of increasing individual wealth have effects that prevent us from doing many things that we would truly like to do.
Is there any evidence at all that policies which encourage more leisure and less wealth accumulation make people happier? Both France and Germany have less inequality and people work less in those countries, but they apparently have lower rates of life satisfaction than the United States. Some data here. This is of course a crude comparison, but I don't know if any serious research on this topic exists.
It is a crude comparison. Ordinary observation tells you that the US is both more religious and values optimism and cheerfulness a lot more than Western Europe. These factors might overwhelm the anti-hedonic effects of greater income inequality.
(I suspect there is a good way to try to quantify this, but it would be more work than I'm up for.)
http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/papers/HappIneqREVApril3.pdf
Most interesting:
"In Europe, the happiness of the poor is strongly negatively affected by inequality, while the effect on the rich is smaller in size and statistically insignificant. In the US one finds the opposite pattern, namely that the group whose happiness seems to be most adversely affected by inequality is the rich. A striking result is that the US poor seem totally unaffected by inequality. Any significance of the inequality coefficient in the US population is mainly driven by the rich."
Also, note that fewer formal work hours at one's paid employment doesn't necessarily translate into more leisure time. European countries have reduced formal work hours faster than the United States, but it seems that they have approximately the same amount of leisure time when you factor in unpaid work in the household. If anything, the United States seems to have a slight advantage here. Here's a comparison between Sweden and the US and here's a comparsion between Germany and the US.
If leisure time makes people happier, then it's a mystery to me how we should encourage people to work less, since high taxes and mandatory hour limits don't seem to do the trick. As for income inequality, this is all that I could find (I believe Will also brought this up at one point):
I would be curious to know what other research is out there.