“The yearning to matter–the desire for significance–is as common and as deeply felt as any material craving.”
– Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour, p. 39.
“So here is one answer to the question of what glamour does. It offers a lucid glimpse of desire fulfilled–if only life could be like that, if only we could be there, if only we could be like them. For all its associations with material goods, the fundamental and insatiable desires glamour taps are emotional.”
– Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour, p. 36.
Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb and Oren Ziv: Maximizing Happiness Does Not Maximize Welfare
Ed Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb and Oren Ziv have what I think you will find to be a very interesting Vox piece that features my research with Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Alex Rees Jones and Nichole Szembrot, as well as research of their own providing evidence that many people are willing to move to less happy cities (that seem to make movers less happy as well) for the sake of a higher income or a lower standard of living. Their description of our research is admirably clear:
Economists define utility as a measure of individuals’ preferences over potential choices. A rich tradition of welfare economics builds on this simple choice-based concept to understand how various policies affect social welfare, whether for better or for worse….
The appropriate interpretation of subjective wellbeing hinges on whether or not stated happiness measures utility. If it does not, then a policy to improve individuals’ stated happiness will not necessarily represent the choices those people would have made for themselves. In this case the policy cannot be justified based on traditional welfare analysis.
Empirical evidence on the relationship between happiness and utilityIn a series of novel experiments and surveys, Benjamin et al. (2011, 2012, 2013) conduct surveys about actual or hypothetical choices people make and measure the expected happiness associated with each choice. They find that actual choices and happiness-maximising choices are positively correlated. But they are not identical. Respondents are prepared to sacrifice happiness in furtherance of another objective, such as a higher income (Benjamin et al. 2011)….
You can see my own description of my coauthored research on the relationship of happiness and utility, including links to current, ungated copies of the papers, in my post “My Experiences with Gary Becker.” There are several important things Ed, Joshua and Orin don’t mention about that research. The most important is that our team is working hard to figure out how to do a National Well Being index right, including thinking through how to do interpersonal aggregation in a practical, but theoretically justifiable way.
I hope you have noticed that one of the sub-blogs I link to ad my sidebar is my Happiness Sub-Blog, that contains all of my posts (and only my posts) that are tagged “happiness.” For those of you reading on your smartphone, who don’t see the sidebar, here is that link:
Including this one, and counting each Quartz column once, there are now 20 posts in my Happiness Sub-Blog.
My Experiences with Gary Becker
In my life, I crossed paths with Gary Becker in a significant way twice. Once was the Fall of 1986, when I was on the job market. Gary invited me to come to Chicago to present my paper “Making Sense of Two-Sided Altruism”–a paper Robert Barro arranged to have published in a Carnegie-Rochester volume not long after. At lunch with Gary and other Chicago economists, I was impressed with how seriously they took economics as the key to understanding everything. I am glad I got to see that.
The second time I crossed paths with Gary was as someone who does research on the economics of happiness. In two papers,
- Rayo, Luis, and Gary Becker. 2007. “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness,”Journal of Political Economy, 115:2, pp. 302-337
- Becker, Gary S., and Luis Rayo. 2008. “Comment on ‘Economic growth and subjective wellbeing: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox’ by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring: 88-95
Gary and his coauthor Luis Rayo took a view of happiness very close to my own, in the paper “Utility and Happiness,” coauthored with Bob Willis, and so close in time to Bob Willis’s and my work that it took an uncomfortable, but ultimately gracious email exchange with Gary and Luis to come to agreement on Bob’s and my priority. The two key ideas for the economics of happiness that Gary and Luis and Bob and I agree on are
- The Price Theory of Happiness: Felt happiness, as measured in surveys, is only one of the many things that people care about. There are many other arguments in the utility function. Thus, the happiness studied in the economic of happiness is not the same thing as utility. In particular, people will trade off happiness for other things they want.
- The Elation Theory of Happiness: Here there are differences in detail between the two theories. Bob Willis’s and mine emphasizes that on top of longer lasting and routine influences on happiness, there is an impulse response of happiness to good news and bad news, where by “news” we mean a rational expectations innovation to lifetime utility.
A large share of my research effort in the last few years has been working with coauthors–of whom Dan Benjamin and Ori Heffetz deserve special note–to back up the price theory of happiness and the elation theory of happiness. Below are our papers published so far (all of the ones below are in the American Economic Review). So far, they are all about the price theory of happiness.
- What Do You Think Would Make You Happier? What Do You Think You Would Choose? (Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball and Alex Rees Jones)
- Can Marginal Rates of Substitution Be Inferred from Happiness Data? Evidence from Residency Choices (Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball and Alex Rees Jones)
- Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference (Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball and Nichole Szembrot)
- Aggregating Local Preferences to Guide Marginal Policy Adjustments (Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball and Nichole Szembrot)
We have been glad to have Gary Becker and Luis Rayo fighting with us for this new view of happiness.
The "Wait But Why" Blog on Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy
Noah Smith tweeted that the post “Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy” on the Wait But Why blog sounded like the theory of happiness that Bob Willis and I have been putting forward. (On that theory, see my post “The Egocentric Illusion”–my riff on David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address.)
After reading “Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy,” I tweeted
Read this wonderful blog post about happiness before you bother with anything I have ever written: http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html
As you can see in that twitter thread, I then begged the author to let me reprint that blog post here, and was delighted to get that permission. I think you will see why if you keep reading. I think this post applies to many more of us than only those of us in Generation Y.
Say hi to Lucy. Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.
I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.
So Lucy’s enjoying her GYPSY life, and she’s very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one thing:
Lucy’s kind of unhappy.
To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:
It’s pretty straightforward—when the reality of someone’s life is better than they had expected, they’re happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they’re unhappy.
To provide some context, let’s start by bringing Lucy’s parents into the discussion:
Lucy’s parents were born in the 50s—they’re Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy’s grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or “the Greatest Generation,” who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely not GYPSYs.
Lucy’s Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure careers. They wanted her parents’ careers to have greener grass than their own, and Lucy’s parents were brought up to envision a prosperous and stable career for themselves. Something like this:
They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they’d need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.
After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy’s parents embarked on their careers. As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Lucy’s parents did even better than they expected to. This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.
With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy’s parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren’t alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.
This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the point where their parents’ goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn’t really do it for them. A GYPSY-worthy lawn has flowers.
This leads to our first fact about GYPSYs:
GYPSYs Are Wildly Ambitious
The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn’t quite exceptional or uniqueenough for a GYPSY. Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.
Cal Newport points out that “follow your passion” is a catchphrase that has only gotten going in the last 20 years, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time. The same Ngram viewer shows that the phrase “a secure career" has gone out of style, just as the phrase "a fulfilling career" has gotten hot.
To be clear, GYPSYs want economic prosperity just like their parents did—they just also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn’t think about as much.
But something else is happening too. While the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have become much more particular and ambitious, Lucy has been given a second message throughout her childhood as well:
This would probably be a good time to bring in our second fact about GYPSYs:
GYPSYs Are Delusional
"Sure,” Lucy has been taught, “everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the crowd.” So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better—A shiny unicorn on top of the flowery lawn.
So why is this delusional? Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which defies the definition of special:
spe-cial | ‘speSHel |
adjective
better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.
According to this definition, most people are not special—otherwise “special” wouldn’t mean anything.
Even right now, the GYPSYs reading this are thinking, “Good point…but I actually am one of the few special ones"—and this is the problem.
A second GYPSY delusion comes into play once the GYPSY enters the job market. While Lucy’s parents’ expectation was that many years of hard work would eventually lead to a great career, Lucy considers a great career an obvious given for someone as exceptional as she, and for her it’s just a matter of time and choosing which way to go. Her pre-workforce expectations look something like this:
Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they’re actually quite hard. Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build—even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them—and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.
But GYPSYs aren’t about to just accept that.
Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback,” and “an inflated view of oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting.”
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, “Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?” He says that “if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief.“
And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, a few years out of college Lucy finds herself here:
Lucy’s extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with being a bit deluded about one’s own self-worth, has left her with huge expectations for even the early years out of college. And her reality pales in comparison to those expectations, leaving her "reality - expectations” happy score coming out at a negative.
And it gets even worse. On top of all this, GYPSYs have an extra problem that applies to their whole generation:
GYPSYs Are Taunted
Sure, some people from Lucy’s parents’ high school or college classes ended up more successful than her parents did. And while they may have heard about some of it from time to time through the grapevine, for the most part they didn’t really know what was going on in too many other peoples’ careers.
Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.
Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:
So that’s why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated and inadequate. In fact, she’s probably started off her career perfectly well, but to her, it feels very disappointing.
Here’s my advice for Lucy:
1) Stay wildly ambitious.
The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it’ll work itself out—just dive in somewhere.
2) Stop thinking that you’re special.
The fact is, right now, you’re not special. You’re another completely inexperienced young person who doesn’t have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.
3) Ignore everyone else.
Other people’s grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.
How I Became Optimistic
For the most part, those around me tend to think of me as relatively cheerful and optimistic. I want to tell you the story of how that came to be.
For several years when I was a teenager, I felt that facing reality meant I mustn’t fool myself by being optimistic. Studiously avoiding optimism had the side-effect of making me less cheerful. But then I read the Maxwell Maltz’s book Psycho-Cybernetics. Maxwell made an argument that changed my life. He argues that visualizing positive outcomes is a way to be prepared in case something good happened and a way to instruct one’s subconcious mind to strive for that outcome. In other words, visualizing a desired outcome is a way to tell one’s subconscious mind what its objective function should be.
To me this was like a bolt out of the blue. Visualizing a positive outcome was not a claim that that outcome would happen, it was simply presenting a certain image to one’s mind without any claim to inevitability, in a way meant to increase the probability that the positive image might be realized. Thus, it was possible to carefully maintain objectivity for analytical decision-making and evaluation purposes, while still gaining the psychological benefits of optimism.
Ever since the day that logic made its way into my brain, I have allowed myself to be relatively optimistic, in what I hope is a careful way, and I have been noticeably more cheerful than I was before.
For many of you, this book was before your time, but it was reasonably important in its day, and in its effect on later events. Below is what the Wikipedia article on Psycho-Cybernetics has to say:
Psycho-Cybernetics is a classic self-help book, written by Maxwell Maltz in 1960 and published by the non-profit Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation.[1] Motivational and self-help experts in personal development, including Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy have based their techniques on Maxwell Maltz. Many of the psychological methods of training elite athletes are based on the concepts in Psycho-Cybernetics as well.[2] The book combines the cognitive behavioral technique of teaching an individual how to regulate self-concept developed by Prescott Lecky with the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. The book defines the mind-body connection as the core in succeeding in attaining personal goals.[3]
Maltz found that his plastic surgery patients often had expectations that were not satisfied by the surgery, so he pursued a means of helping them set the goal of a positive outcome through visualization of that positive outcome.[3] Maltz became interested in why setting goals works. He learned that the power of self-affirmation and mental visualisation techniques used the connection between the mind and the body. He specified techniques to develop a positive inner goal as a means of developing a positive outer goal. This concentration on inner attitudes is essential to his approach, as a person’s outer success can never rise above the one visualized internally.
I can’t guarantee that Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy maintain the same distinction between analytical realism and mental-imagery optimism that I try to, but their embrace of Psycho-Cybernetics indicates some of the reach it has had.
Self-Control as Inaction
Wu-wei: action through inaction
The image of self-control, both in popular culture and in economics, is of a kind of action. But psychologists Justin Hepler and Dolores Albarracín report that priming people with extraneous inaction words helped them resist temptation, while extraneous action words made it harder for them to resist temptation. (See the news article by Rick Nauert, “Is Unconscious Self-Control Possible?”) This sounds like Taoist wisdom to me: the key Taoist concept of wu-wei is “action through inaction.”
What Would Economic Growth Look Like If We Properly Valued the Web?
I love Jeremy Warner’s essay “The UK internet boom that blows apart economic gloom” in the Telegraph. Jeremy makes several important points. One is that accounting for intangible investment, as the latest US GDP revisions do, can affect GDP figures. Here is a deeper issue Jeremy raises:
But even if these changes were to be incorporated, it still wouldn’t do justice to the growth in the digital economy. This is because much internet activity is free, and therefore immeasurable.
Take the traditional music industry, which used to involve, finding, recording and marketing new acts, and then cleaning up through copyrighted CD sales.
For decades, the model worked well — at least for the record producers and a small, elite of popular artists — and made a not insignificant contribution to GDP.
Then along came digital downloads, legal or otherwise. These have destroyed the old music company stranglehold on distribution, and in so doing made previously quite pricey music either far less expensive or completely free.
The pound value of music consumption has declined, and with it the music industry’s contribution to GDP, but the volume of music consumption has risen exponentially.
Much the same thing can be said about newspapers. The traditional business model has been badly undermined by the internet, but news demand and consumption has never been higher. If only we could persuade the blighters to pay, our industry would again be booming….
Prof Brynjolfsson believes that the correct way to measure all this… is via the time people spend immersed in it.
I know Erik Brynjolfsson from his Twitter feed as an excellent commentator on the digital economy.
The growing importance of free goods is one of the many reasons we need to go beyond GDP in accounting for well-being. Looking at the amount of time people spend online to infer value makes a lot of sense. But there are also more radical ways to go beyond GDP, as discussed in “Ori Heffetz: Quantifying Happiness” and “Judging the Nations: Wealth and Happiness are Not Enough.”
For the richest countries, at the technological frontier, human progress has shifted more and more into the realm of intangibles. Services are less tangible than goods; online activities are less tangible than face-to-face services; happiness, job satisfaction and meaning are less tangible than time spent hanging out in cyberspace. If we don’t develop good ways to account for the increasingly intangible dimensions of human progress, we will miss the main story going forward.
Ori Heffetz: Quantifying Happiness
Link to the article on the Johnson Business School website at Cornell
Ori Heffetz is now my coauthor many times over. There is a bio of him at the link. Here is his guest post on some of our joint work on the economics of happiness. Ori asks
Should governments monitor citizens’ happiness and use that data to inform policy? Many say yes; the question is how.
Most of our students at Johnson may be too young to remember, but in 1988, for the first time in history, an a cappella song made it to the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Many of our alumni however won’t forget the huge success of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The artist’s unparalleled singing abilities aside, the song became an instant hit much thanks to its simple message that immediately resonated with everybody. After all, nobody wants to worry, and everybody wants to be happy.
But if everybody wants to be happy, shouldn’t governments be constantly monitoring the public’s level of happiness, assessing how different policies affect it, and perhaps even explicitly designing policies to improve national happiness (and reduce national worry)? Wouldn’t it make sense to add official happiness measures to the battery of indicators governments already closely track and tie policy to — such as GDP, the rate of unemployment, and the rate of inflation?
Researchers increasingly think so. Some advocate conducting nation-wide “happiness” surveys (or “subjective well-being” (SWB) surveys, to use the academic term), and using the responses to construct indicators that would be tracked alongside GDP-like measures. Although these proposals are controversial among economists, policymakers have begun to embrace them. In the past two years alone, for example, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on National Statistics convened a series of meetings of a “Panel on Measuring Subjective Well-Being in a Policy-Relevant Framework”; the OECD, as part of its Better Life Initiative, has been holding conferences on “Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making”; and the U.K. Office of National Statistics began including the following SWB questions in its Integrated Household Survey, a survey that reaches 200,000 Britons annually:
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?
Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
These and other efforts follow the French government’s creation, in 2008, of the now-famous Stiglitz Commission — officially, the “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress”— whose members included a few Nobel laureates, and whose 2009 report recommends the collection and publication of SWB data by national statistical agencies. No wonder Gross National Happiness, a concept conceived in Bhutan in the 1970’s, is back in the headlines. Can a few simple questions on a national survey, such as the British (Fab) Four above, be the basis of a reliable indicator of national wellbeing? Will the Bank of England soon tie its monetary policy to the “rate of happiness” (or to the “rate of anxiety”), making central banks that still tie their policies to traditional indicators such as the rate of unemployment seem outdated?
Not so fast. While demand for SWB indicators is clearly on the rise — witness Ben Bernanke’s discussion of “the economics of happiness” in several speeches in recent years — efforts to construct and apply survey-based well-being indicators are still in their infancy. Among the most urgent still-unresolved practical questions are: Which SWB questions should governments ask? And how should responses to different questions be weighted relative to each other? The four questions above, for example, ask about life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety, and life being worthwhile. But does the public consider these the only — or even the most — important dimensions of well-being? And even if it does, how would people feel about — and will they support — a government policy that increases, say, both happiness and anxiety at the same time?
These are the questions that my colleagues — Dan Benjamin and Nichole Szembrot here at Cornell, and Miles Kimball at the University of Michigan — and I address in our working paper, “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference” (2012). The idea behind our proposed method for answering the two questions — the “what to ask” question and the “how to weight different answers” question — is simple and democratic, and consists of two steps: first, gather a list, as long as you can, of potential SWB questions that governments could potentially include in their surveys; and second, let the public determine, through a special-purpose survey that we designed, the relative weights.
To demonstrate our method, we followed these two steps. We began by compiling a list of 136 aspects of well-being, based on key factors proposed as important components of well-being in major works in philosophy, psychology, and economics. While far from exhaustive, our list represents, as far as we know, the most comprehensive compilation effort to date. It includes SWB measures widely used by economists (e.g., happiness and life satisfaction) as well as other measures, including those related to goals and achievements, freedoms, engagement, morality, self-expression, relationships, and the well-being of others. In addition, for comparison purposes, we included “objective” measures that are commonly used as indicators of well-being (e.g., GDP, unemployment, inflation).
Next, we designed and conducted what economists call a stated preference (SP) survey to estimate the relative marginal utility of these 136 aspects of well-being. In plain English, what that means is that we asked a few thousands of survey respondents to state their preference between aspects from our list (e.g., if you had to choose, would you prefer slightly more love in your life or slightly more sense of control over your life?). With enough such questions, we could estimate the relative weight our respondents put on each of these aspects of life.
Among other things, we found that while commonly measured aspects of well-being such as happiness, life satisfaction, and health are indeed among those with the largest relative weight (or marginal utility), other aspects that are measured less commonly have relative marginal utilities that are at least as large. These include aspects related to family (well-being, happiness, and relationship quality); security (financial, physical, and with regard to life and the future in general); values (morality and meaning); and having options (freedom of choice, and resources). Using policy-choice questions in which respondents vote between two policies that differ in how they affect aspects of well-being for everyone in the nation — rather than state which of two options they prefer for themselves — we continued to find the patterns above and in addition found high marginal utilities for aspects related to political rights, morality of others, and compassion towards others, in particular the poor and others who struggle. We also explored differences across demographic-group and political-orientation subpopulations of our respondents.
But these findings themselves are perhaps less important. After all, our sample was not representative, and we had to make practical compromises in our data collection and analysis that governments would not have to make. The main contribution of our work, we believe, lies in outlining a new method, and in demonstrating its feasibility. Our method for evaluating SWB questions and for determining their relative weight in a well-being index can now be discussed, criticized, and, as a result, improved on. The familiar conventional indicators such as GDP, inflation, and unemployment did not start in the refined state we know them today: they have been continually fine-tuned over many decades. We hope that our work will contribute to a similar process regarding a SWB-based index.
Many practical obstacles still have to be overcome before standardized, systematic measurement and tracking of SWB for policymaking purposes becomes a reality. But if the endeavor is successful, then perhaps our children — who I doubt will have heard of Bobby McFerrin’s #1 hit - will at some point consider a DWBH index - “Don’t Worry Be Happy” index - as standard as GDP and other indicators.
Note: I (Miles) give my take on the same research in my column “Judging the Nations: Wealth and Happiness are Not Enough.”
Quartz #8—>Judging the Nations: Wealth and Happiness Are Not Enough
Here is the full text of my 8th Quartz column, “Obama the Libertarian? Americans say they’d be happy if the government got out of their way,“ now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. The title of this post is the original working title of the column. Below the text of the column itself, I have an important outtake from my original draft. This column was first published on December 4, 2012. Links to all my other columns can be found here.
If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:
© December 4, 2012: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2014. All rights reserved.
Four years from now—or 40—how should we evaluate Barack Obama’s presidency? This is not an easy question. For example, when things go badly (or well), a tricky aspect of this question is “To what extent is the president responsible for what happened?” Ruchir Sharma argues that in their judgment of the last four years, voters put the primary blame for our economic troubles on inevitable after-effects of the financial crisis that hit in 2008. Another tricky aspect of judging a presidency is deciding how to sum things up when a policy initiated by the president helps one group while hurting another. But the first question to ask four years from now, in 2016, will be “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
It’s often assumed that in answering this question people are referring to their financial situation. But what if they took happiness into account as well? As Allison Steed points out in her Nov. 29 article in the Telegraph, “Here’s How Much You Need to Be ‘Happy’ in Different Countries,” financial aspirations can differ a lot across countries. And money is clearly not the only thing that matters for happiness. A Pew Research Center Report on happiness around the world shows that while happiness goes up with per capita GDP, at similar middle-income levels, the Latin American countries do better than expected while Eastern European countries do worse than expected.
In two previous Quartz columns, I discussed evidence that happiness is not enough: people want to be rich, successful, happy and much more. In previous research my co-authors and I found that in both hypothetical situations and the real-world choices young doctors make about which residency to choose, happiness was very important, but so was money and prestige. This would be paradoxical if each of the people we surveyed defined “happiness” as “whatever it is I want,” but in fact, people used the word “happiness” to mean “feeling happy.”
That people want more than money makes GDP an inadequate measure of well-being. That they want more than happiness makes happiness an inadequate measure of well-being. So it won’t work to simply replace GDP with Gross National Happiness as Richard Layard advocates in his book, Happiness. And looking at National Life Satisfaction has a similar problem.
So let’s get serious about what it means for an individual or a nation to be better off. Constructing a solid measure of national well-being requires answering the two questions “What do people want and how much do they want it?” So my coauthors Daniel Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Nichole Szembrot and I set out to answer exactly those questions in our National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper “Beyond Happiness and Life Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference.” We gave about 4,600 US adults hard choices to make in computer-generated scenarios where they had to identify both what people wanted for themselves and what they wanted for the nation as a whole. We didn’t want to prejudge, so we started with a list of 136 aspects of life that people might care about, drawing from a wide-ranging scientific and philosophical literature, as well as spirited discussions among the four of us.
The answers we found to “What do people want and how much do they want it?” were at once surprising and the height of common sense. I want to focus on the answers people gave for what they wanted for the nation as a whole, since that is primarily what a president should be judged on. One important finding is that, even across divisions of party, religion, age and sex, people by and large put the same things at the top of the list of what they want for the nation. And the things they want for the nation as a whole are similar to the things they want for themselves.
Let me give my take on the top 25 things we found people want for the nation as a whole. Freedom comes first: freedom from injustice, corruption, emotional abuse and abuse of power; freedom of speech and political participation, freedom to pursue one’s dreams and the freedom of having choices. Besides freedom, people want for the nation goodness, truth, loyalty, respect and justice.
Only after freedom and goodness, do the “bread-and-butter” aspects of people lives start to come in. These bread-and-butter aspects are reflected in 11 of the top 25 aspects of life, including people’s health and freedom from pain, financial security, someone to turn to in time of need, emotional stability, a sense of security and peace, and activities to enjoy. Beyond freedom, goodness, and the practical, bread-and-butter aspects of people’s lives I just listed, people want meaning—the sense that one is making a difference in the world–for themselves and for others.
Freedom, goodness, truth, loyalty, respect, justice, bread-and-butter concerns, meaning: people’s hopes for our nation, and for themselves, extend to a lot more than money and happiness. I believe the breadth of what people want for the nation has implications for the policies our country should pursue, and how we should judge President Obama four years from now. In drawing out those implications, I will leave aside the bread-and-butter concerns, and concerns about “justice,” since I think our leaders understand those better than the other concerns.
One of the best ways to increase the freedom in the world is to allow more people to come to the United States to experience and tell of the freedom we have here, as I advocated in my Quartz column “Obama Could Really Help the US Economy by Pushing for More Legal Immigration.” But there is a lot to be done to preserve and bolster freedom in the US. Taxes represent a loss of freedom that should be mitigated in the kinds of ways I suggest in my post “No Tax Increase Without Recompense.” The conflict between employees’ freedom at work and employers’ freedom to lay down work requirements need to be fairly adjudicated, as discussed in my post “Jobs.” And every government regulation, in addition to whatever other costs and benefits it has, causes a loss of freedom from telling somebody what they must do.
When we do constrain freedom by regulation, it should be in service of something important, such as truth: people’s freedom from being lied to, deceived or betrayed. It is worth remembering that the standard results about the virtues of the free market all depend on deception being effectively neutralized–so there is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and laws that block corporate deception and throw scam artists in jail. Enforcing the basic principle of telling the truth, like enforcing property rights, is an area where government is on the side of the angels.
Meaning, goodness, loyalty and respect are the trickiest for public policy to foster. As a social scientist who does research supported by government grants, I would like to think that there is some sense of meaning for all of us in humanity’s efforts at scientific research, such as medical research and the kind of research to slow global warming advocated by Noah Smith in his Atlantic column “The End of Global Warming: How to Save the Earth in 2 Easy Steps.” But I think a big part of what government needs to do to foster meaning, goodness, loyalty and respect is to stay out of the way. In this regard, I am worried about recent discussion of limiting the charitable deduction. My proposal for a system of “public contributions” is a way to reform and refocus the purpose of the charitable deduction instead, in order to reduce the government deficit, and reduce the footprint of the government, without depriving people of help they need.
From doing this research, I am left with the overwhelming impression that—even in the realm of intangibles—what people hope for and wish for is not one thing, but many things. Our desires are boundless. And that is how it should be. As Robert Browning wrote, ”Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”
In early drafts, I related what I say in the Quartz column to Jonathan Haidt’s six moral tastes in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Here is a New York Times book review by William Saletan, and here is a good passage from Jonathan Haidt summarizing his theory, chosen by Bill Vallicella, in Bill’s post “Jonathan Haidt on Why Working Class People Vote Conservative.”
There is a key chunk of text making the link to Jonathan Haidt’s theory that was appropriately cut for being too wonkish, but that I think you might find valuable
- for making that connection and
- for more carefully stating the key findings about people’s preferences in hypothetical policy choices from my paper with Daniel Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Nichole Szembrot.
Here it is:
The most important boon people want for the nation as a whole is freedom. In the words we used for the choices we gave them, the #1, #2, #10, #13, #18 and #23 things people want for the nation are
- freedom from injustice, corruption, and abuse of power in your nation
- people having many options and possibilities in their lives and the freedom to choose among them;
- freedom of speech and people’s ability to take part in the political process and community life;
- the amount of freedom in society;
- people’s ability to dream and pursue their dreams; and
- people’s freedom from emotional abuse or harassment.
The next most important boons people want for the nation are goodness, truth, loyalty, respect and justice. On our list, the #3, #6, #8, #17, #19 and #21 most highly-valued aspects of the good society are
- people being good, moral people and living according to their personal values;
- people’s freedom from being lied to, deceived or betrayed
- the morality, ethics, and goodness of other people in your nation;and
- people having people around them who think well of them and treat them with respect
- the quality of people’s family relationships
- your nation being a just society.
The exact picture of “goodness” and “justice” might differ from one person to the next, but it is clear that they represent more than just money and happiness. University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his brilliant book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion argues that morality comes in six flavors (“The righteous mind is like a tongue with six tastes.”):
- liberty vs. oppression,
- fairness vs, cheating,
- sanctity vs. degradation,
- loyalty vs. betrayal,
- authority vs subversion, and
- care vs. harm.
The first five of Haidt’s flavors of morality are well represented above. The fourth flavor of morality, care vs. harm, is the one many authors focus on, to the exclusion of the others. It is the bread and butter aspects of people’s lives. In our findings, care vs. harm is reflected in 11 of the top 25 (numbers 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 22, 24, 25), including “the overall well-being of people and their families” in your nation, people’s health, financial security, and freedom from pain; “people having people they can turn to in time of need” and a “sense of security about life and the future in general” and balance, as reflected in the items “people’s mental health and emotional stability,” “how much people enjoy their lives” and “how peaceful, calm and harmonious people’s lives are.”
In addition to all of these, people want meaning, as reflected by #5 and #14 on our list: “people’s sense that they are making a difference, actively contributing to the well-being of other people, and making the world a better place, and “people’s sense that their lives are meaningful and have value.” In addition to his discussion of key dimensions of morality, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt emphasizes the importance of meaning—in particular, the importance of feeling one is a part of a larger whole. One of his central metaphors is “We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.” That is, Haidt believes that perhaps 90% of the time we are out for ourselves, however gently, but perhaps 10% of the time we are out for a higher cause (like the general good of everyone in our group) to the deepest level of our beings. A sense of “meaning” often comes from making that connection to something greater than ourselves.
You can see my other posts on happiness in the happiness sub-blog linked at my sidebar, and here:
Quartz #3—>Al Roth's Nobel Prize is in Economics, but Doctors Can Thank Him, Too
Here is the full text of my 3d Quartz column, now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on October 15, right after Al Roth’s Nobel Prize was announced. This column describes research Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Alex Rees-Jones were conducting about trade-offs young medical doctors make in their National Resident Matching Program choices, including tradeoffs between happiness and other goods. Our paper is now finished (and submitted to a professional journal) and is available on the Social Science Research Network:
If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:
© October 15, 2012: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2014. All rights reserved.
Neither of this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prizes in Economics have degrees in economics, but they certainly have the respect of economists like me. I learned Lloyd Shapley’s principles of cooperative game theory in graduate school. They have stood the test of time. And Al Roth is a very big name in microeconomic theory, whom most economists thought would someday win a Nobel Prize. Roth has a PhD in operations research, Shapley in math.
I have reason to be personally grateful to Al Roth because his redesign of the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) for medical doctors has provided a foundation for research my coauthors, Daniel Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, and Alex Rees-Jones (all three now at Cornell) and I are conducting. We want to know to what extent young doctors are pursuing happiness or pursuing prestige and fortune instead. For our research, it is important that Al Roth designed the NRMP in a way that encourages medical students to express their true preferences.
What we did was to run our own web survey of the young doctors who had just made their choices in the NRMP. We wanted to see how much they valued happiness compared to other concerns in a real-world situation. We are after the answers to questions such as this: are the future medical residents willing to sacrifice happiness for prestige? Will they sacrifice their own happiness to go to a city their romantic partners like better? If they sacrifice happiness during their residency, is it only in order to experience greater happiness later on in life, or are they willing to make a choice they think will lower their happiness throughout their lives in order to get something else they want? The NRMP provides an ideal testbed for these questions because it makes the future medical residents think hard about their choices and what those choices mean for their lives, and provides a clear deadline for that thinking. And Al Roth’s design means that the match program should be getting the medical residents to think about what they really want rather than about some way to game the system. In a fitting tribute to Al Roth’s new home at Stanford, my coauthors gave a preliminary report of our research at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics this summer. We have more work to do to analyze the data, but we can already see that there are rich rewards to this effort, thanks in important part to Al Roth’s design.
Update: Thanks to Daniel Altman’s digging, Here is a little more detail from Al Roth his efforts with the National Resident Match Program and how it works:
Quartz #2—>Does Ben Bernanke Want to Replace GDP with a Happiness Index?
Here is the full text of my 2d Quartz column, now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. This column was first published on October 8. Links to all my other columns can be found here.
If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:
© October 8, 2012: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2014. All rights reserved.
As chairman of the Federal Reserve, it is Ben Bernanke’s job to devour data like the latest report on how more Americans have found jobs. But he wants even more data. In a prerecorded talk for a conference this past summer, Bernanke said, ”…we should seek better and more-direct measurements of economic well-being, the ultimate objective of our policy decisions.” He’s not talking about more accurate versions of regular economic indicators, though.
Rather, Bernanke suggests that survey measures of happiness and life satisfaction should take their place alongside GDP as measures of how a nation is doing. In doing so, he joined current British Prime Minister David Cameron, who said ”it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB—general wellbeing” and former French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he would ”fight to make all international organisations change their statistical systems by following the recommendations” of the Stiglitz report. He refers to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s committee’s work proclaiming “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.” The emphasis is in the original.
In Sarkozy’s case, historian Brian Domitrovic opines that Sarkozy was just trying to divert attention from poor GDP statistics, saying “France has excellent reason to suppress GDP statistics. Since 1982, among developed nations, France has been a clear laggard in GDP growth.” He went on: “The oldest and most pathetic trick in the book when you lose a contest is to try to move the goal posts. GDP statistics of the past quarter century have shamed France but flattered the US, Britain and East Asia. Mr. Sarkozy’s gambit to paper over this real difference will be lucky to find any takers.” Domitrovic is pointing out the very real danger of the manipulation and politicization of national statistics when the right way to measure something like “well-being” is unclear.
How can we avoid the dangers of manipulation and politicization of new indicators of national well-being? Here is a simple answer: if we are going to use survey measures of well-being such as happiness and life satisfaction alongside well-seasoned measures such as GDP as ways to assess how well a nation is doing, we need to proceed in a careful, scientific way that can stand the test of time. For example, in my research with Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Alex Rees-Jones in the August American Economic Review, people say they are willing to sacrifice happiness for money if the price is right. Without understanding how much people want money and how much they want happiness, no one should pretend to know whether GDP or happiness is a better measure of a nation’s performance.
But it isn’t just happiness vs. money. Should we be measuring anxiety or measuring stress? How much weight should we put on being satisfied with life as opposed to happiness? Without good answers to these questions, it will all degenerate into political posturing and dueling statistics. But if we do it right, the ultimate prize will be a new way to judge whether the government is doing its job. And to me there is no question what the government’s job is. It is to smooth the way so people can get what they want and lead the kind of lives they want to lead—without deciding for them what they should want.
Judging the Nations: Wealth and Happiness Are Not Enough
The title of this post is the original working title of the column.
In early drafts, I related what I say in the Quartz column to Jonathan Haidt’s six moral tastes in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Here is a New York Times book review by William Saletan, and here is a good passage from Jonathan Haidt summarizing his theory, chosen by Bill Vallicella, in Bill’s post “Jonathan Haidt on Why Working Class People Vote Conservative.”
There is a key chunk of text making the link to Jonathan Haidt’s theory that was appropriately cut for being too wonkish, but that I think you might find valuable
- for making that connection and
- for more carefully stating the key findings about people’s preferences in hypothetical policy choices from my paper with Daniel Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Nichole Szembrot.
Here it is:
The most important boon people want for the nation as a whole is freedom. In the words we used for the choices we gave them, the #1, #2, #10, #13, #18 and #23 things people want for the nation are
- freedom from injustice, corruption, and abuse of power in your nation
- people having many options and possibilities in their lives and the freedom to choose among them;
- freedom of speech and people’s ability to take part in the political process and community life;
- the amount of freedom in society;
- people’s ability to dream and pursue their dreams; and
- people’s freedom from emotional abuse or harassment.
The next most important boons people want for the nation are goodness, truth, loyalty, respect and justice. On our list, the #3, #6, #8, #17, #19 and #21 most highly-valued aspects of the good society are
- people being good, moral people and living according to their personal values;
- people’s freedom from being lied to, deceived or betrayed
- the morality, ethics, and goodness of other people in your nation; and
- people having people around them who think well of them and treat them with respect
- the quality of people’s family relationships
- your nation being a just society.
The exact picture of “goodness” and “justice” might differ from one person to the next, but it is clear that they represent more than just money and happiness. University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his brilliant book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion argues that morality comes in six flavors (“The righteous mind is like a tongue with six tastes.”):
- liberty vs. oppression,
- fairness vs, cheating,
- sanctity vs. degradation,
- loyalty vs. betrayal,
- authority vs subversion, and
- care vs. harm.
The first five of Haidt’s flavors of morality are well represented above. The fourth flavor of morality, care vs. harm, is the one many authors focus on, to the exclusion of the others. It is the bread and butter aspects of people’s lives. In our findings, care vs. harm is reflected in 11 of the top 25 (numbers 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 22, 24, 25), including “the overall well-being of people and their families” in your nation, people’s health, financial security, and freedom from pain; “people having people they can turn to in time of need” and a “sense of security about life and the future in general” and balance, as reflected in the items “people’s mental health and emotional stability,” “how much people enjoy their lives” and “how peaceful, calm and harmonious people’s lives are.”
In addition to all of these, people want meaning, as reflected by #5 and #14 on our list: “people’s sense that they are making a difference, actively contributing to the well-being of other people, and making the world a better place, and “people’s sense that their lives are meaningful and have value.” In addition to his discussion of key dimensions of morality, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt emphasizes the importance of meaning—in particular, the importance of feeling one is a part of a larger whole. One of his central metaphors is “We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.” That is, Haidt believes that perhaps 90% of the time we are out for ourselves, however gently, but perhaps 10% of the time we are out for a higher cause (like the general good of everyone in our group) to the deepest level of our beings. A sense of “meaning” often comes from making that connection to something greater than ourselves.
You can see my other posts on happiness in the happiness sub-blog linked at my sidebar, and here:
Daniel Dennett's Spirituality
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, p. 303:
What these people have realized is one of the best secrets in life: let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and it horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck visions of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.
Al Roth's Nobel Prize is for Economics, but Doctors Can Thank Him, Too →
Here is a link to my third column in Quartz, about the Nobel Prize in Economics for Lloyd Shapley and Al Roth. This column describes ongoing research by Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Alex Rees-Jones and me about trade-offs young medical doctors make in their National Resident Matching Program choices–in particular, tradeoffs between happiness and other goods.
Update: Thanks to Daniel Altman’s digging, Here is a little more detail from Al Roth his efforts with the National Resident Match Program and how it works:
Does Ben Bernanke Want to Replace GDP with a Happiness Index?
Here is the link to my column on Quartz and a screen shot of the illustration at the top.
This is my second column on the Atlantic’s new world business website Quartz. One of the interesting things about Quartz is that it is designed to look good on a smartphone or tablet. But it works fine on a regular computer as well, as you can see from the screen shot.
The Egocentric Illusion
Link to David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address (audio with subtitles)
This is one of my annual sermons to the Community Unitarian Universalists in Brighton, Michigan. I gave it on June 1, 2009. In it, I build on David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College. I also talk here about some of the practical consequences of what I have learned from my research on happiness with Bob Willis. Here is a link to an old version of our paper “Utility and Happiness” that is more accessible than the current, more technical (and unreleased) version.
I will begin this sermon with a confession. I am self-centered. But I have an excuse. The normal human brain is designed by evolution to generate the egocentric illusion: the illusion that the owner of a particular brain is the center of the universe.
This egocentric illusion is useful in many ways. In particular, learning the difference between self and non-self is a basic task of mental development, accomplished by most of us some time in infancy. Without knowing which patch of the universe we directly control and will feel pain when hurt, we would have trouble navigating in the world. This awareness of self versus non-self is accomplished by what might be described poetically as a special glow emanating from the part of one’s consciousness that keeps track of the part of universe that is “me.” Moreover, even those things one recognizes as “non-self” are seen in relation to one’s own position, both literally and metaphorically.
While useful, the egocentric illusion also causes a great deal of the grief and suffering and misbehavior that we are prone to. It can also contribute to an inordinate fear of death: one’s own personal death is a bad thing, but not quite as bad as the egocentric illusion makes it seem.
As is true for other illusions, it is good to see the egocentric illusion for what it is. David Foster Wallace spoke eloquently about the egocentric illusion at Commencement at Kenyon College a few years before his own death–in a way that just might loosen the hold of this illusion on those who hear what he had to say. Let me give an abbreviated version of his remarks and then give some of my own, sparked by his. As you will see, hearing what David Foster Wallace has to say inspires a certain bluntness about the realities we face. He began by telling this story:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
He was making the point that we often swim in the egocentric illusion without noticing it, as fish swim in water. As he explained:
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting—hard-wired into our boards at birth….
Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real—you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue—it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
If not for the sake of virtue, why does David Foster Wallace think we would we want to break free of the egocentric illusion? Fundamentally because if one has no other way to approach life, things will get either painful or boring or both. Here is some of what he said on that topic:
Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” …I submit that this is what the real, no-bull value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
After describing at some length the kind of thing “day in and day out” means, with all of the “boredom, routine and petty frustration” that goes into our daily lives, David Foster Wallace says this:
If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default setting—then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of things. Not that this mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…
Because here’s something else that’s true…. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what we worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough… . Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you… . Worship power—you will feel week and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. …. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own culture has harnessed these forces in way that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” –the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
…. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50 without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
The note at the top of the online Wall Street Journal article back in September laying out this address said “Mr. Wallace, 46, died last Friday, after apparently committing suicide.” David Foster Wallace’s suicide hints at just how difficult the battle was for him. Not all battles are won. But we can still win where he ultimately lost.
When I think about what David Foster Wallace said, I see three helpful responses an awareness of our own egocentric illusion can lead us to. The first is that we can take advantage of our egocentric illusion, that focuses our consciousness on many things that are nearby and controllable, to enjoy our domestic lives even when some external things are not as we would wish. Many things bring quiet pleasure, regardless of what is going on at work or in the world at large. For example, I personally think that watching TV is underrated. The disdain of TV by many elites is out of step with the improvement in experience and the quality of what one watches that automatic time-shifting with a TiVo or other digital video recorder can bring. Moreover, in my view the quality of the best shows has increased markedly ever since the ability to sell DVD’s of good shows has enabled TV production companies to afford to produce more intelligent shows. When I say “intelligent shows” I don’t mean anything high-brow, but shows like Heroes, Lost, Alias, Kings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, How I Met Your Mother, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, etc. Critics sometimes speak of long novels such as War and Peace as allowing more time for character development and buildup. But the best TV shows are like 24-hour movies, with much more time for character development and buildup than the typical 2 or 3 hour movie in the theater, and can be watched consecutively when you wait to get the DVD’s or download them.
Another kind of quiet pleasure is being in good health and free from pain. Although good health and freedom from pain are in large measure out of our control, people often don’t realize the extent to which these things are in their control. My sociologist colleague Jim House has found that there is a huge and widening difference in health at older ages between those who have a college education and those who don’t. Since I doubt it is what people learn in college itself that does this, imitating the health habits of the typical college-educated person should work for those without a college education as well. One dimension of pain that is more avoidable than many people realize is pain from tight muscles and the skeletal misalignments that tight muscles can cause. After computer work gave us both serious shoulder pain, my wife Gail and I got so much relief from seeing skilled massage therapists that she did an intensive year of training this past year to become a massage therapist herself. And I believe it is not just my own bias that I think she is a very good one.
I have been involved in academic research on happiness. The grand meaning of happiness is a life well-lived, which is a deep subject for many sermons, much religious and philosophical discussion, and difficult wrestling with unavoidable choices. But when psychologists and economists study happiness, they are working with data that tells us much more narrowly whether people have positive feelings or negative feelings. Happiness in this narrow sense of feeling happy is something well within the orbit of our individual egocentric illusion and something over which we have considerable control. Genes matter, and there is not much yet that we can do about them. Antidepressants are appropriate for some people and not for others. But there are many other controllable things known to be associated with happiness: sleep, exercise, music, time spent with friends, time spent in other enjoyable activities, meditation, and habits of clear, balanced thinking that some people learn from psychotherapists and other people learn from religious teachings—such as an attitude of gratitude. Because most of these things are time-consuming, it takes sacrifice to be happy. Ever since my psychologist colleague Norbert Schwarz pointed out that sleep contributes to happiness, I have been trying to get more sleep. But there are many other things I can’t do if I am determined to get 8 hours of sleep a night. My morning transcendental meditation also takes a chunk out of my day.
One of the interesting things about happiness that can confuse people about what it takes to be happy is that good news about anything makes people happy for a while: a short time for small items of good news, and a long time for large items of good news. Similarly, bad news about anything makes us unhappy for a while. For the most part, this fact about happiness doesn’t directly give you much leverage for feeling happier. For one thing, these doses of happiness that come with good and bad news are temporary. Also—and this is basic—most of us are already doing everything we can to bring about good news and forestall bad news for ourselves. But if you understand that good and bad news about anything affects happiness, but only temporarily, it highlights the things I listed that do have long-run effects on happiness: sleep, exercise, music, time spent with friends, time spent in other enjoyable activities, meditation and good habits of thought such as an attitude of gratitude. Also, if you pay attention to what news gives you a burst of happiness and what news gives you a burst of unhappiness, you may learn something about what you care about that will be useful to you.
While the egocentric illusion is a mostly neutral or even helpful force when we are enjoying ourselves alone or with friends who are favorably disposed toward us in an uncomplicated way, it causes us grief in the arena of social and professional competition. Think of David Foster Wallace’s examples of automatic daily misery: wanting money and things to keep up with the Jones’s, wanting beauty to look better than the competition, wanting power to be able to put others down instead of being put down oneself, wanting to be the smartest kid on the block. The trouble here is that while my egocentric illusion seems to put me at the center of the universe, the other guy’s egocentric illusion seems to put that guy at the center. So the other person will fight like tooth and nail to make sure the universe as he or she sees it is in good order by having the seeming center of his or her universe be a high point. Even if he or she is just being honest, rather than mean, he or she will have a tough time being properly impressed with me. People vary in this, but most of us have at least one person in our lives who regularly puts us down.
Like our close relatives, the chimpanzees, we are wired to respond to competition and to pecking orders. Thinking about status and rank in social groups we care about can dominate our consciousness almost as much as severe hunger, thirst or physical pain. Earlier, I gave a benign view of desire for things such as music CD’s and DVD’s of entertaining TV shows. Why is it then that the desire for things gets such a bad rap? I believe it is because many of the things we want we don’t want for the things themselves, but rather for how they contribute to, or make us feel about, our own social status and rank. My wife and I had some acquaintances whose house we only visited once, many years ago, but I still remember the expensive-looking uncomfortable chairs they had.
I have to say that social rank in itself is probably good for happiness. But all of our fretting, slaving and sacrificing of other good things for the sake of social rank can be very bad for happiness, particularly when we fail to get what we want. And those who do get the social rank they want, unless they are extraordinarily gracious, often make others feel bad.
In view of the automatic daily misery of competition whenever it is not going splendidly, the second helpful response to an awareness of the egocentric illusion is to step back and remember how little everyone else is really thinking about you anyway. There are practical consequences of where each of us fits in the social pecking order, but the burden only gets worse if we add to these practical consequences the emotional beating that we are tempted to give to ourselves over not being higher up. Remembering clearly how each person is at the center of his or her own perceived universe may not always make us feel better in a direct way, but at least the vertigo of that wild picture of overlapping universes can distract us from our pain.
The third helpful response to an awareness of the egocentric illusion is to step back from everyone’s egocentric illusion and think about the good of everyone. This may be the only response to the egocentric illusion that works in extremum. I often think about getting old and creaky and dying. I am not a fan of death. It is hard on those who die and hard on those left behind. Whatever the pain he suffered in living, David Foster Wallace did all the rest of us a grim disservice by killing himself—among other things the obvious disservice that there are books we will never be able to read because he will never write them now. More routinely, our experience is impoverished by each person we know who dies. For each of us, it makes sense to dread our own death at least as much as the collective loss of all those who would be left behind. And indeed, we should add to that the loss of our own experience of life because of our own death. But my death is not the end of the experiencing universe, as the egocentric illusion would have it. There will be people left behind to experience, to feel, to think, to build and create.
In the face of death, or serious illness that makes it hard for our daily personal experience to be positive, taking the perspective of all the other people now and in the future who do and will experience life is one of the few solaces we may be able to find. Almost all of us have the power to significantly improve the perceived life experiences of others by an amount that stacks up quite well against our ability to improved our own perceived life experiences. Sometimes what we can do for ourselves is bigger, sometimes what we can do for others is bigger, but the amount we can do for others is usually at least a big fraction of what we can do for ourselves, especially when illness or impending death limits our ability to help ourselves.
Let me end by getting personal. Up until I was 39 or 40 years old, I genuinely believed in an afterlife, and like most people assumed my afterlife would be a pleasant one. Then I decided I did not believe in God. I had always thought that an afterlife would require someone powerful to make it happen. So not believing in God meant I did not believe in an afterlife either. Realizing that most likely there was no afterlife was a big item of bad news for me. It made me less happy than I normally would have been for several years. That unhappiness caused me to think. Then and sometimes now, I tried to imagine the intelligent aliens who might be recording my consciousness digitally for later cybernetic resurrection, but I have lacked enough social support for that belief for it to be all that reassuring. What has helped me is reminding myself of the Buddhist belief that the self is an illusion. If the self is an illusion, then death is not quite as terrible, in exactly the way I have been describing. My death will be a tragedy as will yours. But neither my death nor yours will be the end of the universe, nor the end of consciousness, nor even the end of humanity. The world will go on, and what we do while we are alive can make it go on in a better or worse way. Sometimes I imagine consciousness as one light that shines through many windows. It is true that the information flows between the separate windows of consciousness are limited compared to the information flows within each window of consciousness, but that does not stop us from identifying our deeper self with consciousness itself, which does not die with my death or yours.
In summary, let us enjoy a high-quality egocentric illusion in our private lives in cooperation with our friends and loved ones, avoid getting too wrapped up in struggles between competing egocentric illusions, and cultivate a perspective that embraces all consciousness as precious, even if for no other reason than to salve our distress at knowing that my limited window of consciousness and your limited window of consciousness are both doomed to be shattered at different times within a few short years.
Note: The other two of my Unitarian-Universalist sermons that I have posted so far on this blog are “UU Visions” (which includes a brief account of my religious journey) and “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life” (which is the best statement of my current religious beliefs).
Isomorphismes on Enclosures →
Click on the title or here for a fascinating post by isomorphismes about the isolation caused by the way we conceive of real estate in our culture. There are great pictures and a BBC audio link, too.
I had no idea that so recently people roamed about each other’s land, no fences dividing the farms and folds.
The modern structure of towns, like so many things, is an outcome of economic structure.
- When shepherds no longer roamed freely through the hills
- and it became efficient for homes to be built in a rotary array around some kind of centre,
- then pubs (public houses = free houses) became the meeting place
This is one of the most influential things I’ve heard, period. Think about how much longer you have to walk and how much lonelier life became once you don’t cut across another person’s land.
My pessimistic image of the culture that I live in is
- city people all in their separate flats, with their separate computers, or separate televisions, on separate couches, alone in the space they’ve paid for with the career they fought to dominate
- going out to a restaurant, pub, or coffee shop to experience the unexpected bumpings into people
- so everything costs money. It costs money to have friends, costs money to hang out, costs money to flirt, costs money to meet people, costs money to put yourself in a place where people will happen to encounter you–unless you do it over the internet–and then people wonder why nobody makes friends after college…
- suburban people the same, except also having their own pools instead of sharing a few community pools
- having their own medium-sized lawns – big enough to keep the neighbours from peeping in the window, or seeing you on the porch and say hello – instead of sharing a large park cutting all the medium lawns down to small lawns (not that they individually choose this – the decision is made by real estate developers)
- country people even more isolated because land tracts are so huge
- and nobody, but nobody, knows their neighbours.
Isomorphismes: A Skew Economy & the Tacking Theory of Growth →
Isomorphismes is one of the most articulate commenters on my blog. His post explores the fact that economic growth usually shows up not as a general increase in income for the same set of goods, but rather as the introduction of a new good or reduction in price for some particular good. This explains some of why people don’t “feel the growth.” People think of getting rich as moving up the ladder to the consumption bundles that those high in the income distribution have. Economic growth delivers something unexpected, which is just as good, but may not be fully appreciated.
Here are three passages to give you the flavor of this post by isomorphismes:
The picture we are now getting in “the news media” is of rich economies (US & Europe) that have ground to a halt, are not producing jobs, median wages stagnating…
… what does capitalism look like in a rich world with many people making low wages?
I think it looks exactly like this: the poor people have a good standard of living in terms of absolute magnitude, but they have little freedom. With a tight budget constraint (near the origin) obtusely and extremely scalening off in various directions of cheap stuff (sox, packaged food with lots of preservatives, canned food [can o’ corn], modular homes, satellite TV, Budweiser beer, … the only way to live like a richie is to buy specifically the stuff that is cheap
… what does a world with high productivity, low wages to many and high wages to some, look like?
- Most obvious is envy. You are going to watch Americans go live like kings in Thailand, Brits go live like kings in Argentina, mansions in the Gran Canarias, chalets in Andorra and beach houses in Tahiti. All of this will be technologically possible but out of reach for you. So you will be aware that it’s possible and that somebody’s doing it and loving it, but not you.
- Next is opportunity. The more money our robo-programmers make, the more they are going to want to free up their time and have every service done for them. Massage therapists, personal trainers, life coaches, psychotherapists, cleaners, cooks, upscale morticians, model organic farms that you can vacation on, drug dealers, hoteliers, sycophantic investment researchers, and personal assistants all have opportunities to form the perfect life for the robo-programmers, tending to their every need and desire, and get paid for it. Service economy, ho!
Note: In a link post like this one, where the title sends you to the post I am flagging, the way to get to the page for my post (for example, to leave a comment to my post here as opposed to isomorphismes’s post) is to use the “all posts by date” button on my sidebar.