Richard Easterlin proposed in 1974 that there is no link between the level of economic development of a society and the overall happiness of its members: “raising the incomes of all does not increase the happiness of all”. There were two legs to Easterlin’s paradox. The first was his claim that subjective well-being is generally no higher in high income countries than in low income countries. The second was his observation that average levels of happiness do not appear to rise through time as societies become richer.
The first claim was always dubious and it has become more obvious that it is wrong as comparable data has been collected for a broader range of countries. Recent cross-section studies provide strong evidence that average levels of subjective well-being are higher in high income countries than in low income countries. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective well-being. (For a recent discussion on the Freakonomics blog, click here.)
The second claim was based on time series data of happiness for the United States, Europe and Japan since the 1950s. The data for Japan was of particular concern. If rapid economic growth brought no improvement in avowed well-being to the people of Japan during the period from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s, did we have sufficient reason to believe that rapid growth in other low and medium income countries would result in improvements in well-being?
A recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers (Economic growth and subjective well-being: reassessing the Easterlin paradox, shows convincingly that the apparent failure of subjective well-being to rise with increasing wealth in Japan can be attributed to changes in the questions asked in surveys. Within periods when the same questions were asked subjective well-being rose strongly as incomes rose.
The authors update Easterlin’s original study of trends in life satisfaction in Europe and conclude that the addition of data for more recent years and show that, although there are exceptions, life satisfaction has typically risen in those countries as income has risen.
Stevenson and Wolfers also conduct an analysis of U.S. data which suggests that the failure of happiness to rise with income in the U.S may have something to do with incomes of lower-income groups not rising as rapidly as high income groups. It seems to me that these findings might be difficult to reconcile with the findings of other research which suggests no relationship between income inequality and happiness inequality. (For example, see here.)
The authors acknowledge that their findings still admit a role for income comparisons in shaping subjective well-being. It seems to me that this is important because there is strong evidence that satisfaction with life depend on income aspirations – a moving target involving income comparisons - as well as on absolute income levels. In my view Steven Pinker made a good point when he suggested that humans nature enables us to calibrate our pursuit of happiness by what we can aspire to attain so that we can avoid fretting about not having things that are out of our reach (“How the Mind Works”, 1997, p 390).
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Are we doomed?
This is a question raised by Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything”, which I have just finished reading. I am not sure when I started reading this book; it must have been at least a couple of years ago. On this basis, some people might suggest that I should do a speed reading course. But that suggestion is not entirely appropriate because I set the book aside after reading the first 500 pages. Perhaps the problem is that my attention span is too short.
Bryson doesn’t explicitly raise the question of whether our species is doomed, but the question is certainly implied. The main context in which the question arises is in consideration of the fact that humans have been around for no more than about 0.0001 per cent of Earth’s history and “even existing for that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune” (p 573-4). He suggests that in terms of climate the time in which we live is a period of unusual tranquillity - and there is not much reason to believe that this will last much longer (p 519). “The extraordinary fact is that we don’t know which is more likely: a future offering us aeons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge” (p 251).
Bryson is himself on a knife edge in writing this book because he clearly doesn’t want readers to come to the conclusion that the human species is doomed no matter what we do. He wants to leave us with the thought that even though the odds are stacked against the human species, what we do could matter: “We are really at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a lot more than lucky breaks” (574).
I like the way Bill Bryson writes, but I find it hard to maintain much interest in what might happen to the human species more than a few generations into the future. If the probability that the human species will become extinct at some time in the next million years (to pick a large number out of the air) is close to 100 percent, so what? We might like to speculate about such things in the same way as we might speculate about the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But our speculations on such matters do not have obvious implications for the way we live our lives. By contrast, the things that we are doing now that will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren are intensely interesting because it is in our nature to feel responsibility for the things we do that affect their well-being.
Another way in which the question of whether we are doomed arises from Bill Bryson’s book is terms of his descriptions of the way science has been conducted. I like to think of scientists as spending their lives testing competing theories in order to choose between them. In reality, the more common method has been to adopt a pet theory and then to spend a lifetime gathering evidence to support it, while playing political games to elicit the support of others to achieve a scientific consensus. This makes amusing history, but in these days when a consensus of scientists is able to influence public policies on issues such as CO2 emissions it is also alarming.
It seems to me that governments have been asking climate scientists the wrong question in asking them to perform the political task of coming to a consensus view on climate change. Governments should be asking climate scientists to focus their efforts on the scientific task of testing whether the mainstream scientific view is robust – or how likely it is that it is a long way too optimistic or too pessimistic. When governments ask scientists to play politics we are doomed to suffer the consequences of poor public policy.
Bryson doesn’t explicitly raise the question of whether our species is doomed, but the question is certainly implied. The main context in which the question arises is in consideration of the fact that humans have been around for no more than about 0.0001 per cent of Earth’s history and “even existing for that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune” (p 573-4). He suggests that in terms of climate the time in which we live is a period of unusual tranquillity - and there is not much reason to believe that this will last much longer (p 519). “The extraordinary fact is that we don’t know which is more likely: a future offering us aeons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge” (p 251).
Bryson is himself on a knife edge in writing this book because he clearly doesn’t want readers to come to the conclusion that the human species is doomed no matter what we do. He wants to leave us with the thought that even though the odds are stacked against the human species, what we do could matter: “We are really at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a lot more than lucky breaks” (574).
I like the way Bill Bryson writes, but I find it hard to maintain much interest in what might happen to the human species more than a few generations into the future. If the probability that the human species will become extinct at some time in the next million years (to pick a large number out of the air) is close to 100 percent, so what? We might like to speculate about such things in the same way as we might speculate about the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But our speculations on such matters do not have obvious implications for the way we live our lives. By contrast, the things that we are doing now that will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren are intensely interesting because it is in our nature to feel responsibility for the things we do that affect their well-being.
Another way in which the question of whether we are doomed arises from Bill Bryson’s book is terms of his descriptions of the way science has been conducted. I like to think of scientists as spending their lives testing competing theories in order to choose between them. In reality, the more common method has been to adopt a pet theory and then to spend a lifetime gathering evidence to support it, while playing political games to elicit the support of others to achieve a scientific consensus. This makes amusing history, but in these days when a consensus of scientists is able to influence public policies on issues such as CO2 emissions it is also alarming.
It seems to me that governments have been asking climate scientists the wrong question in asking them to perform the political task of coming to a consensus view on climate change. Governments should be asking climate scientists to focus their efforts on the scientific task of testing whether the mainstream scientific view is robust – or how likely it is that it is a long way too optimistic or too pessimistic. When governments ask scientists to play politics we are doomed to suffer the consequences of poor public policy.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Are some goals better than others?
There is some evidence that not all goals are equal - the content of goals have effects on well-being as well as the reasons why they are pursued (i.e. whether they are pursued for autonomous reasons or because of external pressure or control). Some research findings suggest that goals that people find inherently interesting and rewarding to pursue have more positive effects on the well-being of individuals than more materialistic goals such as wealth, image and fame (Kennon Sheldon, Richard Ryan, Edward Deci and Tim Kasser, ‘The independent effects of goal contents and motives on well-being: Its both what you pursue and why you pursue it’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30 (4), April 2004).
It is hardly surprising that the findings of psychological research would support the observations that wise people have been making for thousands of years about the futility of seeking happiness through accumulation of wealth and material goods. A good example is the following quote from Epicurus: “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little” (Fragment 69).
What else do the findings of this research tell us about the goal of financial success?
- As is well known, researchers have found that people with higher incomes generally have higher subjective well-being than people with lower incomes.
- The positive effect of household income on overall life satisfaction has been found to be stronger than the negative effect of the goal of financial success (Carol Nickerson, Norbert Schwarz, Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman, ‘Zeroing in on the dark side of the american dream: a closer look at the negative consequences of the goal for financial success’, Psychological Science 14 (6), November 2003).
- The deleterious consequences of the objective of financial success diminish over time if household incomes rise and are less evident for people with high incomes. However, people with a materialistic orientation tend to have a lower satisfaction with family life, regardless of family income (See Nickerson et al).
- The findings do not challenge to the proposition that people can obtain a lot of satisfaction from achieving financial success as a means to such goals as, for example, supporting the education of their children. Some research suggests that functional financial goals such as educating one’s family are a means of fulfilling the psychological needs of competence, autonomy and relationships. (See: Stephanie M. Bryant, Dan Stone, and Benson Wier, “Articulating a Positive Relationship to Money,” paper presented at the Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens Conference, November 11–12, 2005).
Some people have argued that market societies that motivate production of goods and services with profits and wages encourage materialistic attitudes and promote unhappiness. I concur with Will Wilkinson’s response that “capitalist consumer societies – and markets in general – don’t require materialistic monomania in order to operate. They require only that people want things, for good reasons or bad, and are willing to trade whatever they have produced to get them” (In Pursuit of Happiness Research, p 33).
My conclusion is that although the content of goals is important, the choice of goals is inherently part of the process of self-direction. People are likely to flourish to a greater extent if they pursue goals that they can endorse at the highest level of reflection. It might be possible to induce people to pursue goals using external pressure or control but they will not flourish unless they endorse the goals they pursue.
How important is autonomy?
I noted earlier (here) that Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl argue that human flourishing is inherently a self-directed process because “there are no a priori, universal rules that dictate the proper weighting of the goods and virtues of human flourishing”.
The question I want to consider now is what evidence we have that people actually want to self-organize and flourish. How do we know that people would not prefer to have governments keep them in a state of perpetual childhood?
Research by psychologists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan suggests that human flourishing depends on the extent that people satisfy basic psychological needs including autonomy, competence and relatedness. (For references to this research see ‘The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior’). Autonomy relates to “the experience of integration and freedom” and the desire “to self-organize experience and behavior”. Competence involves “achieving valued outcomes” and relatedness refers to “the desire to feel connected to others” (p 231).
Studies have shown that satisfaction of needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness has a positive effect on self esteem and general health. Contrary to claims that autonomy and relatedness are competitive, Deci and Ryan argue that it is in people’s natures to develop greater relatedness as they develop greater autonomy. Research results support the view that being more autonomous is associated with more positive and satisfying personal relationships.
Researchers have also observed that even when people are engaged in tasks that they find intrinsically interesting, their degree of involvement and commitment depends on the experience of autonomy and competence. When rewards are introduced for an intrinsically interesting activity people may feel less autonomy – they don’t feel that their behaviour is self-determined - and thus they display less intrinsic motivation. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, who are economists, suggest that “the effect of external motivation on internal motivation depends on the perception of the people involved – of the outside motivation is perceived to be supporting, the intrinsic motivation tends to be reinforced (“Happiness and Economics”, 2002, p 182).
It seems to me that the findings of Deci and Ryan line up with observed market behaviour. People are always making trade-offs between different goals. Most people are prepared to sacrifice a lot of their autonomy in exchange for money when this is necessary in order to meet their basic physiological needs. When those needs have been met, however, people tend to give their need for autonomy much higher priority. People often forgo promotions or require large increases in incomes to induce them to accept additional responsibility at work. Some are willing to make sacrifices in incomes in order to achieve greater autonomy. For example, many people retire early in order to satisfy a need for autonomy by pursuing leisure activities that they find intrinsically interesting.
The question I want to consider now is what evidence we have that people actually want to self-organize and flourish. How do we know that people would not prefer to have governments keep them in a state of perpetual childhood?
Research by psychologists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan suggests that human flourishing depends on the extent that people satisfy basic psychological needs including autonomy, competence and relatedness. (For references to this research see ‘The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior’). Autonomy relates to “the experience of integration and freedom” and the desire “to self-organize experience and behavior”. Competence involves “achieving valued outcomes” and relatedness refers to “the desire to feel connected to others” (p 231).
Studies have shown that satisfaction of needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness has a positive effect on self esteem and general health. Contrary to claims that autonomy and relatedness are competitive, Deci and Ryan argue that it is in people’s natures to develop greater relatedness as they develop greater autonomy. Research results support the view that being more autonomous is associated with more positive and satisfying personal relationships.
Researchers have also observed that even when people are engaged in tasks that they find intrinsically interesting, their degree of involvement and commitment depends on the experience of autonomy and competence. When rewards are introduced for an intrinsically interesting activity people may feel less autonomy – they don’t feel that their behaviour is self-determined - and thus they display less intrinsic motivation. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, who are economists, suggest that “the effect of external motivation on internal motivation depends on the perception of the people involved – of the outside motivation is perceived to be supporting, the intrinsic motivation tends to be reinforced (“Happiness and Economics”, 2002, p 182).
It seems to me that the findings of Deci and Ryan line up with observed market behaviour. People are always making trade-offs between different goals. Most people are prepared to sacrifice a lot of their autonomy in exchange for money when this is necessary in order to meet their basic physiological needs. When those needs have been met, however, people tend to give their need for autonomy much higher priority. People often forgo promotions or require large increases in incomes to induce them to accept additional responsibility at work. Some are willing to make sacrifices in incomes in order to achieve greater autonomy. For example, many people retire early in order to satisfy a need for autonomy by pursuing leisure activities that they find intrinsically interesting.
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