Sunday, April 27, 2008

What do life stories tell us about human flourishing?

It seems obvious that life stories should contain just about all the information that anyone would want to know about human flourishing. When you ask someone to tell you about their life you get a much more complete picture of how satisfied they are with what life has offered and what they have accomplished than you could ever get by asking them for a numerical rating of their life satisfaction. Actually, asking someone to give you a numerical rating of their satisfaction with life as a whole could even be a good way to stop someone from telling you about those things.

So why don’t researchers ask people about their life stories – the high points, the low points, the turning points etc – rather than the questions asked about happiness, life satisfaction etc in surveys? The reason why little use has been made of life stories in the past, at least in scientific research as opposed to literary works, must have to do with the difficulty of adding different life stories together (or averaging them in some way) to obtain an overall picture of some dimension of human flourishing.

The secret of success in making quantitative analytical use of life stories is to focus on identifying whether or not the stories display particular characteristics of interest to the researcher. For example, in their study of narratives relating to high points, low points and turning points Jack Bauer, Dan McAdams and April Sakaeda coded the paragraphs that participants wrote about each episode according to the presence or absence of integrative and intrinsic memories. Integrative memories were present if there was evidence in the account that the participant had learned from the experience or come to a deeper understanding of self or others as a result of it. Intrinsic memories were present if participants focussed on matters of intrinsic interest, e.g. meaningful relationships, rather than extrinsic interests, e.g. money and status. (See: ‘Interpreting the good life ...’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005).

Participants in this study were also asked to complete more conventional survey questionnaires to provide measures of happiness, maturity (measuring such things as the degree to which individuals can hold impulses in check and respect others’ standards) and personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness). The results of study enabled the authors to reach the following conclusions:
People who emphasised what they learned from their experiences tended to be more mature than others.
People who emphasised the effects of experiences on personal growth and relationships tended to be happier than others.
For the most part these results could not be explained by simply knowing the broad personality traits of individuals in the study.

It seems to me that narrative research may be able to play a role in studying the inter-relationships between the rules of the game of society (including both formal institutions and informal rules associated with cultures) and the extent to which people respond positively or negatively to challenging experiences.

What will you regret on your deathbed?

There is a saying going around that no-one on their deathbed ever regrets not spending more time at the office.

It is a witty thing to say - but the people saying it are making a serious point. Does the point stand up to scrutiny? It seems reasonable to expect that some people would regret not working harder or longer to accumulate more wealth to leave to their children and grandchildren. I suppose there would also be a few who would be wishing that they had spent more of their wealth during their lifetime – they would be regretting that they could not take it with them.

I suspect that it is safer to assert that few people on their deathbed ever regret the time they have spent with their families - but that doesn’t sound so witty. It would also be very hard to confirm (or disprove). Imagine an elderly person lying on her deathbed with her family gathered around when someone conducting a survey comes in and starts asking her to nominate the things she most regrets in her life. How would she respond? Then think about the potential bias in the survey sample that would come from leaving out all the people who die unexpectedly, all those who die peacefully in their sleep and those who are not able to think clearly about anything when on their deathbeds.

Why focus on deathbed regrets? Despite Solon’s ancient view that no-one can tell whether they have had a happy life until they reach the very end, it seems to me that survey findings about regret are no less valid because researchers don’t wait until people are on their deathbeds before asking them about their regrets. As discussed in an earlier post there have been interesting research findings about regret. For example, in the long run we tend to regret the things we have not done more than the things we have done (see here).

When someone makes an assertion about deathbed regrets they are obviously just inviting us to conduct a thought experiment.

Some of these deathbed thought experiments are worthwhile. For example, when you are on your deathbed will you regret that you didn’t live a more healthy lifestyle? That seems to me to be worth thinking about – even though the answer could depend on the reason why I am on my deathbed. What would I be thinking if I was on my deathbed because I had been bitten by a snake while out getting my daily exercise?

However, there is one assertion about deathbed regrets made to me by a wise person the other day that seems to be to be just about beyond dispute: “No-one on their deathbed ever regrets not spending more time ironing clothes”.

How much do we know about regret?

Like most other people, I usually think of regret as arising from short-sighted behaviour or lack of sufficient resolve to resist temptations that I had decided to resist. However, some recent psychological research on self-control regrets, by Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan, reminds me that people can also experience regrets about missing out on the pleasures of life (see here). The research actually suggests that while the passage of time attenuates feelings of regret and guilt about indulgences, it accentuates feelings about missing out on pleasures.

What should we make of these results? Before rushing to the shops to give your credit card a workout it is probably worth considering research results about the effects of excessive debt on personal well-being. This research shows, not surprisingly, that people who have difficulty in repaying debt tend to have lower subjective well-being than those who do not have such problems. (See, for example, Australian Centre on Quality of Life, Survey 11, Report 11, August 2004). I am not aware of surveys that have asked people who have difficulty in repaying debt whether they regret the purchases that led to this problem, but it seems to me to be likely that they would feel ongoing regret.

Gregory Burns suggests that people want more money because of “the accrual of possibilities” that money provides ("Satisfaction", 2005, p 39). The act of buying something closes off any number of other possibilities. This makes a lot of sense to me.

However, Burns asserts that the idea that people value having options is contrary to what most economists think. I disagree with him about that. His comments bring to mind the options approach to capital investment developed by Avidash Dixit and Robert Pindyck in the early 1990’s as an alternative to exclusive reliance on estimating the present net value of an investment. (I would be surprised if this approach is not now widely accepted as applicable to the theory of consumer behaviour as well). There are two underlying ideas. First investments are often irreversible – once the investment has been made funds cannot be recovered if market conditions turn out to be worse than anticipated. Second, investments can often be delayed - they are rarely now-or-never propositions. As a result, it often pays for investors to delay investment even when estimated net present values are positive. There are often benefits in keeping options open and making decisions that increase flexibility (e.g. through more R&D spending) rather than committing resources to irreversible uses. (For a non-technical discussion of the theory, see the Harvard Business Review article, here.)

The idea that buying things closes off opportunities helps to explain why some of us sometimes find moths in our wallets. The idea of investing in R&D (or was that R&R) is also relevant to personal decision-making. Greg Burns’ research suggests that dopamine is released into the striatum whenever a stimulus in the environment – good or bad – causes an animal to change what it is doing (p 43). The theme of Burns’ book is the human desire for novelty. He suggests that to get a satisfying feeling you need to get some cortisol into the striatum (as well as dopamine) and in order to get this you need a little discomfort. In other words, you need a challenge (p 147).

Now, I am about to speculate far beyond my expertise in order to relate this idea about the benefits of challenge back to the point at which I began – the research finding about the accentuation over time of the regrets we have about pleasures of life that we have foregone. My suggestion is that the foregone pleasures we regret most are those that we might have felt if we had not decided to avoid some of the more challenging experiences that were available to us .

Postscript: Since writing this in September 2007 I have learned that research findings suggest that my speculations may not be far off the mark. In his book, “Stumbling on Happiness”, Dan Gilbert sums up relevant research findings as follows: “Indeed, the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more that they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends” (p 197). Spending more time with family and friends may not be challenging but the other examples mentioned certainly would involve challenges.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Do classical liberals and social democrats share common objectives?

Social democrats seek to use the powers of government to modify the outcomes of the market system in order to achieve widely-shared objectives. They often talk in terms of trade-offs between efficiency and equity. They believe that in the name of fairness it is sometimes appropriate for government to use coercive power to help some people (e.g. the deserving poor) at the expense of others (e.g. high-income taxpayers).

Classical liberals tend to be skeptical of such compromises because the classical liberal visions of freedom and fairness are the same - a world in which no-one exerts coercive power at the expense of others.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that classical liberals have no sympathy with the outcomes that social democrats seek to achieve. Even though classical liberals do not have collective views about the desirability of different societal outcomes I think that many who like to wear this label would consider that most of the outcomes that social democrats seek to achieve as having merit. For example, like most other people, many classical liberals would consider it desirable for everyone to have access to incomes above minimal levels and for everyone to have access to education and health services that are above minimal standards.

Such views can be the result of enlightened self-interest – e.g. choices of distributive principles behind a veil of ignorance - rather than the result of altruism. As James Buchanan has pointed out, the Golden Rule clearly implies the ethics of reciprocity (a relationship among natural equals) rather than the ethics of benevolence - a relationship that implies that givers and receivers have different status. (See: “Why I, too, am not a conservative”, 2005, p 49.)

In conceptual terms, the difference between classical liberals and social democrats lies in the willingness of the latter to use the coercive powers of the state to achieve outcomes that they consider to be desirable (i.e. the things they label as social objectives). In practice, however, even such luminaries among classical liberals as Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek saw some circumstances in which use of the coercive power of the state was warranted to achieve better social outcomes (such as in provision of education and alleviation of poverty).

How can a person who claims to be a classical liberal rationalize the use of coercive power for such purposes? Different people do it in different ways and sometimes the same person does it in different ways at different times. It seems to me (at the moment at least) that if we can assume that a very high proportion of the population support provision of a social safety net then it is reasonable to choose the method of providing it that minimises costs. I imagine that the transactions costs associated with use of the tax system for this purpose would be much lower than for voluntary contributions.

I acknowledge that funding of a social safety net via taxation involves unfair treatment to those who would not choose to have such a social safety - even behind a veil of ignorance - but I don’t know how it would be possible to distinguish such conscientious objectors from potential free-riders who would like to have a social safety net without helping to pay for it. It seems to me that the welfare costs of taxing conscientious objectors for this purpose may not be large they retain the right of exit (i.e. the right to move their capital and place of residence to a lower tax jurisdiction).

In addition to support for a social safety net classical liberals and social democrats may potentially also have other objectives in common. For example:

  • Supporting use of more efficient methods to pursue government objectives. It is important to avoid creating unnecessary welfare dependency. It is important to avoid creating unnecessary disincentives to work effort, saving, investment etc. It is just as important for delivery systems for health, education services etc to be exposed to market disciplines as for other goods.
  • Resisting attempts by narrow interest groups to corrupt the political system. For example, all government programs should be subject periodical public reviews to consider whether stated objectives are being met efficiently and equitably. For more about the role of such transparency requirements, see here.