What determines opportunities for humans to flourish?

A series of recent articles on this blog has shown that some societies offer better opportunities than others for individuals to have the basic goods of a flourishing human. My aim in this post is to draw threads together to provide an overview of the links between the basic goods and determinants of opportunities to have those goods.

First, I will recap how the basic goods were identified.

Criteria

As explained in the first article in the series, I have adopted the criteria for the basic goods of “the good life” used by Robert and Edward Skidelsky: 

• Universality: not specific to eras or cultures;
• Finality: not just serving as a means to a more basic good;
• Sui generis: not incorporated in some other good;
• Indispensability: lack of the good leads to loss or harm.

Those criteria were developed by Skidelsky and Skidelsky in their book How Much is Enough (2012). Those authors also presented a list of basic goods that I used as a starting point for thinking about the items that should be regarded as basic goods.

The basic goods that I think a flourishing human could be expected to have are:

1. The prospect of a long and healthy life.
2. Wise and well-informed self-direction.
3. Positive relationships with family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and trading partners.
4. Psychological well-being: emotional stability, positive emotion, satisfaction with material living standards, engagement in doing things for their own sake and learning new things, perception of life as meaningful, a sense of accomplishment, optimism, resilience, vitality, integrity, and self-respect.
5. Living in harmony with nature.

I think my list is comprehensive and have given reasons why I think the items included on it are basic goods. Nevertheless, my perceptions of what it means to be a flourishing human are not incontrovertible.

Some items on this list could be grouped together. Longevity and psychological well-being are both aspects of health. Positive relations with other humans and living in harmony with nature are both aspects of relationships with other living things. However, I think the differences between the items concerned are large enough to warrant separate listing.

Links between the basic goods

The chart shown at the beginning of this post suggests that the basic goods are linked together as an integrated whole when a human is flourishing.

Wise and well-informed self-direction is of central importance. As discussed in the post on that topic, self-direction helps individuals to maintain other basic goods that are necessary to their pursuit of chosen goals.  The exercise of practical wisdom helps individuals to live long and healthy lives, maintain positive relationships, manage their emotional health, and live in harmony with nature.

Psychological well-being depends heavily on other basic goods. As noted in the post on psychological well-being, much of the international variation in life satisfaction scores can be explained by factors that are closely related to other basic goods that a flourishing human could be expected to have. 

The causal link between psychological well-being and self-direction runs in both directions. Sanity is necessary for wise self-direction.

The prospects for people to live long and healthy lives have always depended on living in harmony with nature. That is true even in the modern world. For example, the severity of damage resulting from bushfires recently experienced in Australia may be attributed to failure to have enough regard to living in harmony with nature. In addition to the immediate threat to life posed by the fires, may people have been adversely affected by smoke, which includes particulates that can be detrimental to long term health.

Determinants of opportunities to have the basic goods

Conclusions of the posts relating to each of the basic goods are outlined below.

• Wise and well-informed self-direction: Individuals have strong incentives to learn how to make wise and well-informed choices in societies where there is a great deal of economic and personal freedom. They are likely to have easier access to relevant information in countries with relatively high skill levels.
• The prospect of a long and healthy life: Health spending, income growth and education have contributed substantially to increased longevity. The more fundamental determinants are the cultural and institutional factors that have contributed to economic development, including economic freedom. Long healthy life expectancy is associated with high levels of economic and personal freedom.
• Positive relationships with other humans: The extent to which others can be trusted has an important impact on the opportunities for positive human relationships because it improves incentives for trade and other mutually beneficial activities. Trust levels tend to be higher in countries with relatively low crime rates and adherence to rule of law. Generalized trust, which gives greatest weight to trust of people who have just met and people from different religions and nationalities, tends to be greatest where people hold emancipative values, involving greater tolerance of diversity. Networks of individuals who can rely on each other for social support tend to be strongest in high-income countries.
• Psychological well-being: Countries with the highest average life satisfaction are characterised by relatively high income levels and life expectancy, accompanied by perceptions of strong social support, freedom and low corruption. The percentage of the population who are dissatisfied with life tends to be relatively low in such countries.
• Living in harmony with nature: The sense of kinship that people feel toward some animals living in the wild is similar to their feelings toward household pets. Human reasoning seems likely to continue to expand this sense of kinship to encompass more living things. Rising incomes make people more willing and able to afford more humane treatment of animals.

Common elements among determinants

The most pervasive common elements among the determinants of opportunities to have the basic goods are high incomes and high levels of economic and personal freedom.

The pervasiveness of high incomes as a determinant of opportunities for human flourishing points to the importance of economic growth. I have recently argued that it seems likely that for the foreseeable future the aggregate outcome of choices freely made by individuals as consumers and producers of goods and services will continue to involve further economic growth, even in high income countries.

However, it is possible that, over the longer term, increasing numbers of individuals will choose a lifestyle involving stable incomes and more leisure to one with rising incomes. Such an outcome would be consistent with ongoing growth of opportunities for individuals to live the lives that they aspire to have.

Once we recognize that economic growth is only one possible outcome of personal choices in the context of expanding production and consumption possibilities, that opens the way for us to focus on the determinants of productivity growth, rather than GDP growth outcomes. The cultural and institutional factors that have led to economic growth in the past have potential to continue to raise productivity levels, and thus enable opportunities for human flourishing to continue to expand, even if aggregate demand for goods and services does not continue to grow.

Cultural and institutional factors that support individual self-direction and opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange and cooperation are important not only in enabling people to make effective use of known technology, but also in bringing about improvements in skills, innovation, technological progress and advance of knowledge that enable productivity growth to occur.

Important institutions supporting the ongoing growth of productivity include liberty and rule of law. Individuals need liberty in order to exercise self-direction, and they need trustworthy trading partners and collaborators to engage with for mutual benefit. The perception that others can be trusted is enhanced by widespread adherence to rule of law. Culture is directly important in supporting the advance of knowledge, respect for innovators, and tolerance of diversity. Culture also underpins the values supporting liberty and the rule of law.

 Conclusions

Wise and well-informed self-direction is of central importance among the basic goods of a flourishing human because it helps individuals to maintain the other basic goods. The exercise of practical wisdom helps individuals to live long and healthy lives, maintain positive relationships, manage their emotional health, and to live in harmony with nature.

At a societal level, liberty and rule of law are among the most important determinants of opportunities for individuals to have the basic goods of a flourishing human. That poses the question of why there is greater liberty and adherence to rule of law in some societies than in others.  In order to understand the determinants of opportunities for human flourishing we need to understand the evolution of cultures supporting liberty and the rule of law.

"How dare you?"

I have stopped laughing about Greta Thunberg’s performance at the United Nations a few months ago.

At the time, I was amused by her quixotic antics in attacking world leaders. People who think they can change the world by staging tantrums do not deserve to be taken seriously. It was predictable that Greta’s outburst would have a negligible impact on climate change policies.

I was also amused by Greta’s misconceptions about the relationship between economic growth and climate change.

On reflection, however, those misconceptions are no laughing matter. They are more widely held than I had imagined, including among some people who have had a great deal more education than Greta. By making economic growth the villain, climate activists seem likely to antagonize many of the people who would like more action to be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Global climate change is perceived to be a serious problem by a high proportion of the population in many different countries. However, there is much less support for action to be taken to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The obvious obstacle is the additional cost to consumers of transition to alternative energy sources (including the cost of energy storage and backup to ensure reliable supplies). The advocates of zero economic growth add another obstacle by telling people they will have to make huge changes in their lifestyles to mitigate climate change. The lifestyle changes required for adaptation may seem preferable to many people.

The nature of economic growth

Misconceptions about the relationship between economic growth and climate change stem largely from ignorance about the nature of economic growth.

When economists talk about economic growth, defined as an increase in the amounts of goods and services produced, some environmentalists just think of increases in the amount of stuff they don’t like. A little further thought might enable them to acknowledge that much additional stuff is being produced these days under environmentally friendly conditions. They might even be particularly fond of some additional stuff e.g. organic food, solar panels, electric cars and batteries. There are also some services they might like, such as health and education. 

Greta and her followers are probably concerned that economic growth requires us to dig up more and more natural resources until there are no more to be discovered. If that was true, it would be easy to understand why they might see endless economic growth as a fairy tale. However, growth in capital stock - created by transforming natural resources into equipment, buildings and infrastructure - typically accounts for only a small proportion of economic growth. In the 1950s, research by Robert Solow, a Nobel prize-winning economist, showed that only one-eighth of the increase in gross national product per man-hour in the United States between 1909 to 1949 could be attributed to increased capital stock. The remaining seven-eighth, which became known as the Solow residual, was attributed to technical change. Subsequent research has shown part of the Solow residual to be associated with improvement in labour skills, with the remainder, often described as total productivity growth (or multifactor productivity growth) being attributed to innovation, technological progress and the advance of knowledge.

Economic growth will probably end one day, but there doesn't seem to be anything inherent within the growth process that must bring that about. How do Greta and her followers propose to end economic growth? Do they propose to require people to take the benefits of technological progress in the form of more leisure, rather than more goods and services? Or do they propose to stop the advance of knowledge and innovation? 

The former approach seems more likely. It is certainly not unprecedented in human history for the advance of knowledge to come to a virtual standstill for long periods. However, it would be surprising to see the environmentalists of wealthy countries advocate policies to make that occur.

Environmental impacts of growth

If economic growth is largely about innovation, technological progress and the advance of knowledge, does it necessarily have adverse environmental impacts?  Of course not! In recent years, a significant amount of research, development and innovation has been directly related to development of alternative energy or other environmentally friendly activities.

Much of the other innovation that has occurred over the last decade or so - for example, improvements in communication technology - seems to have been benign in terms of its environmental impacts. It is possible to think of technological innovations that have raised environmental concerns, e.g. fracking and genetically modified crops, but that could hardly justify the blanket ban on innovation that is implicit in a zero economic growth scenario.

My view of growth

At this point some readers might have gained the impression that I am an advocate of endless GDP growth. That is not so. My reservations about GDP as a measure of well-being, and of GDP growth as a societal objective have been on display in articles I have written over the past 15 year (for example one on the priority given to economic growth in Australia, and one on the concept of Gross National Happiness).

As discussed previously on this blog, I advocate growth in opportunities for human flourishing - that is, growth of opportunities for individuals to live the lives that they aspire to have. If increasing numbers of individuals choose a lifestyle involving stable incomes and more leisure to one with rising incomes, I can see no reason to object (unless they want me to subsidize their lifestyle choice). In my view, there is certainly no case for governments to require or induce people to work harder or longer to foster growth of GDP.

However, it seems likely, even in high income countries, that for the foreseeable future the aggregate outcome of choices freely made by individuals as consumers and producers of goods and services will continue to involve economic growth. That outcomes seems likely, even in the presence of the minimal restrictions on individual freedom are necessary to achieve widely accepted environmental goals.

Those who urge the introduction of policies to stop economic growth are contemplating a great deal more interference with the rights of individuals to manage their own lives than could possibly be justified to pursue widely accepted environmental goals.

Bottom line

Despite substantial reductions in the cost of alternative energy that have occurred over the last decade or so, the cost of transition to alternative energy still seems to be a major obstacle to effective international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those who make the false claim that economic growth is incompatible with widely accepted environmental objectives are adding a further obstacle to effective international action.

Instead of frightening people by urging governments to impose huge changes in lifestyles on citizens, perhaps environmental activists could pursue their goals more effectively by making a case for further government funding of research to help make alternative energy more affordable.

Does the modern world offer opportunities for people to live in harmony with nature?

Living in harmony with nature is one of five basic goods of a flourishing human. That is the opinion expressed in an earlier article on this blog. However, some further explanation may be required to persuade some readers that living in harmony with nature meets the criteria of a basic good.

Meeting criteria

Living in harmony with nature is obviously closely linked to survival of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers, but it might appear less important in the modern world. That is debatable, given the potential for environmental impacts of some human activities to be detrimental to human health and well-being.

It is also beside the point. Living in harmony with nature would not be a basic good if it served only as a means to a long and healthy life. Basic goods are not a means to some other good.

Similarly, the question of whether living in harmony with nature is integral to psychological well-being is beside the point. Basic goods are not components of other goods.

Basic goods are final goods.  As I see it, living in harmony with nature is an indispensable final good of flourishing humans because humans have deep-seated intuitions about their kinship (relatedness) to other living things. Anyone who doubts whether flourishing humans have such intuitions should look at some videos of animals meeting challenges of various kinds. Could any flourishing human not be pleased that this video of ducklings climbing steps has a happy ending?

The nature of kinship

The kinship that flourishing humans feel toward other living things is similar to their positive relationships with other humans. In fact, people often value the lives of household pets more highly than the lives of other humans. Some research by Jack Levin et al suggests that adult victims of crime receive less empathy than do child, puppy, and full-grown dog victims. The explanation offered for adult dogs receiving more empathy than adult humans is that adult humans are viewed as capable of protecting themselves while adult dogs are regarded as dependent and vulnerable, not unlike puppies and children.

Living in harmony with household pets may not be the first example that comes to mind of living in harmony with nature. Nevertheless, the sense of kinship with some animals living in the wild seems to be similar. Steven Pinker suggests in The Better Angels of our Nature that species that are lucky enough to possess the geometry of human babies may benefit to a greater extent from our sympathetic concern than other mammals (p 580).

Environmentalists have suggested that this results in disproportionate concern for a few mammals. Nevertheless, some environmentalists make the most of every opportunity to exploit fears that cute mammals are becoming endangered species. Koalas are a prime example. There would be few Australians who do not feel sadness about the large number of koalas killed in recent bushfires in eastern Australia, but claims that the koala population is now “functionally extinct” are probably exaggerated.

Opportunities offered by the modern world

The concept of an expanding circle of empathy, developed by Peter Singer, suggests that humans are likely to continue to expand their sense of kinship to encompass more living things. Singer suggests that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one's family and community members, but our capacity for reasoning has enabled an expanding circle of moral concern to develop. Those concerns seem likely to result in increasing numbers of people deciding to forgo meat products, without hectoring by climate change zealots claiming that we need to do so to save the planet. In my view, rising incomes play an important role in enabling people to give practical effect to their empathy for animals, for example by being willing and able to pay to ensure more humane treatment.

It is often observed that the move toward urban living has tended to separate people from the natural environment, but that lifestyle is likely to be more in harmony with nature than a lifestyle in which large numbers attempt to live in natural environments, but end up destroying the natural qualities that attracted them. As discussed on this blog a few years ago, the idea of locating human activities away from the natural environment, makes sense to decouple human development from adverse environmental impacts.

In How Much is Enough, Robert and Edward Skidelsky suggest that gardening provides a practical illustration of living in harmony with nature. They suggest that a good gardener “knows and respects” the potentialities of nature:

“His relation to nature is neither vulgarly instrumental nor grimly sacrificial. It is a relation of harmony”.

Gardening offers some potential to live in harmony with nature even in an urban environment. For example, it is often possible to select ornamental trees and shrubs, and to construct water features, with a view to attracting native birds into a garden. Even vertical gardening offers some scope to live in harmony with nature. On a larger scale, the story behind the mistletoe pictured at the beginning of this article illustrates some possibilities. An experiment is being conducted in Melbourne to use mistletoe to turn common street trees with no biodiversity benefits, London plane trees, into virtual wildlife sanctuaries.

The gardening concept may also have some relevance to the preservation of natural habitat. The idea that wilderness can be preserved merely by declaring an area to be a national park is a myth. Wilderness areas have not been free of human intervention in the past and may require careful monitoring and management to maintain existing biodiversity. For example, in Australia, the traditional custodians of the land used fire to create an environment suitable for the animals they hunted and to avoid a build-up of undergrowth that could fuel destructive bush fires.

Conclusions

Living in harmony with nature is one of the basic goods of a flourishing human because humans have deep-seated intuitions about their kinship with other living things.

The sense of kinship that people feel toward some animals living in the wild is like their feelings toward household pets. Human reasoning seems likely to expand this sense of kinship to encompass more living things. Rising incomes make people more willing and able to afford more humane treatment of animals.

Living in harmony with nature is consistent with urban living both because there is potential for substantial biodiversity in urban environments and because of the potential it offers for larger areas of natural wildlife habitat to be set aside and protected from the adverse effects of human activity. Ongoing monitoring and management is necessary in those areas to maintain existing habitat that is an outcome of past human interventions.

Which are the countries in which people have the best opportunities for psychological well-being?

This might seem like an odd question, so I will begin by explaining why I think it is worth considering.

Psychological well-being was identified in a recent post on this blog as one of five basic goods that a flourishing human would be expected to have. The post listed a range of aspects involved in psychological well-being: emotional stability, positive emotion, satisfaction with material living standards, engagement in doing things for their own sake and learning new things, perception of life as meaningful, a sense of accomplishment, optimism, resilience, vitality, integrity, and self-respect.

It seems reasonable to expect that opportunities for individuals to experience some of those aspects of psychological well-being might be greater in some countries than in others.

In compiling my list of aspects of psychological well-being, my starting point was the definition of psychological flourishing adopted by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So in their article ‘Flourishing Across Europe’ (published in Soc.Indic.Res. in 2013). These authors view psychological flourishing as lying at the opposite end of a spectrum to depression and anxiety. They identified 10 symptoms of flourishing (competence, emotional stability, engagement, meaning, optimism, positive emotion, positive relationships, resilience, self-esteem, and vitality) as the opposites of internationally agreed criteria for depression and anxiety (DSM and ICD). The study has previously been discussed on this blog.

My main modification to Huppert and So’s list is the addition of satisfaction with material living standards. In my view, people who feel miserable because they are dissatisfied with their material living standards are deficient in psychological well-being, even though they may not be suffering from the symptoms of depression or anxiety.

Despite my desire to modify the measure of psychological flourishing constructed by Huppert and So, it strikes me as providing a good basis for international comparison of psychological well-being. Unfortunately, this measure is only available for European countries, and for one year, 2006. That leads me to consider whether life satisfaction is a satisfactory alternative measure.

Is life satisfaction good enough?

The chart shown above suggests that, at a national level at least, the percentage of people who are satisfied “with how life has turned out so far” (ratings of 9 or 10 on a scale of 0 to 10) is a good predictor of psychological flourishing. In a simple linear regression, the percentage with high life satisfaction explains 83% of the inter-country variation in the percentage who are flourishing. (The chart was constructed using life satisfaction data from the 2006 European Social Survey used by Huppert and So to construct their psychological flourishing indicator.)

The idea that life satisfaction could a good enough measure of psychological flourishing might appear to be at variance with the findings of Huppert and So.  As discussed in an earlier post, Huppert and So found that only 46.0% of people who met the criterion for flourishing had high life satisfaction, and only 38.7% of people who had high life satisfaction met the criterion for flourishing.

 

However, the appropriateness of life satisfaction as an indicator of psychological flourishing depends on the purpose for which the indicator is to be used. If you want to know about an individual’s psychological well-being, it is hardly surprising that a single question about life satisfaction has been found to be a poor indicator. If your focus is on average psychological well-being at a national level, life satisfaction seems to be a good enough indicator because much of the measurement error at an individual level washes out in calculating national averages.

The countries with highest average life satisfaction

Average life satisfaction data from the Gallup World Poll is published annually in the World Happiness Report. This data set covers many countries and measures life satisfaction according to the Cantril ladder scale, with a rating of 10 being given to the best possible life and a rating of zero is given to the worst possible life.

In the 2018 survey, average life satisfaction ratings were greater than 7 in 15 countries: Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Sweden, New Zealand, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany and Czech Republic. Average ratings tend to be fairly stable from year to year, but a decade earlier, Ireland, Spain, U.S, Israel, Belgium and France had average ratings above 7, and U.K, Costa Rica and Germany had ratings below 7.

Regression analysis undertaken by John Helliwell et. al. show that almost three-quarters of the variation in national annual average life satisfaction scores among countries can be explained by six variables: GDP per capita, networks of social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption. That list of variables has a strong overlap with determinants of other basic goods in my list of the five basic goods that a flourishing human could be expected to have. (See other posts in this series, here, here and here.) Apart from GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy, however, the data used in the analysis of Helliwell et al are based on perceptions of survey participants rather than objective measurement. (The analysis is a pooled regression using 1704 national observations from the years 2005 to 2018.)

Since my focus is on identifying countries where a person chosen at random would have the best opportunities, the median life satisfaction for each country would be a better criterion than the mean. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to such data at a national level. Estimates of median life satisfaction for broad regions (based on data here) suggest that median life satisfaction is typically lower than the mean. The difference between mean and median tends to be small for countries with relatively high life satisfaction: Western Europe (6.6 for mean cf. 6.4 for median) and North America and ANZ (7.1 cf. 6.9). The difference more substantial in some other parts of the world e.g. South East Asia (5.4 cf. 4.8).

Avoiding and reducing misery

In considering which countries offer the best opportunities for psychological well-being, countries with high average life satisfaction would be less attractive to risk averse people (most humans) if a relatively high proportion of the population of those countries nevertheless lived in misery. However, available evidence suggests that factors that lead to high life satisfaction also tend to reduce misery. For example, it is apparent from the graph below that the regions of the world with highest average life satisfaction tend also to have the lowest percentages with low life satisfaction.

A study by Andrew Clark et al for the World Happiness Report 2017 used data for the U.S., Australia, Britain and Indonesia to examine how much misery would be reduced if it was possible to eliminate one or more key determinants. The factors considered were poverty, low education, unemployment, living alone, physical illness, and depression and anxiety disorders. The authors found that the most powerful impact would come from the elimination of depression and anxiety disorders.

Conclusions

Life satisfaction is not a particularly good indicator of individual psychological well-being, but it seems to be a good enough indicator to use in international comparisons.

Countries with the highest average life satisfaction are characterised by relatively high income levels and life expectancy, accompanied by perceptions of strong social support, freedom and low corruption. The percentage of the population who are dissatisfied with life tends to be relatively low in such countries.