Should schools and universities teach students how to be happy?

This question arose from the education chapter of ‘The politics of happiness’, by Derek Bok. I wrote some general comments about this book in my last post. Bok’s views about education deserve further consideration, however, not least because he was president of Harvard for a large slice of his professional career.


In reading the education chapter I was particularly interested to see how the author would deal with evidence that education, like economic growth, has little direct effect on happiness in the United States. (Australian evidence suggests that university level qualifications have a negative effect on happiness.) Bok’s views on education are somewhat more positive than his views on economic growth, but he is highly critical of the weight that education policies currently give to acquisition of vocational skills.

The first paragraph of the chapter sets the tone for the discussion that follows:

‘People often misjudge what will bring them enduring happiness or pain. It stands to reason, then, that any serious attempt to increase well-being should give a prominent place to education. Schools and universities are the obvious institutions to assume this responsibility by trying to cultivate interests and supply the knowledge that will help young people make more enlightened choices about how to live their lives’ (p. 156).

I would have liked to see recognition in that paragraph of the responsibilities of parents and of young people (who should be accepting responsibility for their own lives by the time they get to university). But I guess that most parents hope that the schools their children attend will somehow help them learn how to make enlightened choices about how to live their lives.

Does that mean that the results of happiness research should be taught in schools? Bok toys with that idea. He notes that one program based on happiness research, which was presented to school students by Martin Seligman, succeeded in cutting the incidence of depression in half over a two- or three year period. In the end, however, he comes down against teaching happiness in schools on the grounds that teachers who are not adequately prepared to present such material could give students a distorted view based on pop psychology. I suppose that view is wise. I think it would certainly be unwise for time spent on happiness studies to be at the expense of literacy and numeracy skills, and the development of skills in acquiring knowledge.

Most kids probably pick up more than enough pop psychology already from various sources, including their teachers, sports coaches and the self-help section of the local bookshop. If they are lucky they might look on a different shelf at the bookshop and find something more informative, like ‘Stumbling on happiness’ by Daniel Gilbert. When they find difficulty coping with life they might also get some helpful coaching from a competent therapist. To put these thoughts less cynically, while I doubt whether it is appropriate for happiness to be taught in schools, it would be good if children could be mentored by people whose knowledge of positive psychology was not gained solely by reading best sellers on such topics as the power of positive thinking and the secret of becoming an instant success at everything you might like to do.

Professor Bok is more strongly supportive of the study of the science of happiness being included in higher education. He has some reservations, however, about the inclusion of practical exercises to help students bring about ‘a personal transformation’, on the grounds that this ‘may strike some people as uncomfortably close to indoctrination’ (p. 172). It certainly strikes me that way. I think it makes sense to draw a firm line between what is taught as part of a curriculum and practical exercises in self-help that may be offered as an extra-curricula activity.

As noted earlier, Bok is highly critical of the current emphasis in education on acquiring vocational skills. He suggests that more research is required to understand what undergraduate experiences tend to be associated with greater happiness in later life. Our lack of understanding of such matters was highlighted to me in a recent paper by Michael Dockery which indicates that young people in Australia who experience higher education switch from having relatively high to relatively low levels of happiness (compared to others of the same age) at about the time they complete their degrees (LSAY, ‘Education and happiness in the school to work transition’, 2010). A variety of explanations are possible, including the development of unrealistic expectations at universities and a change in reference group following graduation. Andrew Norton's theory is that the graduates become unhappy because they are moving from an intellectually stimulating environment where they have a great deal of freedom to one they have much less discretion over what they are doing.

I think Australian universities should be giving priority to research to shed light on the reasons for this decline in happiness. Some young people may begin to wonder whether the sacrifices they make to attend university are worthwhile when they find out that they will probably end up less happy than their contemporaries who attain less advanced vocational qualifications.
Winton Bates

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Since writing this I have been reminded that Martin Seligman has been involved in a major experiment in teaching happiness at Geelong Grammar School. He recently worked and lived with the teaching staff for six months preparing them to teach positive psychology. A transcript of Kerry O'Brien's ABC interview with Seligman in December 2009 can be found here.

Would the politics of happiness be any better than what we have now?

While reading the first few chapters of Derek Bok’s recent book, ‘The politics of happiness’, I thought its main contribution would be to help to highlight findings of happiness research that are relevant to government policy. This book turned out, however, to be more of a treatise arguing that politics should focus on raising average happiness levels of the population. People interested in an explicit discussion of the policy-relevance of happiness research should look elsewhere, for example: Ed Diener et al, ‘Well-being for Public Policy’ (which I discussed here and here and in a review essay for ‘Policy’, Summer 2009-10).


The first five chapters of ‘The politics of happiness’ provide a lucid discussion of broad findings of happiness research, the reliability of this research, philosophical issues relating to its use by policy-makers, and implications of findings for economic growth and equality as policy objectives. There is little discussion of the findings of happiness research in the chapters that follow - relating to the threat of financial hardship, relieving suffering, marriages and families, education and the quality of government. The focus in the second half of the book seems to be more on the policy implications of adopting the objective of raising happiness in the U.S. than on the relevance of happiness research to consideration of particular policy issues.

The main tenets of the politics of happiness as set out by Derek Bok are as follows:
• Americans have not become much happier over the past 60 years despite the dominant place of economic growth on the domestic political agenda and the vast increases in GDP that have occurred.
• The idea of growth ‘has shifted from a means to desired ends to an end in itself, an end with no foreseeable end in sight’ (p.66).
• There is no way that policy-makers could stop the economy from growing ‘without creating problems that would outweigh any hoped for benefits’.
• Policy-makers should re-focus their priorities away from economic growth toward efforts to raise happiness levels - for example through ‘programs to strengthen marriage and family; encourage active forms of leisure; cushion the shock of unemployment; guarantee universal health care and a more secure retirement; improve child care and pre-school education; treat mental illness, sleep disorders and chronic pain more effectively; and focus education policy on a broader set of goals’ (p.208).
• Law-makers should make efforts to build greater confidence in the political process ‘through measures to reduce the influence of money and special interests’ and to curb a range of ‘efforts by politicians to place their own reelection above the general welfare’ (p. 209).

The main problem with this account of the politics of happiness, from my perspective, is that it would substitute a narrower view of well-being than that which is currently used in policy discussions. Derek Bok adopts Ed Diener’s definition that a person is said to be happy who ‘experiences life satisfaction and frequent joy, and only infrequently experiences unpleasant emotions such as sadness or anger’ (p. 9). I accept that is an appropriate definition of happiness – as the term is most commonly used. But self-reports of emotional states cannot reflect the impact on well-being of an expansion of opportunities that cannot be anticipated.

To be more specific, it is unrealistic to expect the benefits of economic growth in high income countries – benefits that are mainly an outcome of technological progress – to be measured by changes in average happiness or life satisfaction. For example, does anyone seriously expect that people living in 1950 could have felt unhappy or dissatisfied - or sad, or angry even - because they did own personal computers or any of the numerous other amenities of modern life that had not then been invented? The fact that we do not feel dissatisfied that we do not yet possess the products of future technological progress does not mean that such products will not enhance our future well-being and that of our descendents. What it means is that our emotional systems fortunately enable us to be satisfied with what life offers us if we can attain a standard of living that is within the bounds of what it is currently possible for humans to attain.

It seems to me that attempting to compare the well-being of succeeding generations of people using happiness survey data is like trying to compare the prowess of succeeding generations of sporting teams by asking the members of the each team to rate their own performance on a scale of 1 to 10. The ratings would be uninformative because each person could be expected to judge his own performance relative to that of his contemporaries rather than to compare his performance with that of counterparts in the other team.

In the case of well-being comparisons, it is relevant to ask survey respondents to compare their own standard of living with that of their parents. Survey responses to that question over the period since 1994 show that between 60 and 70 percent of Americans assess their standard of living to be better than that of their parents at a similar age.

As an outside observer of the U.S. I am surprised by claims that economic growth has had a dominant place on the political agenda and that growth has become an end in itself in that country. As far as I am aware there is not much government intervention in the U.S. economy that is actually directed toward increasing economic growth. Most of the political rhetoric about the benefits of growth seems designed to reduce government interventions that hinder economic growth rather than to raise the growth rate beyond the levels that would otherwise emerge from decentralized decisions of individuals and firms about saving, investment, research, innovation etc.

Apart from its questioning of the contribution of economic growth to well-being, the politics of happiness does not seem to me to provide a particularly innovative agenda for paternalistic politics. The question that is largely overlooked, of course, is whether well-meaning paternalism is more likely to help individuals to flourish or to hinder their flourishing by making them increasingly dependent on governments.

Finally, it is worth noting that just about all politics in democratic countries is about happiness – using the term now in the broader sense to cover all aspects of well-being. Irrespective of the motives of participants who are presenting their particular views an appropriate consideration of just about every public policy issue must involve an assessment of claims about the potential effects of proposed policy changes on various aspect of human well-being. It seems likely that some of the findings of happiness research will add useful information to such assessments and will result in better policy decisions.
Winton Bates

Does identity economics predict happiness in different societies?

The key idea of 'identity economics' - as discussed in the recent book of that name by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton - is that people gain utility when their actions conform to the norms and ideals of their identity (or social category e.g. gender, race, social class, age group) and lose utility when they do not. We should expect this to be so if we accept that individual behaviour is strongly influenced by socialization and that norms of behaviour can differ between people in different social categories.

This key idea of identity economics suggests that, other things being equal, people are likely to be happier when they live in societies where there are few economic or social pressures for them to act in ways that are contrary to the norms and ideals of their identity. It is important to define what we mean by happiness in this context. I think the appropriate concept in this instance is emotional well-being, as measured in happiness surveys, rather than an all-inclusive concept of well-being explicitly incorporating such factors as wealth, health and education. It seems reasonable to expect that, other things equal, people with high levels of identity utility would be more likely to say that they are happy or satisfied with life than would people with low levels of identity utility.

I get the impression from the methodology chapter of 'Identity Economics' that the authors are not particularly interested in econometric tests of the predictive power of their theory. They suggest that it is difficult to falsify any theory because ‘even the most straight forward test has literally millions of possible specifications’ (p. 115). I think they are exaggerating, but even accepting their point it seems to me that useful knowledge may be gained by considering what predictions might follow from a new theory and how well those predictions describe aspects of the real world.

It seems to me that one prediction we could make on the basis of identity theory is that people in homogeneous societies are likely to be happier than those in societies in which individuals have to interact with people who have different cultural backgrounds. We might expect that this effect would depend on the strength of ties to particular groups in multi-cultural societies, but we would expect homogeneity to be a plus for average happiness.

Is the evidence from happiness research consistent with this prediction? When I did a Google search using the words ‘happiness’ and ‘homogeneity’ the first results I saw seemed consistent with the prediction – people in countries that are homogeneous (as well as affluent) tend to be the happiest. However, delving deeper, I found a more careful study for 65 countries, using multiple regression to control for other variables, which suggests that ethnic homogeneity may actually have a negative effect on average life satisfaction (Douglas Barrett, Kristen Van Rensselaer and Bruce Gordon, ‘Possible effects of national population homogeneity on happiness’, Journal of International Business Research, 6 (1), 2007).

The authors comment as follows:

‘The results suggest that life satisfaction is significantly negatively related to ethnic homogeneity in the presence of our control variables. This is consistent with the “melting pot” concept, as multiple cultural influences create a richer living environment’ (p. 55).

I’m not sure what a richer living environment actually means. Perhaps one way of thinking about it is that a richer living environment enables us to get some of the benefits of foreign travel (e.g. sampling foreign food) without leaving the country. I think the result may also be consistent with identity economics if we view successful multicultural societies as providing learning experiences in which a substantial proportion of the population from all major ethnic groups have come to view themselves as tolerant of diversity. We should expect tolerant people to gain utility from acting in accordance with their ideals.
Winton Bates

Why should we be concerned that paternalism will foster dependency?

While reading the current discussion of ‘Slippery slopes and the new paternalism’ on Cato Unbound the thought occurred to me that the slippery slopes associated with libertarian paternalism could possibly take us in the direction of libertarianism rather than paternalism. If governments apply opt-out provisions to some existing paternalistic regulations it is possible that many of those who choose to opt out will be so successful in running their own lives that others will follow their example. This could result in political pressure for opt-out provisions to be applied to a wider range of regulation.

Has that train of thought filled me with optimism that citizens will tend to become more self-reliant and less dependent on government in the years ahead? Not exactly! I think widespread acceptance of the view of libertarian paternalists that it is possible for governments to act paternalistically without infringing individual rights is more likely to increase paternalistic regulation than to reduce it. That must follow if we can presume that protection of individual rights has had some influence in restraining the growth of regulation.

I think we should be concerned that increased paternalism will foster increased dependency on government. I see two particular areas of concern, the first of which is probably more manageable than the second.

My first area of concern is the development of cycles of dependency on welfare benefits in which several generations from one family become dependent on government hand-outs as the major source of their income from cradle to grave. This seemed to be a growing problem in the 1980s and 1990s, but increased paternalism in the manner of providing assistance may actually be reducing this problem and preventing it from spreading. Instead of income-support being provided as an unconditional entitlement it is now increasingly provided with conditions that require the beneficiaries to take action that will enable them to support themselves.

I have previously discussed (here) how attaching paternalistic conditions to welfare assistance can be consistent with both freedom and flourishing. If as much publicity is given to some of the ideas in ‘Identity Economics’, the recently published book by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, as is being given to the concept of libertarian paternalism, then I think we have grounds to hope that future welfare policies will be developed in the light of a better understanding of the role of identity in influencing behaviour. Policies that encourage people receiving welfare benefits to recognize their potential as productive members of the community are likely to help free them from cycles of dependency on government.

My second area of concern is an increasing tendency for people from all walks of life to look to government to provide protection against all kinds of risks. This has become so prevalent that it is difficult to choose an example to illustrate the point from the huge number available. When I was having breakfast this morning, however, a particularly appropriate example leapt out at me from the pages of ‘The Australian Financial Review’ (20 April). I think the example is particularly appropriate because it shows that even people who have a well-deserved reputation for rationality on public policy issues are now lending their support to proposals for government regulation to protect people who have hitherto been thought of as quite capable of looking after their own interests in the market place.

Tony Harris - a columnist whose views have hitherto generally deserved a great deal of respect – argues that the Australian government’s response to public concerns over executive remuneration has been ‘paltry’. Tony makes clear in his article that he wanted to see the government intervene in the executive pay market to address the problem of pay schemes that enable managers to earn substantial sums in good times, but lose little in bad times. He presents a logical argument that such pay schemes do not do a good job of aligning the interests of shareholders and executives.

The main problem with the article is that the author doesn’t even seem to think it is necessary to attempt to make a case for the government to intervene to protect shareholders in this instance. What is it that prevents major shareholders in public companies from insisting that executive pay packages provide appropriate incentives for executives? What prevents fund managers from taking the incentives provided to executives into account in making investment decisions?

The article doesn’t attempt to answer those questions. I think the answer to both questions is that nothing prevents the market for executive remuneration from working efficiently. The mistakes that have recently been made can be explained by the fact that this is an area where substantial innovation has occurred over the last couple of decades . Investors and fund managers have the strongest possible incentive to learn from this experience. It seems likely that as a result of recent events an increasing proportion of firms will pay executive bonuses in the form of shares that will be vested gradually, but some firms may consider a different approach to be preferable. No case has been made for governments to regulate how remuneration must be paid in all companies at all times.

When even sensible people argue that governments should protect people who are quite capable of looking after their own interests it is time for everyone to be concerned that government paternalism has fostered attitudes of dependency. We have already slid a long way down the slippery slope to dependency on government.

Author: Winton Bates.