April, 2007

Happiness as a Signal of Good Fit with Human Nature

by Ruut Veenhoven

April 25th, 2007

Will raises an important point that requires some elaboration on my part.
What indicates a good fit with the nature of an organism? One sign is the continuation of the species. This may involve high birth rates — as Will notes — but not necessarily so. Another sign is physical thriving as apparent in rising [...]

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The Artificiality of Happiness

by Will Wilkinson

April 25th, 2007

I find Ruut’s argument for the centrality of happiness, even for pluralists, very persuasive. If happiness is in fact a cause of, and is in turn caused by, a number of other values we hold dear in their own right, then I’m sold. And I’m attracted to the idea of average happiness levels as a [...]

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Good News About Depression and Suicide

by Will Wilkinson

April 23rd, 2007

In this post, Barry claims:

Even if well-being is trending up in the U.S., so too is clinical depression (including suicide).
I’m not sure that this is true in the case of depression, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t for suicide.
Estimates of the incidence of depression may be vastly overinflated due to a number of considerations laid [...]

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Justice and Happiness and Growth, not Justice or Happiness or Growth

by Barry Schwartz

April 23rd, 2007

I think Darrin has it exactly right that too much security seems to produce a sclerotic economy, at least in these times, and several Scandinavian countries, seeing the handwriting on the wall, have traded a bit of security for economic flexibility in recent years. Some day a really smart economist may figure out a [...]

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What Public Policy Can Add to Happiness

by Ruut Veenhoven

April 23rd, 2007

Darrin MacMahon notes that people are fairly happy in contemporary capitalist democracies and asks me what public policy can do to create even greater happiness for a greater number. In my view there are options at three levels: the macro level of nations, the meso level of organizations, and the micro level of individuals. I [...]

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The Place of Happiness in Pluralism

by Ruut Veenhoven

April 23rd, 2007

Wil Wilkinson notes that happiness cannot be taken as the sole master value and pleas for a “reasonable pluralism” in which happiness competes with other values in the public debate. I agree that happiness is not the only valuable thing, but I also think that happiness has additional merits that go beyond its intrinsic worth. [...]

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Policy Trade-offs, Justice, and Happiness

by Darrin M. McMahon

April 23rd, 2007

I have to say that as a humanist, it is great fun to watch the high level exchange between Will and Barry from the sidelines. But their discussion raises a number of questions in my mind. Barry spoke of the importance of security as a desirable human end, and I have to say that on [...]

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“Going to Hell” Is a Relative Matter

by Barry Schwartz

April 21st, 2007

Will’s most recent post suggests several thoughts. I think it is absolutely true that affluent westerners whine because we can. The objective improvements in our lives give us the time to examine life in microscopic detail and complain about everything that isn’t perfect. Pity the poor little rich folks. So we have little or no [...]

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Why We Think We’re Unhappy and What Not to Do About It

by Will Wilkinson

April 20th, 2007

At the end of my initial reply to Darrin, I mentioned that I wanted to say something about why so many people think we’re unhappy, even though the evidence says we’re not. Here’s a partial crack at that question. (I give a related but different diagnosis at the end of my paper.)
One obvious reason for [...]

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Happiness as an Input to Political Deliberation

by Will Wilkinson

April 19th, 2007

In his most recent post, Barry writes:
As an empirical fact, states DO make policy. Should policy be determined by the “new science” of happiness? Of course not. Should it be informed by the “new science” of happiness? Absolutely.
I agree completely that policy ought to be informed by happiness research. But I think it is too [...]

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Reasoned Evaluation or Blind Faith? How Should States Determine Policy?

by Barry Schwartz

April 18th, 2007

I am very much taken by the thoughtful discussion offered by Will Wilkinson and then by Darrin McMahon’s reply to our various posts. Darrin continues to teach me history. When I said that Darrin was confusing happiness with pleasure, I did not mean that he did so in his book, for he surely [...]

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Virtue, Pleasure, and Paternalism in Happiness Policy

by Darrin M. McMahon

April 18th, 2007

First of all let me say what fun it is to participate in a forum like this, and to thank the Cato Institute for organizing it, and Barry Schwartz, Ruut Veenhoven, and Will Wilkinson for offering such eloquent and stimulating reactions to my own modest proposals. I have to say that I chuckled when reading [...]

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The Quest for a Scientific Politics of Happiness

by Will Wilkinson

April 16th, 2007

In his reply to McMahon, Cato Unbound managing editor Will Wilkinson lays out three “enormous problems” for the “quest for a scientific politics of happiness.” First, happiness is just one value among many. Second, no one knows for sure what happiness is. Third, Wilkinson sets up a dilemma. On the one hand, if a scientific politics of happiness is understood as the active management of social welfare by political elites, then it pseudoscience. On the other hand, if it is understood as a science of social coordination, then the specific aim of happiness becomes secondary to the requirements of effective coordination. This “institutionalist” conception of a scientific politics of happiness can overcome the problems of pluralism and definition, Wilkinson argues, but at the price of losing focus on the preeminent value of happiness.

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The Data Tell a Different Story

by Ruut Veenhoven

April 12th, 2007

Ruut Veenhoven, editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies and director of the World Database of Happiness, argues that happiness levels are not stagnant, as McMahon maintained in his lead essay. Citing the most recent data, Veenhoven observes that levels of average happiness have increased over the past 30 years in the United States and the European Union, while the increase in the expected number of “Happy Life Years” is even more dramatic. “This increase in overall quality of life is unprecedented in human history,” Veenhoven writes. McMahon’s concerns about an overemphasis on happiness are misguided, Veenhoven argues. Far from making us complacent, happiness improves health, creativity, and citizenship. Though Denmark is the happiest country on record, Veenhoven notes that “this does not seem to have damaged the Danes.”

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Why Societies Should Pursue Happiness

by Barry Schwartz

April 10th, 2007

Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, argues that Darrin McMahon’s cautionary tale is based on the confusion of happiness with pleasure. For Schwartz happiness “rightly understood” is “authentic happiness” centered on the development of virtue and excellence. We should not be afraid to apply such a conception of happiness to policy, for “figuring out what does and does not bring happiness, or utility, might vastly improve the ability of national policies to increase welfare.” Schwartz suggests we will find that not only does happiness not rise in lockstep with wealth, but that happiness in fact begins to decrease at a certain level of affluence. Free-market capitalism, Schwartz argues, tends to turns us into “infantilized pleasure-seekers” not oriented toward authentic happiness. “No one is going to get rich in a society full of seekers of human excellence,” Schwartz says.

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The Pursuit of Happiness in Perspective

by Darrin M. McMahon

April 8th, 2007

In this month’s lead essay, Darrin McMahon, Ben Weider Associate Professor of History at Florida State University and author of Happiness: A History, puts the contemporary obsession with happiness in historical and philosophical perspective. Tracing our current notion of happiness back to “a dramatic revolution in human expectations” in the seventeenth century, McMahon argues that we have come to see happiness as not only something that is possible in this life, but which ought to be the aim of life. Noting that the recent spate of worried meditations on happiness is a luxury of the already wealthy and secure, McMahon argues against the single-minded focus on happiness as both an individual and social goal. Casting a critical eye on the aspirations of the new “happiness research,” McMahon argues that there may be natural limits to happiness, agrees with John Stuart Mill that “The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life,” and asks us to heed Aldous Huxley’s warning of a society in which everyone is happy “and yet the world is a nightmare.”

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