The happiness debate continues. There's a good dissenting article on growth at Prospect, by Will Wilkinson who makes some very pertinent and sensible points. From TFA
The trouble with happiness research is that it is too often a mirror: we look into the data and see our ideology reflected. No one emerges from the happiness literature politically transformed. A dispassionate inquirer with no preconceptions would find that the happiness data say both too little and too much to build a usefully specific politics. Mostly he or she would find that liberal market democracies are where happiness flourishes most. But we already knew we wanted one of those. We already have one of those. Yet the happiness data don't tell us whether we ought to prefer the Swedish or the American type of liberal democracy, which is pretty much the main debate.
Point taken. Oliver James, meanwhile also has a book to plug a point to make in the Guardian, 23rd October:
The greatest crime of the Blatcherites has been the spreading of the affluenza virus among the rest of us. They seem to despise mothers who care for their small children - or anyone else whose work is not paid. They use education to create good little consumer-producers, not to set minds free. They lock students into debts, then impose an insecure, workaholic working environment and a bloated property market that keeps the young on a hedonic, consumerist treadmill. Above all, their talk of "opportunity", "choice" and "freedom" is just Americanised material aspirationalism.
Point taken, again.
I have some reservations about both. Wilkinson, for instance, cites a couple of studies on the empirics of reported happiness in support of his view, but the evidence is a little more nuanced. The quote from Benjamin Friedman is true, but it's not actually too difficult to construct a behaviuoral model from pretty simple consumer choice theory that would say that the utility one gets from having a position of status is what one values, and since status is essentially only a relative concept it is pretty obvious that one is setting oneself up for battle or frustration by doing so.
James, on the other hand, also feels broadly right, but has an alarming tendency to go off on one (this individualist capitalism thing at the end just didn't smell right to me).
I think there's something economists can do to help here, which is to make sure when we tell people about utility maximisation, we are a) not doing so as a prescription and b) making it clear that utility is not necessarily identified with any particular concept. We could also be more honest about the failings of the standard model and more careful about the conclusions we draw from it. And we can also, pace Wilkinson, be clear that relative factors are important to people too.
What would I advise? I'm not a psychologist and don't have any training in psychology, but my guess would be that happiness as a whole can only be achieved indirectly. If you try to be happy, you're almost certainly doomed to fail. If you can get beyond the whole concept, to the extent that it doesn't matter, it's more likely to come, in a similar way to the known fact that people who are desperate to pull never do....(OK, it's a fact. There's absolutely no evidence for it but it is a fact and both of you know it). Does growth matter? Well for a lot of reasons, yes. Do other things matter (like community, family, human respect), equally yes.
Result: My call is James, narrowly, on penalties.
