DISQUS

I don't understand the evolutionary logic here. Why would lack of paternity confidence make men want to coordinate? Isn't paternity a zero-sum game, where one guy's loss is another's gain? It's obviously not in a man's fitness interest if his woman sleeps around, but if other guys' women want to sleep around with him then that is in his interest. On average these interests will balance out, so why would the one interest win out over the other and become the social norm?

I don't see how this argument is specific to particularism. Couldn't you come up with similar dilemmas, to which there doesn't seem to be any principled solution, for almost any moral system?

What should you do in the jail/football dilemma if you have no special relation to anyone involved? Now imagine that you are instead the irreplaceable lead in a play, with an expected audience of X - how large must X be for you to stay and act rather than bail out this man (for whom you are the only hope)? What is X if it is a highly intelligent chimpanzee, rather than a person, that is at imminent risk of suffering?

Which drowning person does a moral pluralist like you save, if you may only save one out of: a top-notch physicist, a beloved movie star, a talented sculptor, an influential libertarian writer, a successful businessman, and an effective philanthropist? Define the relevant variables and plot the indifference curves for each pair of drowning individuals.

Is it right for a man to leave his family to poverty to go paint a beautiful painting? How high on the beauty scale must the painting reach for it to be acceptable? What if he paints several beautiful paintings? Now, suppose that he has no family, but Americans will spend a total of 100,000 hours looking at his painting(s) that they otherwise would have spent working productively, thereby slowing the increase in wealth production in America and economic development around the world.

What is this exercise supposed to prove? That there is no plausible moral system that involves a small set of general principles that are simple and easy to apply?

This doesn't seem to be at all fair to Wright's column. Where does Wright say that society should follow a single shared purpose, or praise the army for pursuing a single common goal? Where does he cite the Spartan aspects of the Army as a model for society? I'm not seeing it anywhere.

The word "solidarity" does not appear anywhere in Wright's column. The closest thing I see is where he praises commanders for caring about the well-being of others, which is a perfectly appropriate sentiment for a society based on mutually beneficial cooperation.

The kinds of "egalitarianism" that he focuses on, diversity and equal opportunity, also seem fine for a non-militaristic society with diverse goals. He talks about people interacting with others from diverse backgrounds, quality schooling for all children, decent health care for all, and jobs that are open to anyone with the relevant skills (which may vary drastically for different jobs). How are those Spartan values? How do they depend on society marching in lockstep in pursuit of a single, shared mission?

Those incredibly annoying 8)s should be 8[close parenthesis]s.

Will, I think that most of your beef is with the news write-ups of the study rather than with the study itself. The study (which is available here) never claims to be measuring happiness, in fact, they explicitly say "It is important to recognise from the outset that the HPI is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live" (p. 8). Instead, they describe it as a measure of "the efficiency with which countries convert the earth's finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens" (p. 8). In other words, they probably aren't pleased by the headlines either.

They do have an ideological agenda, but they're open about it (they even describe themselves as "seeking to inform and influence policy" on p. 10). And I doubt that they're trying to circumvent serious debate, since they spend much of their study, well, debating. They argue that existing indices (like GDP and the Human Development Index) are flawed, and criticize the practice of using them prescriptively as indicators of development. So they tried to come up with an index that does a better job of measuring what countries should be aiming to get out of development, and they think that they succeeded. Compared to previous indices, they write that

[t]he HPI takes a radically different approach to defining progress. With well-being as the ultimate end, and planetary resource consumption as the fundamental input, we can restate the goal of development as delivering high levels of well-being within the constraints of equitable and responsible resource consumption. The HPI reflects the extent to which countries succeed in achieving this goal.

You're perfectly free to disagree with them about the goal of development, and to argue that some other measure is a better indicator of what's important. That is a debate, not a circumvention of debate.

You're worried that the HPI is anti-development, so that countries can get near the top just from a low resource usage, but that's not exactly true. The four countries with the worst HPI all have a small ecological footprint (1.1 or lower), and no country with a Life Satisfaction below 6 (on a 10 point scale) cracks the top 30. Vanuatu has Life Satisfaction of 7.4, the same as New Zealand, Norway, and the USA. So, based on GDP, they are an outlier among the rest of the world (but not so much among island nations). Is that a bad sign for the NEF, or for people who focus on GDP? In addition to looking at overall HPI for each country, which is (Life Satisfaction x Life Expectancy) / (Ecological Footprint), the NEF also sets targets for each of the three components. They claim that no country is doing very well on all three components, and recommend that every country try to improve on the components where it does poorly.

I think that there are flaws to the HPI, including some that you bring up (like the similar to some of what you discuss, but such scorn is unnecessary.

A few comments (best considered separately, at least at first, as they may contradict each other and possibly also my beliefs):

1. Isn't the welfare state an important part of the solution to this risk aversion? The important thing is that the benefits not be tied to people's jobs (which makes this part of the French model, where the benefit is the job, especially unpromising). People's risk aversion in exploring jobs is going to be exacerbated when their health care, retirement savings, and ability to provide for their family (and get their kids a good education) are all highly dependent on their employment. It's important to look at the potential downside of this risk-taking from the point of view of the people who will actually be faced with these choices, not just at the macro level where we can talk about "volatility". Government policies that provide a safety net, offer universal benefits, or are forgiving to those in financial difficulty will help encourage risk-taking by softening the blow of failure. They could also encourage risk-taking psychologically, by changing people's construals of the risks so that they feel more secure and adventurous, confident that things will work out even if this one venture fails (instead of worrying that everything will fall apart).

2. If self-employment makes people happier and more fulfilled, then I guess that's good in a way, but isn't it also likely to reduce productivity? We're talking about people who are failing to take a risk that could bring non-pecuniary benefits due to the joys of autonomy, not risks with potentially lucrative financial benenfits that would bring growth and spread the benefits far and wide. Given the moral imperative of growth, and the billions of people throughout the world whose lives are greatly improved by the growth generated in advanced, productive societies, I wonder about the morality of encouraging individuals to find their "calling" so that they can be happy. (This is more of a "Bral" point, but I'd prefer a Will response to a Liam response.)

3. Is the problem that people are too risk averse, or is it just that people aren't taking the right kinds of risks? There are plenty of ways in which people engage in excessively risky behavior, arguably: buying lottery tickets, not wearing seatbelts, not saving enough for retirement, and buying housing with interest-only loans. An alternative psychological explanation, which also applies to many of those examples of excessive risk-seeking, is that people are neglecting or underweighting the future. Within, say, a one-year time frame, these kinds of risky business ventures usually don't make much sense. The negative risk is concentrated in short-term failure, while the positive value comes their chance of becoming fulfilling jobs for many years.

Liam, it is fortunate that your task was not to lay out a set of policies that would allow society to distribute opportunities so that each person has an equal opportunity to adequately realize their primary capacities, because I don't think that you could do it. This is not a personal failing of yours (I think you're more fit for sharing your ideas in this format than you seem to realize - not that I'm any sort of expert), but a result of an impossible task. Any writing that came close to succeeding at laying out those policies would have to be placed on the fiction shelves, as it would have only strained connections to our world. In the real world, I doubt that any central planners would do better than a vibrant, thriving free market economy, of the sort that Will is always going on about. If hundreds of millions of creative agents, interacting and cooperating in the production of their meaningful lives, do not live up to your ideal of equal opportunity for primary capacity realization, then what makes you think that we could improve on their efforts by bringing in the coercive power of the state? This is especially true if we look beyond our own narrow, artificial "society". The kind of productivity and growth created by a more libertarian society will have enormous spillover benefits to people in the rest of the world (outside of what we mark off as "our society") and to the people of the future, giving them a much better opportunity to realize their primary capacities than they would have had if our society turned inward and focused on redistribution rather than growth.

You seem to suggest that this productivity argument would be mistaken, since redistribution of wealth designed as an investment in primary capacities would more than pay for itself through increased productivity. You happily assume that a government, formed out of a conglomeration of individuals with competing interests and a limited understanding of the very complicated and massive network of cooperation depending on humanity capacities, would be able to improve this system by fiat. I don't think I need to spell out in any more detail why I might be skeptical.

The problem becomes more acute once we recognize, as you seemingly acknowledge by omission, that it's an open question what these primary capacities actually are. It is up for dispute, as it rightfully should be in an open, liberal society, given the weightiness of the question and its close relation to personal values and identity.

It also seems like a fetishization of equality to limit our attention to the "primary capacities", which are accessible to everyone, and necessary to everyone for the realization of one's good. The capacity to excel in basketball, or in art, or in humor, or in philospohy, may not be open to everyone, but there is an enormous value to a society in which different people are able to excel at diverse capacities. Think of Naismith's wondrously beneficial innovation - it is so valuable because it allowed a set of individuals who otherwise would not have had any particularly striking talents to thrive in a new niche. Instead of letting "equality" stifle us into more efficiently pursuing the same old potentialities, let's create a society where innovation allows us to recognize potentialities that we'd never known before. We want a society in which more and more capacities become relevant, and become pathways to success, excellence, and meaning, so that larger and larger portions of society are able to flourish in multifarious ways. Devoting an enormous set of resources to allowing everyone to "adequately" develop that limited set of common capacities so that their lives may reach that minimum standard of meaningfulness will not help us create this thriving society. The society that is most effective at driving this kind of innovation and diversification of meaningful pursuits, again, looks a lot like Will's libertarian paradise.

I hope that this comment has come across as polite, since I'm glad you've jumped into the fray here, Liam (and I'm a bit excited/nervous/apprehensive about jumping into the fray myself). I know that it won't come across as a well-framed question, because it obviously is not, but I hope you'll be able to offer a response, since I'm interested in hearing what you have to say.

A thought-provoking post, Will.

I'm not sure that I agree with you, though, about how often people would change their minds if they were Bayesians. To take the example that you give, once you knew that X% of the population were Democrats and Y% were Republicans, and you knew something about the demographics of the two parties (how intelligent, how well-informed, etc.), there wouldn't be much that you could learn just from talking to someone. You might learn a little from good arguments, with arguments about other people's credibility as judges of the truth (and as judges of credibility, and as judges of meta-credibility, and, ...) often playing a larger role than arguments about the facts, but your beliefs wouldn't be all that much more malleable than they are today. The exception would be when you're first learning about a new topic and you're figuring out what positions are out there - a true Bayesian wouldn't be immediately drawn to certain congenial positions the way that people tend to be in the real world.

You're right that Bayesianism would involve drastic changes to the self. It is important to distinguish between a Bayesian (or a few Bayesians) in our society and a society full of Bayesians. In the latter case, I think that our concept of "belief" would cease to exist. In the actual world, if the information possessed by humanity implies that proposition A has a 90% chance of being true and that there is a 10% chance of alternative proposition B being true (and A being false), then there will still be some zealous advocates and diligent researchers who believe in B and are committed to making the best possible case for B (and against A). In Bayesian Land, if A vs. B was an important question, we'd probably still want some people to specialize and become B advocates, turning pro-B investigation and advocacy into a part of their identity, but these people (like everyone else) would still say that p(B)=.1 & p(A)=.9. Under one concept of belief ("think true"), these people would believe in A, but in another sense (which is more pragmatic and more closely related to the self) they would be B-believers.

Javier, when people are one way (e.g. shy) and they develop a narrative that says that they are a different kind of person (e.g. outgoing), there's evidence that some of their behaviors will tend to become consistent with their narrative (e.g. they'll choose to go to a museum with others rather than alone) while many aspects of their behavior (especially those involving less deliberation) remain consistent with how they had been (e.g. they won't spend that high a percentage of their time talking with others). Social psychologist Timothy Wilson has a lot to say about this in his book Strangers to Ourselves, which probably covers a lot of the same ground as Gazzaniga's book, thoughWilson thinks that the unconscious system is a part of the self along with the "interpreter".

Will, what do you think that he means when he says "Plainly, much more would need to be said actually to undermine consequentialist arguments for liberal strictures on state paternalism"? He is not talking about autonomy there, because the next sentence clearly raises autonomy as a separate issue, which would arise even if those consequentialist arguments were undermined. I read that sentence as saying "Hey, this is just the beginning of a debate here. It's an empirical question whether state paternalism would be an improvement on individual decisions, and I don't have the data to give anything close to a definitive answer."

I guess the important thing, whatever you think Haybron is saying, is that we agree that this debate is worth having. I got the feeling from the way you called "fallacy" on Haybron that you were trying to nip it in the bud, but from your other posts I know that's not so. Human cognition and government institutions are both non-ideal, and figuring out what to do about that is an important, complex, and unresolved question, one about which we have different priors but are still open to evidence. I think that Haybron's passage suggests that he's in the same boat, but I doubt that it's worth having a big debate to try to parse the meaning of his words.

Was I reading a different passage from the rest of you? I read Haybron as being reasonable, cautious, and measured, primarily pointing out that happiness research is likely to show that we are not in the "ideal markets - libertarianism is obviously right" corner of the chart and urging people to be open-minded in investigating the possibility that the much-derided government "paternalism" could make things better in some cases. He wasn't committing any fallacy, or assuming that the government was perfect. Were you all assuming that all of those subjunctives and hedge words, the 'if's, the 'might's, the 'much more would need to be said's, and on and on, were just put in for show?

I read him as saying that it is plausible that happiness research will reveal that people make errors in assessing their happiness that are 1) systematic and 2) large. If the errors are systematic, then researchers can make reasonably accurate generalizations about what they are, and the government can learn about them (just as it learns about damage to the environment, military tactics, and all sorts of other empirical facts). If they're large, then there is room for the (non-ideal) government to institute programs that would be improvements. So, in some particular cases, the government could have an advantage over individuals in this respect. Of course, there are other considerations in deciding on the extent of state paternalism (Haybron refers to consequentialist arguments and to "powerful reasons of autonomy"), which gives us cause to be suspicious of rampant paternalism even if the happiness data turns out as Haybron suspects.

(An aside: isn't the "So, for instance, state officials might know that the average person isn’t happy, while the average person mistakenly believes herself happy" point the one that Will was referring to approvingly in the previous post, where he was pleased to find someone who mirrored his doubts of happiness self-reports?)

Jadagul, if people are spending their money on something that is of no value, then that's a problem, and an inefficiency in the economy. To say otherwise - that it helps the economy to have people like Chet buy worthless status-enhancers - is to commit the broken window fallacy. At least under the Rawls view, producing a status-enhancer is like breaking and fixing a window, in that it costs resources but adds no value. If clever policies made it so that society didn't need to produce so many worthless yachts, then that would be an improvement, just like getting society to stop needing to fix so many windows.

Will, those are four important points, all worth discussing, but I don't want these comments to be a debate of every argument you've made against Layard. I'd rather focus on this post, on Rawls and interdependent preferences. The main point of my comment was that the Rawlsian approach of deciding that some preferences don't count does not weaken Layard's general argument. If people are working to satisfy preferences that don't have any value, then that's just as much of a problem as people working to benefit themselves in a way that harms others. In this comment to one of your earlier posts, I identified both of these problems with status-seeking (people striving for something that isn't really of value and people striving for something that benefits them at others' expense), and now I can add that, depending on how we define value, we might transform one of these problems into the other, but that doesn't make the problem disappear. Your comment did not respond to this argument.

I suppose that it's possible for the Rawlsian approach to add to your anti-Layard argument if you can come up with a principled way to have the benefits that people gain by getting ahead in the status game count, while the harms to others from falling behind in the status game do not count, but this seems hard to do. It is more likely that ruling out certain preferences in our normative judgments would weaken the argument made in your first quick response (that status games create new status rather than merely redistributing existing status), since there's a good chance that a principled application of the Rawlsian approach would lead us to decide that at least some of these status-benefits have no value.

Will, I think that a Layard-style argument against the rat race goes through just as well on a Rawls-style view of what's valuable as it does on a utilitarianism-style view of what's valuable. Layard's basic point is that a lot of what people do is directed at succeeding in a positional game which he calls status-seeking. People like it when they're doing well in this game relative to other people, and they don't like it when they aren't. This is a problem, since it's a waste of people's efforts (even if the game is not strictly zero-sum, and it does produce some things of value rather than simply redistributing positional goods, it is still inefficient). The utilitarianism-style objection to the positional game is that every positive movement in relative position creates an equivalent negative movement which cancels out its value. The Rawls-style objection is that the whole game is worthless, since people's preferences about their relative position have no value. Either way, it seems like good public policy to get people to direct their time and energy at something other than this positional game.

To take a crude example, say that Chet and his neighbor each have a yacht. The neighbor's yacht is bigger, which makes Chet unhappy, so Chet works really hard and buys a new, bigger yacht. Now Chet is happy that he has a bigger yacht than his neighbor, and his neighbor is unhappy about being bested by Chet. Layard says that these two changes cancel out, Rawls that happiness and unhappiness based on who has a bigger yacht is irrelevant and lacking in value.

In real life, the effects of relative position are probably not so crude. For the most part, I think that they are not based on emotions like envy or schadenfreude, but rather on indirect effects like how people evaluate how well their lives our going. This could make things harder for the Rawls-style argument, since we aren't just talking about bigoted preferences.

I mean government policies that would actively encourage people to work, not just policies that remove disincentives to potential workers and employers like minimum and maximum requirements. This problem would be more salient if many highly productive people decided "I can live comfortably enough on 20 hours of work per week, so that's all I'll do."

What if individuals in rich Western countries were a little bit more rational (assuming leisure contributes more than wealth to what people want, at least on the margin)? Would you want to institute policies that would encourage people to work more, so that the poor people in other countries would benefit? Why aren't you already arguing for policies to encourage even more work in the West? Is your failure to do so repugnantly nationalist and anti-cosmopolitan?

You sound like Ralph Nader.

This argument for redistribution from the rich to the poor is as old as the idea of diminishing marginal utility, and, if my understanding of the SWB literature is correct, then the shape of the utility vs. money curve still supports it. My understanding is that more money does translate into increased happiness for people who don't have much money, but happiness reaches a plateau at a fairly low level of money (something roughly in the neighborhood of twice the poverty rate). So redistribution of money from the rich to the poor does increase utility, since many of the poor are still poor enough to not be in the flat part of the curve.

A related argument from the SWB camp (e.g. in this Frank article) is that, instead of redistributing resources to different people, we should redistribute them to different pursuits, like increased leisure time, which actually do have an impact on people's happiness. If you believe that the vast majority of Americans are already on the flat part of the utility vs. money curve, then this kind of redistribution becomes much more attractive than the money-to-the-poor kind.

Krauthammer is right that there is a "very serious fiscal problem," but he's wrong about the timing. It has already started. The government is spending a lot more than it's bringing in, and the gap keeps increasing because people in power are not making serious efforts to cut spending or raise taxes.

One other mistake: it's not about social security. The government needs to figure out how to balance its revenues and expenses, outside of the payroll tax and social security payments. Cutting back on social security, as in Bush's plan, does not even begin to address the problem. Changes to social security will not influence whether or not the government has serious fiscal problems come 2009.

Shorter WW: if you don't care about truth then there are no fallacies.

(And if you want to use the hot new term of art, not caring about the truth is bullshitting, rather than lying.)

If you really want to turn this into a philosophy-of-language, satisfaction-condition game, I think that Matt can beat you on that turf, too. He isn't wrong to point out instances of the pundit's fallacy, because giving a speech act that label is an excellent way to counteract it by undermining the speaker's credibility. The immediate purpose of calling someone on the pundit's fallacy is to make everyone think "I can't trust his claim that this'll make our candidate more electable, because he's just trying to rally everyone to his pet cause." (The long-term purpose, generally, is to encourage people to figure out how to actually make your candidate more electable.)

Will - I meant to use "good for us" in the most generally sense, to refer to anything worthwhile, not just happiness. You seem to be talking about "what we value" and "what people want" in such a general sense, but the way that you're using "value" and "want" risks conflating what people actually do seek with what is worth seeking for them. They are not the same, as can be seen if we consider how evolution can "program" us to seek things that help us make copies of our genes but are not particularly valuable for us as people.

"The question is: if people want [status], and they are willing to bear the trade-off between happiness and status in their own lives, why impose the value of happiness by designing the value of anti-status-seeking social policy?"

One answer is that the arms race is "zero sum with respect to relative position." A bunch of people are sacrificing the creation of new happiness for themselves in order to bring about the transfer of some existing status to themselves. Now, to the extent that the arms race promotes the creation something else of ultimate value, or the creation of happiness via something other than status, this waste of time and effort in status-seeking is less troubling. But it is an inefficiency that suggests opportunities for improving the system.

A second answer is that people are sometimes mistaken. They aren't all that good at predicting what will make them happy, and they have mistaken ideas about how good it will be once they have more status, so they make decisions that they wouldn't make if they had superhuman predictive ability and rationality, unclouded by the dictates of inclusive fitness.

I think that the government could make gradual changes to the structure of society that reduce how enticing the status-seeking arms race is and result in people being more likely to end up living lives that are good for them (in the general sense).

There are two problems with the first half of your argument, that we shouldn't be concerned about the happiness findings because people value higher position for its own sake. First, it may be true that people want status independently of its effects on their happiness, but that does not mean that the high status that they strive for is good for them. There are obvious evolutionary reasons, for instance, why people would seek status: it is (or at least used to be) good for your reproductive success, if not for your quality of life.

The second problem is that, even if relative position is good for the individual, that doesn't solve the problem of the arms race. The game of seeking higher relative position is zero-sum, so lots of people are pouring resources into changing positions with each other without causing any net improvement.

The second half of your argument is that what matters is a sort of excellence, like transcendently good poetry, not happiness. If we accept that, then of course the happiness data isn't troubling. But we still need to worry about how well our society's rat race is tuned to producing the kind of excellence that you claim to be valuable. We ought to find some way of measuring how well we're doing at it, analogous to the hedonic studies which show that we're not doing well at producing happiness. Poets and other artists are often thought of as stepping outside of society's arms race in order to pursue their own aesthetic goals, so maybe we're not doing as well as we could be.