Part III. Growth, Quality, Happiness, and the Poor
Increasing Scope, Not Pot-of-Pleasure “Happiness,” is What Mattered
To be sure, the new and better and more abundant stuff—which remember covers non-stuff stuff like haircuts and education and entertainment—does not include all of human fulfillment and does not measure even what it claims to measure perfectly well. The forests primeval and the hosts of golden daffodils have shrunk (though on the other hand ordinary people with more leisure and more means of travel can reach the remaining spots more cheaply in hours of labor spent). And marginal utilities of the gigantic new pile of stuff, as the economists say, diminish. You may own 18 time more chairs than your ancestors in 1700, but you don’t enjoy 18 times more chair-sitting pleasures. In other words, all this radical, 100-fold increase is an increase in possibilities, and is not measured on the same scale as happiness viewed as cat-like pleasures of the day, or even as the deeper goal of human fulfillment. In discussing Nordhaus’ results the (equally useful) economists Timothy Bresnahan and Robert Gordon note that the utility from the last unit of increase of lighting, from 99 to 100 fold (which after all is only 1 percent), is surely a great deal less than that from the first few, from 2 to 3 to 4 fold.24 The 100th ball point is less pleasure-producing than the second or third. “Diminishing returns,” or more exactly in this case diminishing “marginal utility,” is one of the pieces of economic jargon that have slipped into the common tongue (like “GDP” or “the balance of payments”). You are pretty much right in your idea of what it means.
Doubtless, if she were lucky enough in 1800 to miss the smallpox and malnourishment, the Scottish nut-brown maiden, “Her eye so mildly beaming/ Her look so frank and free,” equaled in happiness (viewed in pot-of-pleasure terms) the average person on the streets of Glasgow nowadays. That at any rate is what recent research on “happiness” claims, and plausibly so.25 The economist, historian, and demographer Richard Easterlin, who pioneered the modern field of happiness studies applied to economics, concluded recently that “how people feel they ought to live . . . rises commensurately with income. The result is that while income growth makes it possible for people better to attain their aspirations, they are not happier because their aspirations, too, have risen.”26 A poor Glasgow maiden with an IQ of 140 in 1800 could aspire to no better position than head cook in an aristocratic house, and was very glad of that—her equally intelligent mother aspired to milkmaid. The cook was “happy.”
Easterlin argues, against the “freedom-from-want” claims of scholars like Abraham Maslow and Ronald Inglehart (believing that the hierarchy of needs can in fact be satisfied), that “economic growth is a carrier of a material culture of its own that ensures that humankind is forever ensnared in the pursuit of more and more economic goods.”27 The “happiness” literature, you can see, is predisposed to find modern levels of consumption vulgar and corrupting. The field has become one of the scientific legs of the century-old campaign by the clerisy against the “consumerism” to which the non-clerisy are so wretchedly enslaved, as described in the writings of the economist Robert Frank or the sociologist Juliet Schor or indeed the sociological economist of a century ago, the great Thorstein Veblen.28
Admittedly, we are “ensnared,” even “enslaved.” But social science since Veblen has discovered a reply: any level of income a “carrier of a material culture,” $3 a day as much as $137 a day. The anthropologists point out that any meal-taking or shelter-building or tale-telling “ensnares” its people, the Bushmen of the Kalihari no less than the Floor Traders of Wall Street. “Consumerism” characterizes all human cultures—which rather reduces the scientific usefulness of the term. Easterlin urges us to resist consumerism and become “masters of growth.”29 One wants to be wary of such urgings that “we” do something, since the “we” is so easily corrupted, for instance by rabid nationalism, or by the mere snobbery in the clerisy. Easterlin would agree. But surely in an ethical sense he is right. “We” need to persuade each other to take advantage of modern enrichment for something other than watching television and eating more Fritos and strutting about in a world of status-confirming consumption. We are ensnared, admittedly. But we want the ensnaring to be worthy of the best versions of our humanness, ensnared by Mozart or by the celebration of the mass or by a test match for the Ashes at Lord’s on a perfect London day in June. But that advice, to be nobly ensnared, has been a staple of world literature since the invention of writing. It has nothing much to do with the Great (and Liberating) Fact of modern growth, except that thanks to the Fact a vastly larger percentage of humanity is open to the advice.
Which raises another, humanistic criticism of the recent literature on “happiness.” The literature pays no attention to reflections on happiness that are non-quantitative or non-mathematical. (“Quantitative” and “mathematical,” by the way, are not the same thing; and often in the recent literature the two have no scientific connection, though trotted out separately to give an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing tale). In his recent book, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics, the brilliant insider critic of economics, Bruno Frey, devotes exactly one sentence to thinking about “happiness” before “measurement”: “For centuries, happiness has been a central theme of philosophy.” 30 (That’s it. He does not mention that it has been a central theme, too, of poetry and stories and biography and religion.) The lone footnote attached to the lone sentence cites six items on “how philosophers have dealt with the topic of happiness, six out of the approximately 670 items in the book’s long bibliography. In the next sentence Frey turns firmly away from such stuff, towards “the empirical study of happiness”—as though Sophocles’ Antigone or Plato’s Republic gave no insight into happiness worthy of the word “empirical” (from the Greek for “experience”), at any rate by comparison with asking random Greeks on the streets of Athens whether they are “happy” on a non-interval scale.
The result is that “happiness,” setting aside such pointless ruminations as the Hebrew Bible or the life and works of Buddha or Aristotle or Rumi or Shakespeare or for that matter Adam Smith, is reduced to self-reported declarations—added up scores 1 to 3 (“not too happy” = 1, “pretty happy” = 2, “very happy” = 3). An interviewer surprises you on the street, puts a microphone in your face, and demands to know, “Which is it, 1, 2, or 3?” Even the merely technical problems with such calculations are formidable. For one thing, a non-interval scale is being treated as an interval scale, as though a unit of 1.0 were God’s own view of the difference between “pretty” and “very.” It would be like measuring temperature by asking people to rate things as “pretty hot” = 2, “very hot” = 3, and expecting to build a science on the “measurements” thus generated. For another, the literature regularly depends on misuse of the bankrupt notion of “statistical significance.” Virtually every paper using survey results takes “statistical significance” to be the same thing as scientific significance. For still another, the measurement and the mathematical theory, as I’ve noted, live on different planes.
And the so-called “empirical” result thus achieved is often scientifically unbelievable on its face. Bruno Frey for example reports on results from 1994-1996 in the United States that claim the bottom decile of income earners to be “happy” to the extent of 1.94 on the 3-point scale, as against 2.36 for the top decile. One is gratified that the result is based on a massive, carefully done survey by the National Opinion Research Center. That’s great. It can be compared and averaged and regressed, at any rate if one is willing to ignore the philosophical and technical problems. But does anyone actually believe that someone earning $2,596 a year in 1996 prices (that’s the figure) and living in crime-ridden public housing is only 18 percent less happy in a seriously relevant sense than someone earning $61,836 and living in an apartment building with a doorman? I realize that many of my respected colleagues are willing to go along with such a fiction. I wish I could:
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said “one can’t believe impossible things.’”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
One of the proponents of happiness studies, the eminent British economist Richard Layard, is fond of noting that “happiness has not risen since the 1950s in the US or Britain or (over a shorter period) in western Germany.”31 Such an unbelievable allegation merely casts doubt on the relevance of “happiness” so measured. No one who lived in the U.S. or Britain in the 1950s (I leave judgments on West Germany in the 1970s to others) could believe before or after breakfast that the age of Catcher in the Rye or The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was more fulfilling than recent life. Even in their own dubiously “measured” terms , further, such facts have been plausibly disputed, for example by Inglehart and associates in 2008 arguing on the basis of large data sets. “Happiness [even measured in the unbelievable way] rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which substantial time-series data were available. Regression analyses suggest that that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness.”32 Even in the allegedly depressive U.S., Britain, and West Germany the “change in percentage of those saying they are very happy from earliest to latest survey for all countries with a substantial time series” was very large—if, again, “large” in such numbers is meaningful in God’s eyes.
But the main problem, as I said, is that the insights of poets and historians and philosophers from the second millennium B.C.E. to the present into what human happiness actually is have simply been bypassed. “Happiness” viewed as self-reported mood is surely not the point of a fully human life. The point is made by numerous modern philosophers—Mark Chekola (2007), for example, as it was earlier by Robert Nozick, David Schmidtz— and by other philosophers and theologians and poets back to Confucius.33 If we economists are not going to get any deeper than the pot-of-pleasure theory of happiness, perhaps we ought to stick with what we can in fact know scientifically—namely, national income properly measured, as “potential” or “scope” or what Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum call “capabilities”—the ability to read, for example, or the potential to become an artist.
The scope to do more, whether or not the opportunity has been fully seized by everyone, is what modern economic growth has achieved—it being pointless to urge a Higher Life on people dying on the streets of Calcutta (that was Mother Teresa’s project, and one can reasonably doubt its ethical value, if not in its own terms its theology). Sen and Nussbaum for example wisely turn away from pot-of-pleasure “happiness” and focus on the more objective measurement of their definitions of capabilities, which surely are much larger in Norway today than in India in 1800.34 The ancestors of the very clever professors, whether advocating or disputing pot-of-pleasure measures of happiness—Easterlin, Frank, Schor, Veblen, Frey, Leyard, Chekola, Nozick, Schmidtz, Cowen, Sen, Nussbaum, and I—were illiterate peasants or impoverished shoemakers (well . . . perhaps not Amartya’s). Unless by chance they were among the tiny group of privileged rajahs or bishops, or the still tinier group who achieved through spiritual exercises nirvana or blessedness, they were not close to the “happiness” in any fully human sense as we enjoy.
You can take a pessimistic line and claim with many critics of innovation that a “materialistic and individualistic culture,” as Easterlin puts it, is created by economic growth. The evidence seems weak. For all the chatter in the journals of opinion about the wretched materialism of modern life, studies in the psychology of goods find that poor people in poor countries put more, not less, value on the possessions they have than people who possess more. In rich countries the museums and concert halls are full. Among the thirty democratic countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nowadays some 27 percent of the adult population 25 to 64 years old have completed tertiary education, ranging down from Canada’s 47 percent down to Turkey’s 10 percent.35 The university graduates of Europe therefore probably now exceed its total population in 1800. The economist of culture Tyler Cowen points out that modern life has produced more artists alive today than have lived in all previous ages combined.36 During the 1960s more professors were hired in American post-secondary institutions than in the entire history of American education, and the expansion of higher education resulted, for example, in a big audience for literary fiction. 37
Terry Eagleton, a brilliant, useful, and left-wing literary critic, makes the conventional claim that the bourgeois are to be blamed for the “monstrously egoistic civilization they have created”— as though he had not encountered Chaucer and his Pardoner, or Shakespeare and his Iago, representatives of monstrously egoistic civilizations of church and aristocracy. 38 To yearn for a simpler time when getting and spending was not too much with us is mostly a version of the pastoral, repeated in every world literature in every age, quite independent of the sociological evidence. Theocritus and after him Horace lamented the passing of a golden age of nymphs and shepherds. In 1767 Adam Ferguson, notes Eagleton, lamented the “detached and solitary” people of Scotland, whose “bands of affection are broken.” Disraeli and Carlyle three-quarters of a century afterwards lamented it, too. We are always already lamenting becoming urban and selfish and alienated. The years when our parents were children are always seen as blessed times of familial and social solidarity, whether the years are the 1920s or the Golden Age of Cronos. It isn’t so.
In any event the modern Glaswegian descendent of the Nut-Brown Maiden, in which the old intelligence shines, has gigantically greater scope, whether or not she is persuaded to take full human advantage of it. She has hugely greater opportunities—capabilities, potential, life plans, second-order preferences—for what Wilhelm von Humboldt called in 1792 that Bildung, that “self-culture,” “self-development” which is success in life. She can do 100 times more of many things, leading a fuller life—fuller in travel, education, ease of housekeeping, ease of listening to “The Nut-Brown Maiden” in English and Gaelic on the internet. A well-fed cat sitting in the sun is “happy” in the pot-of-pleasure sense of happiness studies What the modern world offers to men and women and children, as against cats, is not merely such “happiness” but a uniquely enlarged scope to be fully realized human beings. Sure ’tis that one can turn down Bildung, and watch reality TV all day. But billions are enabled to do more—and they can have nowadays, too, in proper moderation, more cat-like, materialistic, economist-pleasing “happiness” if they wish. Bring on the Baskin-Robbins.
- [back] Bresnahan and Gordon 1997, p. 19.
- [back] Easterlin 1976.
- [back] Easterlin 2003, p. 349. See also Easterlin 1996, and 2002.
- [back] Easterlin 2004, p. 52.
- [back] Frank 1985; Frank and Cook 1995; Schor 1993, 1998, 2004; Veblen.
- [back] Easterlin 2004, p. 53.
- [back] Frey 2008, p. 13.
- [back] Layard 2009.
- [back] Inglehart and other 2008, abstract. The next quotation is from the caption of Fig. 6, p. 277.
- [back] Nozick 1974, pp. 42-44; Schimdtz 1993, p. 170. I discuss these in McCloskey 2006a, pp. 123-125.
- [back] Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Sen 1999; and Nussbaum 1999.
- [back] OECD 2009, p. 12.
- [back] Cowen 1998.
- [back] Menand 2009, p. 109.
- [back] Eagleton 2009, p. 40; the later quotation from Ferguson is on Eagleton, p. 19.
