Cato colleague, pal, and all-around smart guy Will Wilkinson has started a single-issue blog devoted to “happiness studies.” I’m glad Will’s on the case, though I think the whole proposition of studying happiness is a sham, and indicative of the fact that free market critics are rapidly running out of arguments. I haven’t read nearly as much on this as Will has, but from what I have read, here’s my admitedly pedestrian take:

There’s a bias against contentment in our wiring. In hunter-gatherer society — where much of our psychology was developed — contentment meant complacency, which likely meant starvation. Ambition, angst, and worry compelled us to seek more — more status, more food, more mates, more “stuff.” And so those of our ancestors who lacked contentment probably did better at getting those things, and therefore at living longer and reproducing, than those who didn’t. Meaning they passed ambition, angst, worry and other traits at odds with happiness through our ancestry to us.

Which means, I think, that in virtually any setting, we’re (a) fighting against a natural predisposition towar unhappiness, and (b) we’re likely to measure our own success by those who live around us, our peers, and not on what took place before we were born.

Measuring the success of capitalism by subjective polls in which people are asked to assess their own happiness, then, is a farce. We’re constantly reconfiguring our happiness “baseline” because we’re wired to always be wanting more. Most of us don’t even factor where we were ten or fifteen years ago when assessing our mood, much less where humanity was a generation or more ago. When asked if they’re “happy,” then, I doubt anyone answers the question in the context of all of human history, the last 500 years, or even in the last 50. Barring clinical or chemical depression, most of us gauge our own happiness by comparing ourselves to the guy in the cubicle next to us, our siblings, our neighbors, or our peers. Robert Wright explains in his stellar book The Moral Animal that the people most satisfied with their own lives tend to be “big fish in a small pond” people. These people may not be the richest folks in the world, the country, or the state, but they’re doing very well for their own communities. It’s the guy with the nicest house on the block,or the guy at the lodge with the hottest wife. Sorta’ makes sense when you think of things in a hunter-gatherer context.

Perhaps the great 1980s philosopher Tom Kiefer put it best when he said, “don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone.” So you’re unhappy right now. What if I took away your air conditioning? Would that make you more or less happy? Your car? What if we took half the stuff out of your refrigerator? What if you had just two television channels to choose from instead of 100? How about no Internet? No antibiotics? No music? What if you knew you’d live to be only forty, instead of eighty? What if you knew there’d be a good chance that just half your kids would live to see age ten?

I doubt any of the respondents to “happiness” surveys take this stuff into account. Which is why happiness surveys are a silly way to measure the successes and failures of capitalism. Capitalism is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: It’s feeding us, helping us live longer, making our lives easier, and — frankly — giving us the luxury of worrying and writing books about how “happy” we are — instead of, say, worrying about whether our kids are going to die of malaria. Or polio. Or starvation.

It’s probably a bit much to ask capitaism to unravel several thousand generations’ worth of psychological wiring, too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 8:17 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.