Does happiness economics favor the market state of neoliberalism or the welfare state of social democracy and regulated capitalism.
Most of us are Stoics. We think that happiness is something that individuals find for themselves: the key is to work hard for a good life, and to face adversity with defiance. This ‘rugged individualism’ might fit the American ethos, but it is at odds with a growing body of empirical research that shows that some kinds of societies produce a great deal more satisfaction with life than others. Happiness, in other words, is more social than psychological.
If so, then the obvious step, as Albert Einstein put it, is to ‘ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible’. Economists, political scientists and other social scientists in the growing field of the political economy of wellbeing, or ‘happiness economics’, are using empirical rather than speculative methods to better understand what makes for satisfying lives. Happiness economics is not to be confused with ‘positive psychology’, which approaches happiness as a matter of individual attitudes. In contrast, scholars of ‘happiness economics’ maintain that, in the aggregate, a satisfying life is rooted in objective conditions, such that the economic, political and social aspects of societies are strong predictors of individual happiness.
The policies most conducive to human wellbeing turn out to be essentially the same ones that Einstein himself originally suggested: those associated with social democracy. In reviewing the research in 2014, Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a political scientist at Rutgers University-Camden in New Jersey, found that ‘societies led by leftist or liberal governments (also referred to as welfare states)’ have the highest levels of life satisfaction, controlling for other factors. Looking across countries, the more generous and universalistic the welfare state, the greater the level of human happiness, net of other factors.
The phrase ‘welfare state’ is pejorative to many Americans, but it would be less so if they had a better understanding of what it implies to the rest of the world.…The obvious question is why "welfare state" is a pejorative to many Americans. The answer is clear historically — huge investment in redefining "welfare" from its original meaning "hand out paid for by your taxes." Who would do such a thing? Those with an interest in redistribution of wealth upward as growing inequality under neoliberalism strongly suggests. Neoliberal deregulation and policy aimed at reducing labor bargaining power allowed the upper class to capture the bulk of the benefits from rising productivity of the past several decades.
Benjamin Radcliff | professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and author of The Political Economy of Human Happiness (2013).
2 comments:
There are two fundamental flaws in the notion of ‘happiness economics’, or ‘the economics of happiness’:
1. Researchers are untutored in discrimination between the human heart and the human mind.
2. Researchers have no notion of the self as consisting of layers (like an onion) that may be peeled one after another.
Seeking satisfaction in objective conditions and/or individual attitudes is doomed to failure as the last 200,000 years attests. Of course what they are really trying to do is measure ‘fish-dependent joy’: great if the fish are biting. Mind will always fight and struggle with mind, until it resolves itself (in the acceptance of a higher, harmonising energy).
These things are basic to understanding human existence. Mind cannot be satisfied: - it may be appeased temporarily, but it soon will be restless again. It is the monkey on our back. It is in conflict with the heart. The mind rears its hydra heads, again and again, all prophets promising satisfaction. The agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the technology revolution, …. the information and communication (not knowledge and wisdom) revolution – these are our less than perfect prophets. Coming to you today on an ‘I’-phone. Politicians promise, but no-one delivers but the same old bread and circuses.
The problems of the world will be here, long after we are gone.
The heart is singular – it wants only to be content. It will not be fooled – it knows exactly, what it wants. Within each human heart there is an energy, a potential, lying dormant and waiting to be discovered and uncovered. This is Peace. It is also Happiness. It is also Clarity. Life. It is an entity and it can be felt – not a concept, attitude, or substitute. It is a part of human nature, it is the essence of human existence; as real as your breath and the atoms that hang together to house your seventy laps around the Sun body. It is truly transmutable, transformative, and ultimately, transcendent.
Kabir, of course nails it, every time: - ’ … the fish are thirsty, in the water – and every time I hear that it makes me laugh’.
Tutoring brings the capability to withdraw the attention from the mind, emotions, and sense organs, and focus inside; the real self slowly becomes visible, and path to freedom (Happiness) becomes abundantly clear: - the self that lives in the mind as thoughts, emotions, ego - is let go. It never was going anywhere except back to the dust. This has been spoken about for millennia. And people don’t turn into cauliflowers or mutilate their credit cards.
Happiness has absolutely nothing to do with economics and v.v. Could we at least get that clear in the academe?
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have airports or a human economic system that supports the reason why we all came here in the first place, or work in a CB, or farm in a village somewhere on the planet, without intervention.
We are human beings, and Happiness was packed with us and delivered at each birth. Our stupid social systems just screw it all up.
@jr
Agree in essence. But the researchers say that they are excluding other considerations (psychological) in favor of focusing on "welfare" in an economic sense that can be defined operationally.
This has value in distinguishing the welfare state as a good society from a market state, which is assumed to be "value-free," as if that were possible.
As you say, there are many levels and in the end, only the highest level really counts because it is holistic (comprehensive and inclusive).
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