The always readable Cato Institute gadfly Will Wilkinson has not one, but two, long posts about the supposed evils of trying to measure happiness. I only provide brief excerpts – so read the whol thing. In the first, Effective Policy and the Measuremen…

This could easily just be a proxy for an ideological/cultural debate between those preferring continued general economic growth and those who are nervous about that, whether for environmental reasons, social justice reasons, or lifestyle “take back your time” reasons. I know I find myself tempted to endorse the survey research whenever I find myself on the nervous side.

My background is as an engineering researcher (electromagnetics). We often dodge this problem because we can back our work up by fairly well-defined experiments, etc: either it works or it doesn’t. The social sciences doesn’t have this luxury so much. But we also have a culture where it’s more OK to be wrong, and where being unbiased is paramount. I think we should all be in the habbit of stating our own biases (as I did above) and in turn should commend others for doing so and scold them when they don’t. This won’t cure all ills, but I think it would help.

As an example of this from politics, any time a politician is accused of “flip-flopping”, she should attack back and say “you’re darn right I changed my mind when I got a better understanding of the situation, and it’s a big problem that you don’t too!”

…Off-topic: Felicifia is an online utilitarianism community, which anyone can join/write for. We enjoy Overcoming Bias (and overcoming bias).

Here’s an idea that I think could be helpful in curbing confirmatory bias in the social sciences (I don’t know if it’s novel, but maybe you can tell me if you’ve heard of it, or even if it sounds worthwhile): Have teams of researchers with different ex ante beliefs/motivations/political allegiances regarding a given phenomena collectively design experiments and models. I’m envisioning a sort of contract between intellectual “rivals” that stipulates some lack of bias in a given experimental design. If people on both sides of a dispute agree on a methodology and some sort of interpretive framework for the resulting data BEFORE seeing the results of that experiment, they might be harder pressed to cling onto their ideas as you mentioned in your post. To be sure, this won’t necessarily lead to answers or policy solutions that are better — after all, both sides of a dispute could be missing the mark — but it would seemingly make the debate more honest.

what do you think?

DED

People think theory is hard and facts are easy, when in fact they are tightly connected. Facts are hard, because the interesting ones aren’t obvious (minimum wage effects, effect of tougher sentencing, the relation of risk to return), they take wisdom because you can see how probable a fact is not merely by the face-value in a particular paper’s abstract, but its compatibility with other facts given a certain view on the way the world works.

Not going to make any national forecasts, but Scandinavia provides a good example about being careful regarding these nation-based cross-sections. So, most of the Scandinavian countries are near the top, but then they also have pretty high suicide rates.

My own theory on them is that there is this strong tendency to conformity and to act like you are happy because you are supposed to be. “Ja, ja, I am happy, now please don’t bother me while I go home and blow my brains out.” Other cultures are notoriously whiney and kvetchy. Are they really unhappy because their members complain all the time?

Another aspect of this “happiness” versus “satisfaction,” and is happiness being measured at a moment in time or more generally? So, more careful panel studies of moment-to-moment happiness by Kahnemann et al come up with pretty interesting stuff from a sample of 500 women in Columbus, Ohio: they are happier with being with their friends than with their husbands, happier being with their husbands than their kids, happier being with their kids than being alone, and happier being alone than with their bosses. Also, “intimate relations” provide the greatest happiness, but commuting provides the least. So? Commute with one’s friends.

Also, on this with cross-national, US women claim in general to be happier around their kids than French women, but when one monitors this on a moment-to-moment basis, the French women seem to be happier. Does this mean American womena are lying hypocrites?

Also, economic status (again, usually relative within a society) seems to be very important for “satisfaction,” but is a big fat zero on moment-to-moment happiness.

The question of testing is obviously the key. Happiness studes would get sorted out if, but only if, people were using the results for practical purposes – making predictions, making interventions, seeing whether interventions conformed to predictions etc.

But insofar as happiness studies are merely used as ammunition of socio-political agendas (eg. assertions about whether equality, status, wealth, democracy or the welfare state makes people happy) then they will never get sorted out.