That’s my understanding. I think the big fight is over whether relative poverty or absolute poverty is the most important.

Would you say “happy life years” differs in any important respect from “quality adjusted life years,” a standard measure in health and medical research?

I see “quality adjusted life years,” as a necessary evil, a measure I’m not particularly fond of but that’s probably better for what it does than anything else available.

But “happy life years” appear in another context entirely. The question being debated was “has happiness stagnated”, with the subtext question of “does more money fail to make people happier (in prosperous western societies)”. The answers to that, according to the graph that Ruut Veenhoven includes, are yes and yes. The other question – has life expectancy stagnated – has an emphatic no as an answer, but is unrelated to happiness. “happy life years” just fuses the two questions, without justification.
If the debate had been about “happy life years” from the start, then that would have been fine; but as it stands it’s a cheat.

Thanks for your response (and sorry for mistyping your name as “Robin” – yesterday was not my day . All the ‘facts’ I mentioned were based on various statistical surveys I’ve seen in different newspapers, sufficiently often that they weren’t single aberrations (though selection bias still applies). The decreased social mobility for example, can be seen in the economist, hardly an anti-free market publication. By anxiety, I was meaning both “worry about the future” and “mental illnesses”, both increasing (though for different reasons).

But… I can’t help but notice that the facts you questioned or caveated were mainly the pessimistic facts.

As you said, “I think that people’s values are bound to motivate their approach to facts”. But I’m not sure that our mechanisms serve to “work out disagreements in a truth-conducive way”. There are still people who disagree with the fact that modern free-markets are good for the majority. There are still people who disagree with the fact that markets fail, and, historically, have failed very often. If these well established results fail to filter into people’s minds, what chance to more controversial ones have?

That’s an interesting question. Let’s see… I was not an expert on the subject. I had simply assumed (I’m describing myself in my mid-twenties, mind you, and I would not have put things in these terms) real wages were rising because a kind of inchoate a priori assumption about the overall effects of accelerating technological change and casual egocentric empiricism — i.e., I was raised modestly middle class in Iowa in the 80s, and things certainly seemed to be getting better for most everyone I knew even during the “crisis” of the disappearing family farm. I was already a libertarian — much more dogmatic than I am now — and first encountered the CPI and issues surrounding it’s construction in either Reason magazine or Cox and Alm’s book Myths of Rich and Poor. After I became a professional policy analyst, I dug much more deeply into the issue, reading the Boskin report and the surrounding and subsequent debate (such as the Gordon paper I linked to), and talked about it with economists, other philosophers, and even with some employees of the BLS. That said, I’m not sure how important my autobiography is here (though it is interesting to me!). It seems to me that the important thing is actually arguing the merits of the case in and effort to find the truth.

Would you say “happy life years” differs in any important respect from “quality adjusted life years,” a standard measure in health and medical research? We could also measure “beauty adjusted life years,” and why not, since that may be interesting to the eyes of some beholders?

I’m interested in your series of claims:

People are

(1) equally happy

Not obvious, even taking the data for granted. See the exchange with conchis. I would also argue that scale renorming creates artifical flatness in the trend.

(2) far richer

Yes.

(3) more anxious

How can you tell?

(4) more unequal

Which class of people, and in what respect? Increasing income inequality is consistent with decreasing inequality in material quality of life. (Goods in a class can become more qualitatively homogenous even as the price range expands.) Happiness inequality is trending downward. Income inequality within the US is up, but between China and the US, down (maybe due to the same mechanisms).

(5) less socially mobile

Not sure what you mean.

(6) living longer

OK

(7) healthier lives,

OK

(8) more self-centred but less selfish

I might agree, but not sure what you have in mind.

(9) less religious

I’ve seen conflicting evidence. Participation or belief?

(10) more tolerant

Of what? Maybe.

(11) and more partisan

I don’t know.

“Better or worst is in the eye of the beholder.”

People certainly disagree, that’s for sure. But I think it’s pretty obvious that disagreement isn’t just over values — as if the facts are clear, and we’re just fighting over what to make of them. The facts aren’t transparent, either, and they are very often contested precisely because of the effect some facts, if accepted, would have on the prospects of norms and policies embodying different value commitments. I think that people’s values are bound to motivate their approach to facts, and that this is a good thing just as long as there are widespread norms of rational inquiry and debate that tend, over the long run, to work out disagreements in a truth-conducive way. I think this is basically J.S. Mill’s view. If the discovery of truth depended primarily on people motivated primarily by an ideology of truth, we’d get way too little of it.

I also think Easterlin is a relatively dispassionate empiricist, and I have nothing but respect for his work in a variety of fields in which he has been a pioneer. It also helps that he doesn’t go around writing ridiculously misleading books like the scholar-politican Richard Layard. Actually, I think the reason I see Veenhoven as “relatively dispassionate” is that my reading of decades of his writings seemed to indicate that his views have shifted nontrivially over time as he has compiled and analyzed more and more data. I’ve been following the Easterlin vs. Hagerty-Veenhoven exchange closely. Yes, there are good points all-round. And I don’t know what to think of Easterlin’s charge of data incompatibility vs. VH’s claim of the virtue of getting the average of a much larger dataset. My sense is that VH get the best of the debate overall, but maybe that’s my bias showing. Setting that particular debate aside (the “getting happier” part), I think my general point stands up pretty well: most people simply don’t know that the happiness data very clearly shows that the wealthy liberal democracies score tops on self-reported happiness.

It’s not pretty clear to me, though I don’t have a terribly strong opinion the other direction either. Are there any broad quantitative measures that make it clear that I should share your strong opinion? Life expectancy, performance on literacy-related standardized tests, careful and detailed estimates of leisure time, whatever?

Also, to what extent are you comparing poor Americans today to poor Americans 20 years ago? I remember factoids making the rounds a few months ago suggesting that some statistical measures of US down-and-out-ness are to a considerable extent measures of immigration from poor countries. That doesn’t mean they’re not disturbing, but it does mean that if you want to understand the impact on people’s lives, comparing the bottom N% of the US today to the bottom N% of the US 20 years ago might sometimes be less appropriate than comparing it to the destined-to-emigrate subpopulation of Southeast Latinostan 20 years ago.

For three out of the four biases I discuss in my book, it’s easy to see the connection between economic…