Nowadays, the debates usually go in the other directions, with people on the left being less positive about material progress and people on the right saying that things are great now and are getting better.

Andrew kindly points to my skeptical take on those who use happiness research to argue that consumer capitalism is making us miserable, and continues:

The connection here to "overcoming bias" is that the question, "Are things going well now?" is (a) politically loaded, and (b) is commonly treated as a factual question.  I suspect that Shaw and Chesterton (as well as modern commentators) are showing bias in that they derive their perspective on the pluses on minuses of a modern economy based on political judgments.

I had a similar thought recently while going back and forth with Barry Schwartz in the recent happiness issue of Cato Unbound. However, it doesn’t strike me so much that a left-right sort of bias drives views on whether things are sunny or dark. Rather, I suspect a bias for and against government action in certain domains may be doing some of the work of motivating cognition. Nothing beats a "crisis" to rally support for a big government effort. Right statists constantly drum up moral panics about sex and drugs. Also, Mexicans are "invading" and terrorists will surely blow us all up while singing the Star Spangled Banner at baseball games if we don’t allow the executive Jack Bauer to torture military detainees whenever he wants. Similarly, left statists warn that the shores of Manhattan will be inundated by rising oceans and very cute baby polar bears will die in droves. Also, inequality is soaring, threatening the foundations of democracy. And the middle class lives in terrifying "economic insecurity." And so on.

By comparison to people on both the left and the right who would like the government to do something, libertarians can seem either ostrich-like, pollyanna-ish, or both. I suspect the "everything is going to be OK so the government can just stay out of it" bias played a key role in motivating many conservatives and libertarians to be favorably disposed toward skeptical findings about global warming. Let’s call this "libertarian optimism bias." But I also suspect that the "OMG! there is a huge crisis so the government has to do something NOW" bias is at play at least as strongly in a number of important issues. Let’s call this "statist pessimism bias."

Perhaps it is a partly a symptom of my libertarian optimism bias, but I am completely convinced that the government badly underestimates real wage growth [pdf] due to, among other reasons, the difficulty of determining the value of new goods and quality improvements in existing kinds of goods. Also, I am completely convinced by John Mueller’s case that large terrorist attacks are massively improbable, and that it is a waste of money trying very hard to prevent them. However, I have provoked raised voices, if not outight shouting, simply by laying out the case for both propositions. What’s going on?

In the first case, it was made clear to me that voters will be complacent about poverty and inequality if they are told that they really are doing better economically than the statistics say. My reply was, "But the evidence seems to say that people are doing better." In the second case, it was made clear to me that we will all be killed by terrorists if we dangerously allow ourselves to believe that we will not be killed by terrorists, because then we won’t spend the huge amounts of money necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. "But the evidence seems to say we probably won’t be killed by terrorists," I repeated, to no avail. These cases both seemed to me clear instances of strongly motivated statist pessimism bias.

My experience writing my happiness study was often just surprise. It turns out that the evidence simply doesn’t say what lots of commentators say it says. Relatively dispassionate empiricists like Ruut Veenhoven, chief of the World Database of Happiness and the Journal of Happiness Studies, will tell you that people in wealthy liberal market democracies are quite happy and getting happier, but that’s not what you’d think happiness research says if you just read about it in newspapers and magazines.

Perhaps it is not surprising that you often don’t hear that air quality has improved, that lifespans are increasing, or that prices indicate that we are not running out of some natural resource until some libertarian like Julian Simon or Indur Golkany pops up to tell you about it, because often there is no other constituency obviously served by pointing out that there is no problem — especially when pointing it out may score you bad corporate, political, or social PR. I suspect that I am in fact somewhat biased toward evidence that says that there is no problem when the existence of the problem too-tidily serves to advance common, pre-existing political desires. The fact that I was in fact a little too disposed to be persuaded by skeptical takes on global warming in the mid-nineties has chastened me (though I plead youth and naivete!).

But I don’t worry too much. Here’s why. I think the general risk-averse fearfulness of people creates a very strong  incentive for those who have and seek political power to make things look worse than they really are, in this or that respect, in order to motivate support from an otherwise listless public. Since most people prefer to be a member of a going political coalition, rather than sit semi-uselessly on the sidelines like libertarians (it is possible we are just a deviant personality type), most intellectuals will probably identify with a competitive coalition, adopt it’s biases about how bad things are (and/or pick a coalition because it shares preexisting biases), and avidly dig up all the evidence that this or that really is a crisis. The related motivation to shout down all those who deny the putative crisis is also strong. So if libertarians like me get too vocally chipper or oblivious, the evidence that this is so cannot possibly escape our attention, and those of us susceptible to shaming are shamed.

I have become convinced, from reading contemporary cognitive science, neuroscience, and Hayek, that Reason is no part of our biological endowment, and that Rationality is an "unnatural," culturally-transmitted set of cognitive norms. As I’ve analogized before, Rationality is to the mind as ballet is to the body. Failure to adhere to the standards of the canons rationality — decision theory, game theory, formal logic, Bayes Rule, etc. — is a failure to cognize balletically, but is not a mistake unless one was trying to cognize balletically, or was trying to accomplish something that requires that kind of highly polished cognition as an instrument. Reason, it turns out, is damn good for a huge number of things, has made our live unimaginably better, and deserves nothing but hymns of praise. 

Nevertheless, I think it is important to acknowledge that the project of this blog — the project of debiasing-as-making-Rational — is about adjusting our cognitive behavior to live up to a particular set of cultural ideals, not about living up to our "nature" as putatively rational beings. People guilty of cognitive biases are failures in the sense that people who don’t have the discipline to hold down a job are failures. Shame! But if we look at this kind of "failure" from an outside perspective, as detached but interested consumers and critics of our own cultural norms, then we’ve got to ask: so what? The cultural project of debiasing is about cultivating norms that prevent people from shifting to or feeling comfortable in the "so what?" perspective. What can we say in favor of this cultural project?

Libertarian debiasers favor technological and market debiasing techniques. Paternalist debiasers favor elite-managed policy debiasing techniques. Both, I think, need to face up more fully to the particular cultural construction of Rationality standing behind the desire for these techniques, and the lack of intrinsic normative oomph therein. It simply isn’t obvious that this cultural ideal about the refinement and deployment of our native capacities is one reasonable people cannot reasonably (or even Rationally) reject. So I’m "biased." So we’re all "biased." So what?

If there is some cost to debiasing, then maybe I don’t want to buy very much of it. Why should I? What’s in it for me? It’s seems that the answer might be: not much, unless enough other people coordinate on the cognitive norm. If the individual advantages of being less "biased" are contingent on many other people debiasing first (or at the same time), what kind of problem is that? I think it’s a rather diffuse and maddening <em>cultural</em> problem (if I’m convinced it counts as a problem at all). There is little demand in our democratic society for political representatives inclined to appoint competent debiasing bureaucrats, and so unless there is some kind of bloodless coup of behavioral economists, we’re not going to get any. Paternalist hopes are misplaced in the absence of a cultural shift, at least among elites. Libertarian debiasers hoping for new institutional technologies, like betting markets for ideas, face a similar kind of political problem. Legislators and/or bureaucrats have to act to make these kinds of markets legal. Why would they want to do that?  Where does the demand come from? We probably need a bit of cultural ferment before we get there.

So, how do we catalyze this cultural ferment? Blogging? Actually, I think that’s partly the way. New technologies that do not require political approval, but which dramatically decrease the cost of communication among elites can be create openings for the transmission of new norms. So I think we’re actually doing something useful here. And if new technologies create increasing economic returns for certain kinds of debiased individuals (can anyone name such technologies?), we should expect to see more of them, and we should expect those individuals to demand cultural norms that help them rationalize, justify, and psychologically sustain their economic interest in debiasing. If there is reason to be bullish on the adoption of the cultural norms of Reason, then we have reason to be bullish on the eventual adoption of debiasing institutions, paternalist or libertarian.

Now, maybe my analysis of the difficulties in measuring happiness with surveys (which I would be happy to share at some other time) is wrong. But even if I and other critics of the data are wrong, it appears that many of the best criticisms aren’t taken very seriously, even when they are duly noted. Indeed, I’ve noticed a tendency to bristle defensively at mention of problems with the data, or even at requests simply to be more precise in what it is that is being measured. "Don’t tell us we’re only really measuring dispositions to say certain things about happiness under various conditions! We don’t call it the Journal of Saying Things About Happiness Studies, now do we!" seems to be a fairly widespread attitude.  And there also seems to be a willingness to cite just about anything that superficially seems to support the validity of the measurement instrument — a sign of a kind of confirmation bias.

Now this is just my cumulative impression from reading a boatload of papers, and I’m not prepared to press this any further, or more specifically, with respect to happiness research, which isn’t the point of this post, anyway. The general question I want to raise concerns the the possible biases of social scientists when it comes to the quality of sets of data they have come to depend upon.

Here’s a plausible fictional narrative on a topic other than happiness. Let’s do it in the second person:

You take a grad course on some aspect of income inequality in which you are introduced to a certain data set with information about household income. You write a paper using this data, get a good grade, and are invited by your professor to co-author something in the same vein. You agree, you’re paper is published in a good journal, you develop a reputation as an expert on some corner of the inequality literature, and you are offered a decent job. You publish a few more decent journal articles and have high hopes for tenure. Now, suppose someone comes along and argues that this particular survey of household income upon which you have been relying is shot through with problems, implying that everything that you have developed a reputation for having demonstrated may simply be gibberish.

What do you do?

(a) Sigh, open-mindedly dig into the claims about the data, and if they are right, reassess everything you have done?
(b) Latch on to any bit of reasoning that confirms the reliability of the data and dismiss the criticism?
(c) Fight dirty and attack the motives, credentials, etc. of the critic with anything you can lay your hands on?

My bet is that most human beings — even scientists! — will go for some combination (b) and (c). It is probably an inevitability for humans who have written a moralizing book using their potentially debunked data source. Now, this may in fact be a necessary part of "normal science," since most researchers would go crazy if they didn’t mostly ignore and/or dismiss manifestations of the fact of the underdetemination of theory by data — especially when it comes to the auxiliary hypotheses upon which their day-to-day work depends implicitly.

My worry is that whole fields of inquiry can get stuck in bad path-dependent channels due simply to a practically sensible but epistemically irrational disposition to affirm the reliability of one’s data sources. It seems that a poor-quality, but widely accepted body of data could impede the progress of human knowledge by decades!

I’m a newcomer around here, so maybe this has been discussed at length. If so, sorry! But I wanted to raise the issue, and ask if others have thoughts about it, or if there are any good studies that address it.    

More important, [Rayo] went on to say, the psychology literature and surveys clearly show that not all happiness is ephemeral and geared to endlessly moving targets. With nonmaterial things, the target does not move.

"Exercise will absolutely make you feel better. Your social network, family and friends can bring permanent happiness. Longtime relationships can bring long-term satisfaction."

The claim here is… what? Satisfaction from money is hit hard by adaptation, but satisfaction from health and social embeddeness isn’t?

It’s truly hard to know what to make of the claim. Because I’m certain Rayo knows what he’s talking about, I’m sure he didn’t say "nonmaterial things" are not subject to adaptation. I assume the author intends something like "non-pecuniary," since exercise is a material thing, as are our friends and family members (to be pedantic about it). And, of course, money can buy both gym memberships and the leisure to nurture our emotionally sustaining relationships. "Material things" and "things money can buy" are not well-defined categories about which one can make useful psychological generalizations.

Suppose tomorrow a Swiss bank account was opened in my name and one billion dollars was deposited in it — but I didn’t know it. It would be pretty surprising if this had any effect on my feelings or my satisfaction with life. Having money and knowing it does affect "happiness" (as construed by survey research) by providing a sense of security and control; we gain something simply in knowing we could convert our cash to consumption. But money affects happiness mostly through actual consumption. No doubt some patterns of consumption are more subject to adaptation than others. Sadly, happiness research has fixated almost entirely on income levels, and almost not at all on consumption levels, much less on differently composed patterns of consumption at different levels. It is safe to say that we know almost nothing about this.

A number of happiness researchers are souring on the strong adaptation thesis popularized by Brickman and Coates’ famous paper on lottery winners and amputees. Richard Easterlin claims to show that the fairly stable level of average self-reported happiness over the life cycle (rises slowly and slightly from about 18 to 45 and then declines slowly and slightly) is a function of offsetting changes in life-domain satisfaction, and not so much adaptation. So, for example, average satisfaction with health declines sharply from middle age. But satisfaction with finances rises sharply. Strangely, Easterlin takes declining health satisfaction as evidence that we do not adapt fully to changes in health, but he does not take sharply rising financial satisfaction as evidence that we do not adapt fully to gains in financial resources. Here is what he says about the latter:

While people’s incomes typically rise during their prime working years, and then level off and decline, satisfaction with their financial situation is, on average, fairly constant until almost age 40, after which it begins to rise, with the largest increase in late life. What must be happening is that conceptions of material needs are being readjusted as actual life circumstances change. Relative to income these needs are lowest in late life, and financial satisfaction correspondingly greatest.

It strikes me that there is an obvious hypothesis Easterlin neglects. Financial satisfaction shoots up right about the time in the life-cycle when income plummets — retirement from the work force. You can see the perversity here in looking primarily at income as a proxy for material well-being. On average old people have relatively small incomes, because they are retired, and relatively huge stores of wealth, because of compound interest. And wealth increases non-linearly due to compound interest, with the biggest gains coming later in life. Forty-something is about when expenses on children fall sharply and the compounding effects of interest starts to get good. And retirement provides the leisure time to enjoy the consumption of accumulated wealth. I conjecture that experience helps us figure out what we really like, and so old people are more likely to consume in patterns that are truly enjoyable.

Click here for an image of the charts from Easterlin’s paper. Financial satisfaction is the only thing keeping us from being miserable in old age! The lasting satisfactions from friends and family all plummet! Now, it seems to me pretty arbitrary to interpret the permanent negative effect of declining health satisfaction as disconfirming the adaptation-setpoint hypothesis but to interpret the permanent positive effect of increasing financial satisfaction in terms of some kind of complicated story about shifting conceptions of material needs. Both explanations should have the same form: Declining health makes us less happy, and we don’t get used to it. Increasing wealth, and the increased leisure and consumption it enables, make us more happy, and we don’t get used to it either.