Left undisturbed, economists will usually go about
quietly, muttering under their breath strange incantations, like “negative
elasticity”, “Laffer Curve”, “externalities”, etc., and happily predicting doom
just around the corner. That, after all,
is how the field came to be described as “the dismal science.” They worship odd things that no one else can
see, like “perfect competition” and “the rational man”, but we all have our idiosyncrasies,
and economists are useful in providing a plausible explanation for things that
happened last week, though they never can seem to figure them out in
advance. But the field has been under
attack lately, and some are beginning to react strangely. Perhaps, it’s another tremor in the paradigm.
Take for example, the column the other day by
Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post. It
was an all-out attack on happiness! He
was obviously upset and outraged about a report just issued, the “World
Happiness Report”, which argued that GDP doesn’t measure everything important
in life and that economic growth doesn’t always make people happier. He attributes it to a shadowy, sinister
European conspiracy he calls “the happiness movement.” Oh, the Horror! He’s particularly concerned about a recent
study result that economists call “the Easterlin Paradox”, that the rich and
middle class are happier than the poor, but after that, getting richer doesn’t
cause their own sense of happiness to increase. (It should be noted, by the
way, that decades ago, behavioral scientists studying motivation theory learned
to distinguish between “satisfiers” and “dissatisfiers”, and then found that
lack of money is a dissatisfier, but money is not a satisfier, and by itself is
not a motivator. Could it be that motivation counts toward happiness? They found that what really counted toward “morale”,
a kind of group happiness, were gestalt and cohesion – a shared group identity
and a sense of active belonging.)
All that is
preface of course to his real target, which is the immeasurability of happiness
and the lack of a common definition. He
believes that, since no measurable standard of universal happiness exists,
governments should not promote it, but stick to things he’s good at measuring
like GDP. He notes that the Happiness Report lists Freedom as an essential
component of happiness, but that freedom permits self-destructive acts which
reduce happiness. Thus, to him, happiness is a utopian vision not worth
pursuing, and creates goals doomed to failure.
He’s right that happiness is not
an entitlement, and will probably never be achievable for all, but grumpily
wrong otherwise.
It starts
with his bland premise, that “All rich societies already try to balance
economic growth with social justice, security and environmental progress.” Yet a fellow columnist, Harold Meyerson,
reports that since the 1970s all additional income from increases in
productivity in America, the richest of nations, have gone to the top ten
percent. Had the minimum wage, now
$7.25, increased in line with productivity, it would be $21.72. The security of families is under constant
attack though efforts to chip away Medicare and Social Security. Environmental progress is challenged every
day by oil companies and other entrenched interests, who seek to worsen, not
better, the environment through self-serving policies. And he of course is wrong in his 18th
century attitude that any goal which cannot be measured is not worth
seeking. It was those “utopian visions”
that brought his ancestors to America in the first place, that conquered a
continent and that serve as the engine that drives America today. People do not live to pursue a higher GDP;
they live, in part, to prosper in a virtuous society. The Founding Fathers, far
better than Samuelson, understood that the virtue of a society includes the
promotion of individual hopes and dreams, not all achievable or measurable. His
bliss lies in counting and measuring; he should not deny others their own.
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