This very interesting account of the opening of the World Social Forum reminds thinkness of an old topic that I meant to post about. In constrasting the WSF with the World Economic forum, Samuel Loewenberg mentions that the WEF has been getting slightly softer in recent years, this year holding a panel called, "Why rich countries can't buy happiness."
Seems to me the field of "hedonic science" has been picking up some momentum in recent years, even a bit on the periphery of the economic community. I blogged a while ago about psychologist Martin Seligman's advocacy of "positive psychology," the effort to make happy people happier, as opposed to just trying to fixing unhappy people. Then there was Robert Frank's great ideas about how to actually make oneself happier by spending money wisely.
More recently I've come across Bhutan's plan to aim its public policy at maximizing "Gross National Happiness." The theory is that increasing GNP doesn't necessarily make people happier... which is of course absolutely right! [One interesting sub-note is that even per capita GNP is deceptive, because while a certain amount of economic robustness does definitely help, when going past a certain point you get rapidly diminishing returns. Which is part of the reason why Sweden is right to focus on different criteria than the standard GNP-type stuff, as I recently blogged.] Bhutan's effort is actually starting to get some press attention. I really want to go to their next big conference on GNH.
Then there's also Daniel Kahneman, who has devoted the recent part of his work toward finding out what actually makes people happier, or less unhappy. From one of Bhutan's seminars on GNH [this is a pdf]:
In his introduction to Well-Being: the Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (63), Daniel Kahneman expresses the hope that hedonic science will prompt economics to shift its focus from 'those aspect of life that can be traded in the marketplace' to desirable goods such as love, mental challenge and (reduction of) stress'.
I have to admit that I have some misgivings about this approach of trying to quantify everything: personality, happiness, pain, etc. In addition to the fact that this stuff is so subjective and confusing -- and there's a certain beauty in leaving it outside the reach of our grabby, analytical minds -- it seems to me there are just bound to be lots of mistakes in terms of how people measure this stuff, and it will lead to much trouble.
Still, there is a certain fairly persuasive argument that nothing in our society and our world really gets recognized until it can be identified, isolated, and quantified. Such is a part of the human experience. GNP is a steamroller of an idea partly because it's so clear, universal, and easily measurable. When people have an easy grasp on something like that -- a quantity that can in their mind approximate "goodness" of an economy -- they will use it. Humans attain a lot of power using heuristics like that.
Along these lines, I spoke recently with this professor, David George, who says -- somewhat rhetorically -- that people should assert property rights over their desires. The idea is that companies affect what we want by, for example, advertising. Say someone is trying to quit smoking, but he is constantly reminded of smoking by ads in his magazines, and he ends up smoking again. George calls this "preference pollution": the company has interfered with what he wants to want, or polluted his preference. [I love this saying: "You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want."] But if he says that his preference not to smoke is something he owns, then by interfering with that the company has damaged his property and it owes him money. George doesn't actually believe this would really work, but it's an interesting thought experiment. Donno how he would actually want to enact this sort of idea, now that I'm thinking about it.
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there's a certain beauty in leaving [personality, happiness, pain, etc.] outside the reach of our grabby, analytical minds
Boo! (I know you overturn this argument somewhat to make a rhetorical point, but I need to respond nevertheless.)
I bet dollars to donuts that efforts to better understand our grey matter were seen as "grabby" and "analytical" by the contemporaries of scientists as old as Aristotle--or as recent as Freud or Kinsey. But our world is the better off for their efforts. Thinkness, I posit the fallacy you're being tempted by is the belief that there's some point in the future at which our brains have been pinned to the dissection table and the miracle of conscious existence is destroyed. Baloney!
Self-knowledge doesn't destroy our humanity (it hasn't yet, despite a hundred thousand years of hard-won lessons)--and much of that self-knowledge has instead served to improve humanity's lot.
the company has interfered with what he wants to want, or polluted his preference.
Yuck!
This strikes me as a lousy concept, unless George has some rock-solid ways of constraining its ambit. The way that it's described above makes it sound like I have the right to sue anyone who has the unmitigated gall to utter an unpleasant thought in my presence. How DARE they!
Part the first: I agree with you that the rational program is generally pretty beneficial, o Ezra, but I also believe it causes problems with certain applications. Eugenics was a scientifically popular 100 years ago, just as a quick and superficial example. Moreover, I think that faith in rationality as a nearly all-providing approach is corrosive to the spirit.
I'm not advocating giving up on dogmatic rationalism as a whole I'm just saying there are areas I don't want it, at least quite yet. I don't oppose all of Seligman's work, I just don't like this one bit. And I'm not thinking about a dystopic brain dissection scenario -- I'm thinking about how social decisions are sometimes made on rather shortsighted schemes of rational quantification, and how they are problematic. Think Freud is not exactly very popular in psychology circles right now, and Freudian analysis has led to a lot of psychology/therapy that is widely regarded as being just flat-out wrong [e.g., the "repressed-memory" craze that sent tons of innocent people to prison in the past couple decades]. This is one case where applying his particular rational formulation caused harm. Doesn't mean I scorn all of Freud, though.
Part the second: George has no rock-solid constraints. But it is unfair to demand this of his scheme when so much of law comes down to fairly arbitrary line-drawing, e.g., with regard to obscenity, "I know it when I see it." If you were determined to enact some law compensating preference pollution, you would have to sort the massive pollution from the incidental stuff. Some kinds of advertising might be punishable, whereas the actions of an "unpleasant" "anyone" would obviously not be.
Realize that this is not entirely without precedent in America right now. Cigarette advertising, for instance, is pretty strictly limited, essentially because it pollutes preferences. I don't think it ridiculous to imagine that this sort of thing could be extended; will government somehow come down on junk food companies who make food that is almost addictive to people?
I agree that this does get closer toward thought-police stuff that I'm not very comfortable with. In general, I'd rather educate people and trust in them making better decisions.
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