Interesting piece in the FT today:

France’s president on Monday urged other countries to adopt proposed new measures of economic output unveiled by a panel of international economists led by Joseph Stiglitz, the US Nobel Prize winner ... The commission suggested a series of improvements to the way GDP was measured. It proposed accounting for people’s well-being and the sustainability of a country’s economy and natural resources.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1af2194c-a12f ... ck_check=1

This would be great news for any kind of utilitarian, IMO.

Of course our inability to model happiness either with statistics or neurobiology makes this incredibly subjective, and perhaps cheapens the notion of happiness by turning it into a number for bureaucrats to wrestle over.

I'm certainly not suggesting GDP is a good measure of anything either. It is really very stupid to claim superiority because your country made more widgets than another country. Really, much of GDP consists of things which any self-respecting country would be ashamed of.

At least they got Stiglitz to head up this new indicator, so it might not be completely idiotic.

I do like that this specifically tackles the issue of leisure versus income maximization. Here is a cool video I found on the topic:

http://www.workersoftheworldrelax.org/

I'd call it difficult rather than subjective (it would presumably account for people's claims about their welfare), which is a much less troubling claim. It seems pretty clear to me that a) you need some benchmark for assessing how well the world and its constituents are doing, b) that GDP is inadequte, and c) that inaccuracies caused by difficulty of measuring things like happiness can be reduced by making them the object of such scrutiny much better than by basically ignoring them at a social level.

I don't think that any single index can capture the happiness of a population, and frankly, most people wouldn't be able to understand any index with the sufficient complexity needed to accurately depict our complex world. Finally, I'm not sure that any sort of democratic consensus-building on the issue could yield any really relevant results from a utilitarian perspective since presumably any truly democratic index would have to take into account loads of barbaric, internally contradictory, and factually inaccurate religious dogma.

The percentage of laws inspired by sharia. The percentage of people saved by Jesus Christ. Clearly, the only true happiness is the warm embrace of (insert deity here).

These are just a few of the many irreconcilable values that would likely be included. There are those that claim that a "hard day's work" is a pleasure like none other. Yet, any truly civilized society wouldn't try to force obedience upon others draped in "work ethic" rhetoric.

Thus, while many might argue Full Employment is a goal to strive for and a necessary piece of any happiness index, I would argue that Full Unemployment should be the goal we constantly strive for through proper usage of automated systems and the open source/copyleft mode of production.

In a society where wage labor is not a prerequisite for survival, would hard work really be an end in and of itself? Clearly self-improvement, activism, philanthropy, sports, and hobbies would all likely command an enormous amount of our time, energy, and resources, but would the hard work in and of itself be the goal?

No, happiness is the goal! If being productive tricks you into being happy, great, but it is only great indirectly.

Yet, deontological value systems, duty ethics, and work ethics can just posit a whole bunch of ridiculous stuff about the intrinsic value of work, and no doubt this mentality would permeate any indicies that weren't simply foisted upon the public.

I'm not sure why you're concerned with democratising indices. GDP has never been democratically developed, and I don't think anyone's suggesting this will, either. The element of this that I'm pleased about is its incorporating welfare (and putting less emphasis on consumption) into its output.

I agree with you about happiness as the ultimate value, in case there was any doubt. That's why any move towards using it (or any of its obvious synonyms) as a national standard seems like good news to me. Worries about 'cheapening' the notion seem way to vague to be worth worrying about, and measuring happiness isn't so hard - you just ask people, and extrapolate. That's what happiness economics is all about.

Thinking that this happiness index should be developed without democratic input shows extreme naivety or extreme cynicism, as does thinking states have a right to be the arbiter on the definition of happiness.

The first Gross National Happiness scheme was cooked up by Bhutan's supreme leader to increase tourism to that miserable country.

Even if we created, say, a wiki happiness index, it still would be dangerous for politicians to use it as a political tool. Even if it were an independent organization which runs the index.

Even the article you linked to mentioned that half the reason France is doing this could be to boost their international ranking and make good on campaign promises to increase the GDP without having to actually - you know - do anything.

These things simply become tools for states to play games with... even war games on the grand chessboard that we call.... home.

Don't get me wrong, I think states should spend every waking moment seriously considering how to best improve the happiness of people, but I am not naive enough to think that they would actually do that. Thus, giving them control over the definition of happiness is absurd.

The GDP was developed as a very natural and empirical indicator that goes with the whole market system enchilada. The market system has generally been accepted by the electorate, so in a sense this has been voted on. Happiness, on the other hand is neither empirical (at least not yet, if ever) nor perceived as the natural domain of state control.

Putting a number on this creates a false sense of objectivity. Want to know how happy the country is, look check this graph. We aren't Randians, and we don't want to become discredited like them. That is likely what would result from such a happiness index. I think independent groups can make such indicies, but the government must not use this as a tool.

I think utilitarians as a group are susceptible to this type of thinking. For instance, Cass Sunstein, who I have a tremendous amount of respect for as an academic, and his wife Samantha Power, are both now part of the Obama Administration. These people genuinely think that the state can be used as a tool for good and Cass thinks that we can be nudged in the right direction non-coercively.

Cass is getting smeared by Glenn Beck now for being an adamant animal rights supporter, and believes that hunting is cruel and animals should be provided with lawyers. He is a utilitarian to the core, and despite my respect for him, I know that he is likely as naive as his wife who thinks that US imperial conquests can be a force for good in the world. These are the worst type of supporters of tyranny and war since they can put a well-meaning face on it, even though their good intentions were never really ever part of the actual motivations behind the warmaking.

It takes even more naivety to think the American public or anyone else wont see imperial excursions for what they are. So much for that legitimacy and "soft power."

Just to be clear, I do not think it is ok to use the GDP to rank the superiority or inferiority of countries either. From a cynical perspective, it makes sense that if people will be using numbers to rank the superiority or inferiority of nations, it is better that they use indicators that at least take into consideration things besides production capacity.

Yet, even that doesn't hold up. People will choose statistics which conform to their preferred political objectives, and thus will highlight or ignore this new indicator only on that basis.

Thus, it becomes one more tool in a political arsenal for centralized power holders.

Here's an index for you:

The Decentralization Index: An index of the number of people using decentralized energy sources, digital manufacturing, local agriculture, alternative currencies, bittorrent, open source, etc.

Maybe it should be called the Pirate Index for effect

EmbraceUnity wrote:Thinking that this happiness index should be developed without democratic input shows extreme naivety or extreme cynicism, as does thinking states have a right to be the arbiter on the definition of happiness.

Would I be extremely naive to think that democracy is a rather flawed model of utilitarianism? As that is what I believe. There is no logic in believing that every person has to be consulted on the development of a governmental system, if that system can be developed and be perfect. If a hyper-intelligent alien dropped by on earth and showed us the perfect system of government, and decided it was in our best interests to implement it for us, but the system was far too complex for humans to comprehend and implement would you object because there was no democratic input?

I also do think this French model is on the right track.

I think most people would really prefer a despotism governed by their chosen rules to the whims of mass rule. That said, it's hard to be confident without actually having tried most of the alternatives. Maybe democracy's prevailance is Darwinian...

This is my first post on Felicifia and my first question is if this thread is still active a month since the last posting?

I find this topic of happiness economics and measuring happiness very interesting and I hope the conversation will continue.

I just wanted to say that contrary to what some people think it seems to me that happiness, at least in principle, is a far more objective criteria than anything the conventional economists are currently measuring.

Isn't happiness just a function of purely electrochemical processes in the brain involving well defined structures such the limbic system, endorphins, and neurotransmitters such as dopamine? (I'm assuming materialism is true)

How much more objective can you get than a totally physical process?

Economists on the other hand are measuring the value of goods and services. How much more subjective can something be than that?

You can buy houses now in Richmond CA for $50K that cost $400K two years ago. Pieces of paper with numbers on them, or now days electronic accounts, have value only because enough people have faith in them. The same even applies to gold. If everyone loses faith that other people believe they are valuable, they become worthless.

It seems economic value is a complicated and murky mix of subjective beliefs about the future, what you think other people are thinking, what you've been told is true, what you believe is true, combined with a whole gamut of emotions from hope, excitement, nostalgia, pleasure and pride to greed, pain, and fear.

Now I admit practically measuring happiness is a different story. But with advances in brain characterization techniques like fMRI or MEG, or whatever the next generation of technologies is that comes along, along with increased understanding of neurobiology, whose to say it won't be practical some day to objectively measure happiness?

Until then I guess we have to settle for polling, maybe combined with a polygraph test?

Hi bhuddy, no worries about a bit of thread necromancy on a forum this slow. I agree with you fwiw, though you might want to look at this thread where I've been trying, without much success so far, to find a way to recognise happiness (brain scanning technologies will at best be able to tell us relative happiness, not where the 0 point might be)

Bhuddy, you make a good point that economic wealth might be a lot more abstract and transitory than happiness. Welcome to the forum, by the way.

I wonder if the difficulty we face in determining public happiness has paralells in other fields. If so we might be able to apply their solutions to our problem. Unfortunately, no solutions can come from political polling imo. Because there, they are really only trying to ascertain how people will vote on a later occasion. So if, for instance, suppose everybody truly preferred Obama to McCain, yet they voted McCain because he was old and doing otherwise would make them feel guilty. To a political pollster, the true preference is beside the point. It's just about predicting an election result.

So then how can we actually get to the core of the issue and find out people's feelings? Perhaps we could consider how doctors determine a patient's mental state: they don't just note down how the person says they are feeling, they look for external signs of emotion. Is the person smiling? is their voice upbeat? We could probably measure these things with technology. And what is exciting is that Jesper Ostman says these kinds of things, are already happening!

-Very high response rate (about 99%)
-The results correlate well with estimates by friends and family of the happiness of the respondee
-Correlations between measured happiness and frequency of laughter and smiles
-Some fMRI studies finding correlation with activation in "pleasure centers" in the brain
-Correlations with things like good sleep and lenght of life (a difference of 8 years between happiest and unhappiest, in one study)

Hi Arepo and RyanCarey thank you for the greetings. I am glad that you've set up this forum on utilitarianism which I hope will become a more influential moral system in the future, even though utilitarian arguments have often historical been put forth to justify a whole range of actions and policies (whether they were sincere or not is an entirely different matter). What I should say is I hope that utilitarianism backed by more rigorous supporting evidence like what some of the new economists, Joe Stiglitz, France etc. are attempting will become more influential.

Regarding brain scans only providing a relative happiness I will continue reading through the thread you provided, Arepo, to understand why you take that position.

Drawing on my laypersons understanding of neurobiology and psychology i would have thought an absolute scale could be developed for brain scans, at least in principle, provided they were accurate enough.

For example if one knew the number of neurons associated with the "pleasure centers" and one knew the maximum firing rate of each neuron in the pleasure center. Then absolute maximum happiness could be all the neurons in the pleasure center firing at their maximum rate. Absolute zero could be zero firing in the pleasure center (or whatever the minimum rate of firing is). The absolute minimum could be all the neurons in the "pain centers" firing at their maximum rates. (If the pain and pleasure centers were simultaneously firing i suppose there would be some kind of canceling out)

Of course this all rests on a number of assumptions

1) the pleasure/pain centers are known
2) the neuronal activity in the pleasure/pain centers can be measured
3) maximum activation of the pleasure/pain centers in fact does correspond to maximum happiness/suffering

RyanCarey I didn't mean polling in the sense of political polling. I actually intended to mean something more along the lines of a survey as you described. I also added polygraph test, somewhat jokingly because it is controversial whether they really work, because of the fact that people might lie and there could be a number of reasons they might claim they were happy when they weren't, or visa versa.

I like the survey described by Jesper Ostman. In some respects it reminds me of a survey question that I thought could in some ways act as an overall gauge of a basic minimum level of happiness in a persons life up to a given point of time.

"If it was guaranteed that you would live out the rest of your life with the same average level of happiness and suffering and the same rate of maximal and minimal happiness events as what you've experienced up to this point in your life, would you wish you had never been born?"

I would put an yes answers to this question at less than zero on the happiness scale.

larry wrote:Would I be extremely naive to think that democracy is a rather flawed model of utilitarianism? As that is what I believe.

Hi Larry,

I do agree that there is an empirical aspect to happiness, though I just don't trust any specific authority to properly define it. I did misspeak a bit in that sentence you quoted though. I basically mean to say that people should reserve the right to define happiness, not nation-states. In that post I mentioned that even independent attempts to quantify happiness, and even wiki-style attempts, could be cherry-picked by those in power for their own ends.

When there isn't even any outside input or peer-review, then that is even worse. I would prefer something more open.

larry wrote:I also do think this French model is on the right track.

I think they are more on the right track than most American indicies which seem to be based around things like GDP per capita, but that isn't saying much.

Of course, I don't wish to demean efforts that are going in the right direction. Leisure is a very important, and often overlooked, aspect of happiness and it is good that the French take this into account.

That said, the definition of happiness is still something I wouldn't trust with any specific power structure, French or otherwise.