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Happiness comes as a by-product Samuel Brittan Financial Times 15/12/06 With the demise of full-blooded socialism, the opponents of market capitalism have fallen back on three remaining policy pillars: tax and spend, the promotion of "equality", and controls and intervention - the "nanny state" as some like to call it. Two of these pillars are looking shaky. The argument over public spending has reached a stalemate. Left of centre parties now assume that there is little public tolerance for a further increase in the share of tax in the national income, while conservative parties hesitate to promise more than the most limited inroads in that share. Equality too is no longer the great slogan that it once was. A survey of Harvard students found that the majority would rather earn $50,000, while others earned $25,000 than earn $50,000 while others got $100,000. These were mostly spoilt middle-class brats who had never known real poverty; and if I were a liberal dictator, their feelings of jealousy and envy would play no part in my policy decisions. But when it comes to state intervention the collectivists are still improving their position. A new pseudo-subject called happiness studies has been called in aid. People are asked how happy they are with their lives. Up to some modest level of affluence real incomes are correlated with reported happiness. But then the relationship falls off. Americans and Western Europeans say that they are no happier than they were several decades ago when they were much poorer. Within a particular country the better off report themselves more satisfied than the poor, but it is relative rather than absolute incomes that seem to matter. Some happiness addicts even talk of high incomes as a form of pollution for the rest of us. It is not difficult to work out their policy proposals: high and progressive taxation over and above the state's revenue needs, or limitations on working hours so that people have to spend more time with their families, and so on. Fortunately we now have a new study of an altogether superior kind by a father and son team of philosopher and economist. (Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility, Anthony and Charles Kenny, Imprint Academic, £17.95). Aristotle identified happiness with virtuous activity. Bentham and his utilitarian followers identified it with pleasure and subjective satisfaction. Words do not have essential meanings. Take the fifth century St. Simeon Stylites, who spent most of his life perched on a pillar. He could say that he was happy to do so. Or he could say "Of course I am not happy up here, but there are more important things than happiness." The concept was not designed for such extreme situations. The authors derive from Aristotle the idea that "the solitary scholar will not have to suffer the kind of withdrawal symptoms that the Chief Executive of a large corporation will experience on retirement. The ideal life is one in which there is no clear boundary between work and recreation" - a passage which I have heavily underlined. To make progress the authors break up happiness into three components: welfare, contentment and dignity. Welfare is treated in a common sense way, covering items such as life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality or health. Contentment is the type of thing measured by the questionnaire studies. I am less sure about dignity. The celebrity chef who yells at his staff and customers makes an undignified sight, but who is to say that he is unhappy? The most striking of the Kenny findings is how little welfare has to do with income either absolute or relative. Income per capita in the early nineteenth century UK was similar to that of Vietnam in 2000. Yet the UK then had four times the infant mortality, a much lower life expectancy and a good deal less literacy. "British subjects in 1815 knew nothing of the germ theory of disease and little of refrigeration. The most advanced sewer systems they were likely to have known were those found in Roman ruins from 1500 years earlier." A purist might want such factors to be taken into account in income estimates. But considering how difficult it is to allow for new products in national income computations, it is almost impossible for benefits which are not even sold in the market place. The authors believe that the main contributors to increased welfare are technological advance and "public action". Their own data suggest however suggest that only a very limited part of public expenditure, such as public health and sanitation measures are relevant here rather than the bulk of items which went into either a nineteenth century or a modern government budget. The authors point out that even if we take the findings on relative incomes at their face value, they are associated in the US with a maximum of 5pc of the reported differences in reported well-being between individuals. They quote another study which asked a beneficiary of a large trust fund why the rich were not happier. The reply was a litany of woes: "social isolation, resentment from peers, rich bashing from society, betrayal or exploitation by friends, unrealistic expectations from family and society, unequal financial status in marriage" and the absence of factors like worrying about the rent "that have caused the rest of us to drag ourselves out of bed most mornings". I could not stop weeping at these misfortunes. The authors rightly put a lot of emphasis on adaptation theory. People get used to more income, but also to worse health. So much of the cross country variation in subjective well-being remains unexplained by objective influences that they suggest "a distinct limit to policy or other interventions" in increasing subjective well-being scores. As so often, I come back to John Stuart Mill who never wavered in the conviction that happiness was the end of life, but who also believed that those who achieve it "have their minds fixed on some other object" such as the wellbeing of others or some art or pursuit. A long standing difficulty for utilitarians has been the contrast between the individual pursuit of his or her own happiness and the pursuit of general contentment which they believe ought to be the end of public policy. I have often in my own writings spoken of a series of concentric circles in which we paid most attention to oneself, next to one's immediate family and then to circles of neighbours, fellow nationals and the rest of the world. I used to think that I had invented these concentric circles and grumbled at the unwillingness of academic philosophers and economists to recognise something that was not produced by a member of their own trade union. But I now learn that this idea first occurred to the ancient Stoics and was called by them 'oikeiosis'. The authors have little patience with growth drives in the developed West. They suggesting that investment subsidies, or evicting people from their homes in the name of development, or government bureaucracies designed to stimulate productivity ought to disappear. Their main point of contact with mainstream progressive thought is their emphasis on the poor people of poor countries, but not their often corrupt and dictatorial governments. They approve of global efforts to eradicate the smallpox and polio, but are much more sceptical of government to government aid. In advanced western countries it is reasonable to expect governments to concentrate on their core functions of internal and external security, providing public goods which the market cannot do and trying to correct for the worst spill-over effects of our activities upon each other. I would also include redistribution towards the less fortunate, which need not depend on envy and resentment. But surely matters such as obesity, respect and so much else on the Blairite agenda ought to be left to individuals? Quite a lot of politicians of all parties would agree with these general sentiments, but when it comes to specifics - such as disliking things they see from their car windows on the way to the airport - the itch to intervene becomes unstoppable.
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