The Pursuit of Happiness

"There are days I wish I didn't pay attention to it all. But I'm built to ask these questions."

I'm still doing what makes me happy (research), but this interesting and thought-provoking piece of writing showed up in my inbox today, so I'm passing it on.

Here's a brief synopsis - Psychologist Kasser studies (among other things) happiness. "Kasser is among the loudest in a growing chorus of academics who are boldly — and, some say, prematurely — asking governments to transform the conclusions of the maturing body of happiness science into real-world public policies."

You probably had one of two responses to that last statement...

1) Excellent! We should do more to help those who are less fortunate/who don't have all our advantages/who can't help themselves!

or

2) What?!? You want to turn bureaucracy loose on happiness? Are you nuts? What about individual responsibility?

So many thoughts while reading this article...

I'm a huge believer in individual responsibility. I get annoyed when someone else thinks that they have to worry about my happiness.

I have a background in psychology. I get annoyed when someone (particularly a psychologist) confuses some correlates of happiness with the ultimate causes of happiness.

I'm looking at To Have or To Be? by Erich Fromm, and wondering how you can legislate self-awareness and a detachment of identification of self from material possessions. And now I'm wondering what kind of government would be motivated to decrease the degree to which its citizenry care about monetary wealth and the opportunities it affords...

This statement reminds me of my previous posting...

• "As a scientist, I'm trained to be objective and hand over policy options to the policymakers. I'm trained not to get into this kind of stuff," Kasser says.

... and yet Kasser chose to 'violate the unspoken rule of his field' and engage in active protesting and campaigning in support of his position.

Many of the things that I'm doing with my economic stimulus money are making me happy in the transient sense of the word, so the paragraphs on the economics of happiness caught my attention. The recasting of psychological research into economic terms...

• "Economists, on the other hand, offer hard data on what people do — known as "revealed preferences" — and are more often welcome in the halls of power."

... may aid the push towards 'happy-policy', but may also result in that 'happy-policy' targeting a diluted 'correlations equal causation' definition of happiness.

"What Kasser is hoping for, eventually, is a revolution of values about what is important in life..." Great! I'm all for that! But making anything mandatory, obligatory, or 'policy' is not the way to do it.