Edge discussions - You can buy happiness

We've chatted about the Bentham's hedonic calculus, but this puts a
nice perspective on recent findings:

"
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Psychologist, Princeton; Recipient, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences

The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill

The central question for students of well-being is the extent to which
people adapt to circumstances. Ten years ago the generally accepted
position was that there is considerable hedonic adaptation to life
conditions. The effects of circumstances on life satisfaction appeared
surprisingly small: the rich were only slightly more satisfied with
their lives than the poor, the married were happier than the unmarried
but not by much, and neither age nor moderately poor health diminished
life satisfaction. Evidence that people adapt — though not completely
— to becoming paraplegic or winning the lottery supported the idea of
a "hedonic treadmill": we move but we remain in place. The famous
"Easterlin paradox" seemed to nail it down: Self-reported life
satisfaction has changed very little in prosperous countries over the
last fifty years, in spite of large increases in the standard of
living.

Hedonic adaptation is a troubling concept, regardless of where you
stand on the political spectrum. If you believe that economic growth
is the key to increased well-being, the Easterlin paradox is bad
news. If you are a compassionate liberal, the finding that the sick
and the poor are not very miserable takes wind from your sails. And
if you hope to use a measure of well-being to guide social policy you
need an index that will pick up permanent effects of good policies on
the happiness of the population.

About ten years ago I had an idea that seemed to solve these
difficulties: perhaps people's satisfaction with their life is not the
right measure of well-being. The idea took shape in discussions with
my wife Anne Treisman, who was (and remains) convinced that people are
happier in California (or at least Northern California) than in most
other places. The evidence showed that Californians are not
particularly satisfied with their life, but Anne was unimpressed. She
argued that Californians are accustomed to a pleasant life and come to
expect more pleasure than the unfortunate residents of other states.
Because they have a high standard for what life should be,
Californians are not more satisfied than others, although they are
actually happier. This idea included a treadmill, but it was not
hedonic – it was an aspiration treadmill: happy people have high
aspirations.

The aspiration treadmill offered an appealing solution to the puzzles
of adaptation: it suggested that measure of life satisfaction
underestimate the well-being benefits of life circumstances such as
income, marital status or living in California. The hope was that
measures of experienced happiness would be more sensitive. I
eventually assembled an interdisciplinary team to develop a measure of
experienced happiness (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Stone and Schwarz,
2004) and we set out to demonstrate the aspiration treadmill. Over
several years we asked substantial samples of women to reconstruct a
day of their life in detail. They indicated the feelings they had
experienced during each episode, and we computed a measure of
experienced happiness: the average quality of affective experience
during the day. Our hypothesis was that differences in life
circumstances would have more impact on this measure than on life
satisfaction. We were so convinced that when we got our first batch
of data, comparing teachers in top-rated schools to teachers in
inferior schools, we actually misread the results as confirming our
hypothesis. In fact, they showed the opposite: the groups of teachers
differed more in their work satisfaction than in their affective
experience at work. This was the first of many such findings: income,
marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less
than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a
statistical artifact. Measuring experienced happiness turned out to
be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected. We had
simply been wrong.

Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and
on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their
time. Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the
hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable
activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in
work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but
more time doing tedious chores. Conditions that make people satisfied
with their life do not necessarily make them happy.

Social scientists rarely change their minds, although they often
adjust their position to accommodate inconvenient facts. But it is
rare for a hypothesis to be so thoroughly falsified. Merely adjusting
my position would not do; although I still find the idea of an
aspiration treadmill attractive, I had to give it up.

To compound the irony, recent findings from the Gallup World Poll
raise doubts about the puzzle itself. The most dramatic result is
that when the entire range of human living standards is considered,
the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the "ladder
of life") are not small at all. We had thought income effects are
small because we were looking within countries. The GDP differences
between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences
in life satisfaction. In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126
countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of
individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40
– an exceptionally high value in social science. Humans everywhere,
from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a
common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP
increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different
countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against
everything we thought we knew ten years ago. We have been wrong and
now we know it. I suppose this means that there is a science of well-
being, even if we are not doing it very well.
"
.

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