Who Is Happy and When?Exploring Happiness:From Aristotle to Brain Scienceby Sissela Bok.Yale University Press, 218 pp., $24.00

The Politics of Happiness:Wbat Government Can Learn fromthe New Research on Well-Beingby Derek Bok.Princeton University Press,262 pp., $24.95

A number of surveys in recent yearsclaim that, above a modest level of suf-ficiency. happiness-as measured bypeople's responses to questions frompolling organizations-is not stronglycorrelated with income. Average re-ported happiness is somewhat higher inrich countries than in poorer ones, andsomewhat higher within any countryfor those with higher incomes than forthose with lower incomes; but averagehappiness in the United States, for ex-ample, has not increased over the pastfifty years even though real per capitaincome has increased greatly. Andthough most people think they wouldbe happier if they had more money, theytypically react to an increase in wealthor income with a temporary spike intheir reported happiness, but soonadapt and revert to their former level.

Such findings prompt the thoughtthat the focus on economic growth asa measure of national success is mis-placed, and that we would do better,individually and nationally, to give upthe rat race and think more about whatreally matters. Maybe money isn't ev-erything. But then again, maybe hap-piness isn't everything. When I wasgrowing up, if you wanted to see amovie, you had to go to the local movietheater, and you saw what was playingthat week. Now I can see almost anymovie from the entire history of cin-ema whenever I feel like it. Am I anyhappier as a result? I doubt it, but thatseems irrelevant to the value of thisvast expansion of possibility. Happi-ness is not the only human good.

The practical implications of happi-ness research are not obvious, but its in-terest is undeniable. Even in the slumsof Calcutta most people apparently de-scribe themselves as reasonably happy.If we can trust these self-reports, mosthumans have a disposition to find hap-piness in their actual circumstances,if they are not too dire, and neitherFreudian pessimism about the neces-sary conflict between the conditions ofhappiness and the conditions of humancivilization nor Augustinian pessimismabout the possibility of true happinessthis side of paradise is borne out byempirical research. This suggests thatwe look again at the history of nonsci-entific reflection on the nature, causes,and value of happiness found in litera-ture, philosophy, and political theory.

Happiness has had a prominent placein debates about the ends of life and ofsocial institutions for millennia. Thereare four big questions: What is happi-ness? How much should we value it?What causes it? Should political insti-tutions try to create it, and if so, how?Exploring Happiness and The Politicsof Happiness, two books whose au-thors are married to each other, take

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Thomas Nagel

Peter Paul Rubens: Rubens and Isabella Brant in the Honeysuckle Bower, circa 1609

up between them all these questions.Sissela Bok is a prominent moral phi-losopher who concentrates mainly onthe first two questions; Derek Bok isa lawyer and former president of Har-vard whose book focuses on the thirdand fourth questions; both are con-cerned with the relevance of recentpsychological research.

Exploring Happiness is Sissela Bok'smeditation on her reading about thesubject over many years; the book isrich with citations from Aristotle, Sen-eca, Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne,Freud, Russell, Woolf, Nabokov, andmany others. It does not have an over-arching thesis; Bok is cautious aboutoffering strong judgments of her own.She urges us not to neglect the reflec-tive and introspective insights of indi-vidual writers in favor of brain imagingand Gallup surveys; she insists on thevariation among individuals that statis-tical averages conceal; and she refusesto choose among rival accounts of hap-piness, insisting that there is somethingto be learned from all of them.

But she makes the important pointthat the word "happiness" is used todescribe different things, and that somebasic conceptual distinctions are neededif we are to be clear what we are talkingabout, and to judge its value. The an-swer to the question whether you arehappy can be either subjective or objec-tive; it can refer either to a particularmoment or to a general and extendedcondition-even to your life as a whole;

and it can either report a feeling likeenjoyment or stress, or express a valuejudgment on bow well your life is going.

The second and third of these dis-tinctions are important for psycho-logical and economic research, since aquestion about how you felt yesterdayis very different from a question abouthow good your life is. But I should firstsay something about the subjective-objective distinction, which plays nopart in contemporary empirical re-search. It is significant that socialscientists investigate only subjectivehappiness, which means that your de-gree of happiness or unhappiness isalways what you think it is' (althoughyou can be seriously mistaken aboutwhat would make you happy). But thesubjective-objective distinction is atthe center of philosophical disputesabout the nature of happiness. SisselaBok cites a famous thought experimentby Robert Nozick to illustrate it:

Suppose there were an experiencemachine that could give you any ex-perience you desired. Superduperneuropsychologists could stimu-late your brain so that you wouldthink and feel you were writing agreat novel, or making a friend, orreading an interesting book. Allthe time you would be floating in

'Or wbat you say it is in response toan anonymous interviewer. As with allpolling data, questions can be raisedabout tbe accuracy and honesty of peo-ple's responses, but I leave these aside.

a tank, with electrodes attached toyour brain. Should you plug intothis machine for life, preprogram-ming your life's experiencesv?

~'5 Nozick was concerned with the prob-~ lem of what we should value, but there~ is also a problem of whether we shouldt describe someone undergoing highly] satisfying or even blissful experiences~ in the experience machine (not know-~ ing that he is in the machine) as happy.

If it continued for eighty years, until his~ death, would it be right to say that such~ a person had had a happy life? Some-@ one in the experience machine can be"5 made to feel happy, and would think he~ was happy, but would he be happy?

The issue, which has divided philoso-phers from the beginning, is over thekind of value implied by the concept ofhappiness. Everyone agrees that happi-ness is good, but what kind of a goodis it? Is its value purely experiential-amatter of subjective pleasure and satis-faction-or does it require a more ob-jective value in what the happy personis actually doing and what is actuallyhappening to him? Nozick believedthat most of us would not trade ouroften frustrating real-world lives for amuch more subjectively satisfying life-long tenure on the experience machine,however blissful: we not only care howthings feel from the inside, we careabout how things actually are in ourlives, and about our relations to the realworld and to other (real) people. Noteveryone agrees. Some maintain thatthe only thing that has value in itself,positive or negative, is the quality of in-dividual subjective experience-mostsimply pleasure and pain, according toa hedonistic utilitarian like Bentham-and that all more "objective" goods likeknowledge, freedom, love, accomplish-ment, and virtue are good only becauseof their effects, actual or possible, onsubjective experience.

The question whether experience isthe only thing of value is distinct from.the question whether experience is theonly determinant of happiness. But be-cause happiness is generally agreed tobe the name of a fundamental humangood, these disagreements about valueare often expressed philosophically inrival definitions of happiness. Thosewho think that virtue, or understand-ing, or freedom is essential to a goodlife will be tempted to include themamong the necessary conditions ofhappiness (so that Stalin, for example,could not be counted as happy no mat-ter how much he enjoyed himself).Much of the history of philosophicalreflection on the nature of happinesswould be better described as a searchfor the conditions of the good life.

Sissela Bok believes that amongthese "persuasive" definitions of hap-piness there is no unique right answer:

The concept of happiness, giventhe central role it plays in views oflife and death and in political andreligious doctrines, is especiallylikely to be redefined for such per-suasive purposes. It is tempting

2Robert Nozick, Anarchy, Stale, andUtopia (Basic Books, 1974), p. 42.

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to reject all persuasive definitionsas being unscientific or vagueBut when it comes to happiness,as with beauty or love, those whooffer a new definition invite us tothink anew about a concept wemay have taken for granted.

Bok's nonjudgmental receptivitythreatens to deprive the concept of itsusefulness, except as a label for whatevera person happens to care about. But sbedoes insist that the pursuit of happinessmust be subordinated to morality:

Such moral limits may be built intothe definition of "happiness,' aswas done by Aristotle and all whosee virtue or character as neces-sary for people to be called happy;or the limits may be thought, as byKant, to be indispensable regard-less of what form of happinesspeople want to pursue .... In eithercase, the moral limits imposed onthe pursuit of happiness are cen-tral. ... Pursuits of happiness thatabide by fundamental moral valuesdiffer crucially from those that callfor deceit, violence, betrayal.

It would be hard to disagree. But Sissel aBok's ecumenical disposition steers heraway from more controversial issuesabout the significance of happiness re-search and its importance in moral andpolitical justification.

Empirical research on happiness setsaside most of the philosophical ques-tions by taking as data people's ownfirst-person reports, either about thepositive or negative feelings occasionedby particular recent experiences or ac-tivities (experience sampling), or abouthow satisfied they are with their lives orhow well they think their lives are going(life evaluation). The precise questionsvary, but all the surveys measure somekind of subjective happiness; objectiveconditions are only thought of as cor-relates of happiness, not as parts of it.This introduces a certain clarity, evenif it ignores many traditional questionsabout the nature of happiness.

Derek Bok's The Politics of Happi-ness cites several interesting results.One is that

almost all of the most pleasurableactivities of the day take placeoutside of work-having sex, beingwith family, seeing friends, and soforth. The less pleasant aspectsof the day involve activities as-sociated with one's job, includingcommuting.

Another is that the experience ofday-to-day happiness is much less cor-related with income than life evaluationis.J On the other hand, this correlationis not simple. While people in the topincome quartile in any country are onaverage significantly more satisfied

3A recently publisbed study by DanielKabneman and Angus Deaton, "HighIncome Improves Evaluation of Lifebut not Emotional Well-Being," Pro-ceedings of the National Academy ofSciences, September 21, 2010 (availableat www.pnas.org), finds that experien-tial happiness in the US today rises upto an income of about $75,000, but notbeyond, whereas people's judgment ofhow well their life is going continues torise steadily beyond that.

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with their lives than those in the bot-tom quartile, these figures don't all goup over time as incomes rise for every-one in the society. That suggests thatthere is a comparative element in therelation between satisfaction and in-come-since for many people incomeis in part a good whose value dependson whether they have more or less thanothers. Finally, an unexpected findingis that greater economic equality of asociety is not correlated with higheraverage happiness, nor is average hap-piness positively correlated with thepercentage of national income devotedto social welfare programs.

Derek Bok asks whether these resultsshould affect our views on the desir-ability of economic growth and of re-distributive fiscal policies. He responds,first, that the results are sufficientlyconsistent and robust to take into ac-count in evaluating public policy. Heacknowledges that we have to be cau-tious about inferring causes from cor-relations: if marriage is correlated withhappiness, it could be because marriageincreases happiness, or because beinghappy makes it more likely that one willmarry; or the causation may go in bothdirections; or there may even be a thirdfactor that causes both. However, thereis enough information about how levelsof happiness are changed by changesin people's circumstances that in somecases we can be pretty sure of a direc-tion of causal influence.

Second, Derek Bok believes thathappiness is a more important goal fora society, and a better measure of itssuccess, than GDP per inhabitant:

The Gross Domestic Product is.a very crude way of estimatingwelfare. It measures output ratherthan consumption. It excludesmany activities that benefit soci-ety, such as caring for children inthe home, while including othersthat are actually harmful or use-less, such as the manufacture ofcigarettes. Moreover, a nation'stotal production of goods and ser-vices is at best a means to otherends and often a dubious meansat that. In contrast, happiness, orsatisfaction with life, can lay claimto being not merely an end in itselfbut the end most people considermore important than any other. Inlight of these weaknesses, the re-sults of happiness studies seem, ifanything, more reliable than manyfamiliar statistics and other typesof evidence that legislators and ad-ministration officials routinely usein making policy.

Nevertheless, Bok believes that eco-nomic growth is indispensable for theUnited States, mainly because Americansare so hostile to taxes: only growing na-tional income can generate the revenueneeded for essential government serviceswithout politically unobtainable tax in-creases. The association of happinesswith personal relations and family lifesuggests that it would be worth givingup some growth in exchange for paren-tal leave and less work. "The averagefull-time employee in this country worksmore hours per year than workers inalmost any other advanced industrialnation." But Bok doubts that it wouldbe feasible in the US to impose moredown time by reducing the workingweek and mandating lengthy paid vaca-tions, as is done in France, for example.

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However, while Bok doesn't believethat happiness research provides areason to devalue economic growth,he does believe that it undermines thecase for promoting economic equality.He cites evidence that average happi-ness is not positively correlated withgreater economic equality across so-cieties, and that increase of inequalitywithin a society (as in the US in recentdecades) does not correlate with de-crease of happiness-specifically forthose at the bottom of the economicdistribution, who might be expected tomind it most:

Opinion surveys show that Ameri-cans are twice as likely (60 per-cent) as Europeans (29 percent) tobelieve that the poor can get richif they only try hard enough.While most Europeans feel thatwhere you end up is largely a mal-ter of luck or other circum-stances beyond your control,fewer tban half of Americansagree. Armed with thesebeliefs, lower-income Amer-icans are less likely to blamesociety when inequality growsand more inclined to believethat persons of great wealthmust deserve their goodfortune.

If subjective happiness isour only concern. it doesn'tmatter whether those beliefsare true. just as the happiness broughtby religious beliefs doesn't depend onwhether they are true. But Bok is U11-

willing to go that far:

The exceptional tolerance ofAmericans for substantial inequal-ity appears to rest in large parton their belief that rates of socialmobility are unusually high in theUnited States and that anyonewho works hard can get ahead inlife. Yet this belief appears to reston a misapprehension of the facts.Although differences of opinionstill exist, most analysts have con-cluded that rates of economic mo-bility are no higher in the UnitedStates than in other advanceddemocratic nations and may actu-ally be somewhat lower for poorerAmericans. Thus, Americans' tol-erance for inequality stands onshaky ground. In a country that ismarked by such large disparities ofincome, it is only prudent and fairto bring the facts of life into closeralignment with prevailing beliefsabout mobility and opportunity.Creating greater equality of op-portunity and political influence isthe best way to achieve this result.

The word "fair" implies that Bck ishere moved by a value other than thepromotion of happiness, a value thatcrosses the boundary between subjec-tive and objective evaluation. The pas-sage expresses his belief that inequalityof opportunity is objectionable even ifit doesn't make people unhappy, sincethey don't recognize its existence.(Elsewhere in the book he says thatflagrant injustices like slavery, falseimprisonment, and fraud should notbe tolerated regardless of the feelingsof the victims.) I believe this is correctand important.

However, Bok is unsympathetic tomore strongly egalitarian claims, of the

kind that favor redistributive policiesbeyond the provision of equality of op-portunity in specific domains like edu-cation. His most significant point is thatbroad redistributive aims have essen-tially no support in American publicopinion. But he also argues that top-down redistribution doesn't increaseaverage happiness, even though thisseems to be predicted by the principleof diminishing marginal utility-thata dollar is worth less to a rich personthan to a poor person:

Any incremental happiness forthe poor is likely to erode as ben-eficiaries grow accustomed to theirextra income and adjust their aspi-rations upward. That is surely onereason why the broad-based eco-nomic growth that benefited lower-income Americans in the 1950sand 1960s did not increase their

Drawing by Edward Gorey

well-being. Moreover, as research-ers have discovered, taking moneyfrom one group creates much moredistress than the added happinessgained by giving the same amountto another. The net effect of re-distribution, therefore, is far fromobvious. If rising inequality after1975did not produce more unhap-piness in the United States and ifdifferences in income distributionin prosperous nations are not cor-related with differences in theiroverall levels of happiness, it isunlikely that transferring moneyfrom rich to poor will bring a netincrease in well-being.

It is r~sh to assume that psychologi-cal results about the different effectsof individual losses and gains can beapplied directly to tax policy, whichcreates fixed expectations. But Bok'sbasic point is clear. and his strongstand is challenging. He thinks wewould do much better to focus on spe-cific sources of unhappiness than oneconomic inequality in general. Heidentifies several empirically estab-lished happiness-destroyers as targets:inadequate medical protection, lossof employment, chronic pain, sleepdisorders, depression, the decline oftwo-parent families, and dissatisfac-tion with the quality of government. Itis a mixed bag. but clearly Bok is rightthat it would be good to diminish theseburdens and that we should apply ex-isting methods and search for new onesin order to do so. The recent healthcare bill should make a big differenceto those whom it insures, as Medicaredid for the happiness of the elderly. Re-moving the legal impediments to theeffective use of opiates for pain relief isanother important goal.

Bok believes that the US shouldinstitute general protection for work-ers against dismissal without just

cause-now available only to thosecovered by a union contract. And hesuggests, perhaps unrealistically. thatthe news media should do more to in-form the public about the considerablesuccesses of government instead of con-centrating only on its failures-sincethe false belief that the governmentnever achieves anything is a significantcause of citizens' unhappiness.

This piecemeal approach may be rea-sonable if subjective experiential happi-ness is our goal, but that brings us backto the question of subjective versus ob-jective value. Sissela Bok asks at onepoint: "Is there more to happiness thanfeeling happy? And more to life thanhappiness?" Her book makes it clearthat she believes the answer to bothquestions is yes. But even if she is right,it is a further question whether publicpolicies should be designed to promotemore objective values, or whether the

promotion of experiential hap-piness favored by Derek Bokshould be our main collectiveaim. After all, subjective hap-piness and the avoidance ofsubjective unhappiness are un-deniably important.

There are some basic goods,like literacy and personal lib-erty, whose value seems not todepend just on their contribu-tion to happiness. But beyondthis, the appeal to objective val-ues may seem antidemocratic,an excuse to give people what

those in power think is good for them,rather than what they want. That is aserious political problem, but it is notthe problem here, because the distinc-tion between subjective experientialhappiness and objective goods that Iam talking about is a distinction withinthe category of things that people want.While we all want to feel happy, it is notthe only thing we want: we value manyspecific things, activities, relations, andopportunities for their own sake, notjust for how they make us feel. Someof tbose things are available only as aresult of economic development, andobtainable only with money. Given achoice between being quite happy ata modest standard of living and beingequally happy at a significantly higherstandard of living, it is not irrationalto prefer the second option, simply be-cause of the substantive differences inwhat life contains. Even if we could bejust as experientially happy without it,we want all this wonderful SlUff.

Admittedly some of the motivationto acquire more. bigger, and fancierhouses. cars, appliances, and manyother possessions is essentially com-petitive, and therefore self-defeating,since the percentage of winners andlosers never changes." But that is notthe only reason people want the ever-proliferating range of things that tech-nology produces and that money canbuy; and if those things are good, itwould be good if more people hadmore of them. That is a reason otherthan subjective happiness to wish toraise the income of those who don'thave very much-even though DerekBok is right that redistributive policieshave little support in the antiegalitar-ian climate of the United States. 0

"This is a point that the economist Rob-ert Frank has made to great effect. Seehis Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails toSatisfy in an Era of Excess (Free Press,1999).

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