Some fast crude thoughts on Graditude

Culled from a Facebook conversation with a colleague. 

I’m actually quite ambivalent on gratitude, but I haven’t reached the point where I can articulate my thoughts on it very well. Robert Emmons, who leads the gratitude research program in psych, wrote some tremendous work early in his career on religion, spirituality and mental health. I feel that his gratitude work is a really piss-weak distillation of a trope he found there into something you can easily run crude, empirical studies of for the academy and otherwise market to the American earnestness brigade. More generally, gratitude is part of the California ‘smile society’ of hedonic psychologists who are more interested in whether people feel happy than whether they are psychologically healthy. Just practice gratitude and all your worries will float away. This attitude, like the privilege movement and the tendency towards smiling and earnestness, strikes me as so god-awfully American.

Some random stuff on atheist ethics

A friend of mine had some follow up questions to my blog post about the existential meaning of life. They were, roughly:
1. Wouldn't things be easier if there was a cosmic moral order?
2. Have you come across the idea that we can be moral without God thanks to our genes?
3. Is atheism incompatible with moral absolutes? Does it restrict us to consequentialist morality?
4. How does one determine their 'authentic self'?

Here are my answers as written in an email:

Presentation Transcript: weaknesses, 2nd and 3rd paper, the budget constraint

We were recently required to give 15 minute presentations, so I mashed up three topics. The first is the things about my thesis that I am most worried about, the second is my other two papers (after the paper presenting the model) and the third is some thought bubbles I had recently about the budget constraint. Fears and the 2nd and 3rd papers ended up getting mashed together because I thought that would be the easiest way to discuss these issues. 

What contribution I would like to make to the literature

Last week I discussed the history of happiness research, especially since the Easterlin Paradox in economics in the mid-1970s and the advent of Hedonic Psychology in the 1990s. In the past I’ve presented the model that I’m going to be building. This week, on Bruce’s suggestion, I’m going to talk about how my model fits into the literature. That is to say, I’m going to explain what contribution I would like to make.

History of the economics of happiness

This week I’m going to talk about the history of happiness as a concept in public policy. As I’m doing a PhD in economics this will be mostly about economic attitudes to happiness, but as this is a public policy school I will discuss the concept more generally as well.

PhD Presentation: The Model

This was a presentation I gave recently to my PhD cohort, rehashing some things I have posted here previously. 

Let’s just start with the model. It looks like the following:

UTILITYi = log(WELLBEINGi) + HAPPINESSti + MEANINGi

Summary of the existentialist answer to the meaning of life

I wrote this in an email to a person who was at my PhD presentation and asked if I could elaborate on the philosophy a bit. I said I couldn’t do it in the time we had available but that I would write him something. Voila.

PhD presentation on happiness

These are two drafts of transcripts for presentations of my thesis theme to a group of other PhD students. They were both too long so I had to cut them down, but I thought I'd post them here for anyone interested and so I can refer back to them when necessary. 

My PhD is concerned with modelling happiness. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, and I am principally motivated by a desire to better integrate the philosophical literature on this topic into the existing research stream, which is mostly prosecuted by psychologists and economists. To date, academic happiness research, which began in the early 70s, has been principally driven by empirics rather than theory. This is understandable, because very little of what we mean by ‘happiness’ can be observed and measured. This is precisely why economics decided to focus on utility instead and to utilise revealed preferences and rational actor theory rather than something like the hedonic psychology model of behaviour. However, I am little bit troubled by this approach as I think it sometimes risks overlooking aspects of happiness that aren’t measurable. My hope is to develop a model of happiness that is more integrative and expansive and then test it empirically. Now as I just said, many of the hypotheses that I am interested in involve unobservable factors like ‘meaningfulness’ and living ethically. I am currently thinking of work arounds that will allow me to at least make a start on empirical stuff, but today I thought I would talk more about the theory itself and leave empirics to a future session.

Income doesn't make you happy

In class earlier this year there arose a conversation about what jobs people wanted and why. Now this was a language class, so some people just said things that were easy to remember, but one objective clearly stood out from the pack as the principle goal of many people: a good salary.

This is really dumb.

Happiness and economists’ obsession with income

This piece explores why economists are obsessed with income, why they are so challenged by the notion that income and happiness don't have a linear relationship, and why they should chill out because happiness and the Easterlin paradox really aren't a challenge to the economic way of thinking. 

Fundamental models in economics suggest that as someone’s income rises their utility will also increase. Empirical verification suggests that this is mostly correct, as are certain derived assumptions such as ‘people will choose more over less income’. A lot of these checks have used ‘revealed preferences’ to verify the claim (for very good reasons that I won’t go into here). That is, they note that people act in such a way as to maximise their income, ergo: they must prefer more income to less because income makes them happy. As a consequence of this kind of thinking, economics built a monolithic body of work that assumes that higher incomes make people happier and thereby enshrines higher incomes as the key goal of development and economic policy.

What this blog is about

I am a PhD student in economics at the Crawford School for Public Policy at the Australian National University. The working title of my thesis is 'Towards a Grand Theory of Utility: Integrating insights from philosophy, psychology and economics'. Its aim is to build a mathematical model of utility. It approaches this task from the perspective of philosophy (i.e. word-based theory), mathematics (i.e. numbers-based theory) and statistics (i.e. empirical investigation). My first paper will hopefully be available as a draft around the end of October. It will set out a preliminary specification of the model.

The good life with Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Donald Windham, Buffie Johnson and Tanaquil le Clerq

This blog tracks the progress of my PhD. It will contain book reviews, journal article summaries, random thoughts, working papers and short articles. I intend to use it as a kind of scratch pad for my research as well as a repository of any work that I do towards my PhD and my intended career as an academic. I will be publishing a lot of op-ed style commentaries over the next few years and all the ones that I retain rights to will be re-produced here after an appropriate time delay.

Thus far I have only uploaded a few pieces from my other, more general, blog: markfabian.blogspot.com. In the future I will be writing a lot more stuff that is relevant to this blog and will post on both sites.

What's wrong with subjective wellbeing?

In happiness research we tend to build models around survey questions pertaining to ‘subjective well being’. They might take the following form: “Have a good long think about your life right now. Think not so much about this moment, but about perhaps the past year and the trajectory you are on going forward. On a scale of 1-10, how happy do you think you are?” These questions are very powerful for measuring aspects of human flourishing that might evade conventional economic indicators like life expectancy and income. But they have their own problems. Moreover (or perhaps more accurately, depending on your perspective), we should be trying to measure and analyse other things as well.

I have two main concerns with subjective wellbeing: you don’t really know what you’re measuring; and it’s not a variable that can continuously increase as life gets better. Let’s take each of these issues in turn.

Happiness is an emotion not a state

Why do the Americans insist on harping this word - happiness? All day and all night they talk about it. They ask each other - are you happy? They exclaim, as though it were the most elegant and insightful thing anyone ever said - I just want to be happy. They've even written it into their constitution, as though it were the ultimate value. Their principal approach to ethics - utilitarianism - is founded on the principle of greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Money and Happiness: the proverb of the fisherman

Some of you may be familiar with the proverb of the fisherman. It goes something like this. There was once a fisherman who spent the morning fishing and the afternoon sleeping with his wife and playing with his kids. 

What’s wrong with subjective well-being?

I haven’t done a complete literature review yet (will take a while), but as far as I can tell, there are two things the human wellbeing/happiness literature hasn’t really tackled yet:

1.  Moving beyond happiness and subjective wellbeing to a more comprehensive model of human flourishing (e.g. happiness + meaning + needs) that can be estimated using a regression. A regression would allow you to weight the variables that affect human happiness appropriately. I foresee many problems; the most obvious is that some things are obviously non-linear, like the impact of income.

2. Examining both preference and life outcomes. There is plenty of literature looking at the effect of preferences on happiness, and plenty of literature on the effect of life circumstances on happiness. But, as far as I can tell, nobody has put the two together yet.

I addressed the first issue somewhat in my last article, so I won’t dwell on it here. I will be working on a collaborative project tackling it throughout this year, so I’ll post plenty of thoughts in the coming weeks.

Preliminary PhD thoughts

Perhaps the most fundamental concept in economics is utility. Individuals seek to maximise their utility, firms, governments and other actors respond by providing the goods that give people utility, and the economy emerges as a natural consequence. Yet utility remains a rather under-investigated concept. There are good reasons for this. Having utility as a black box allows us to treat it as entirely subjective; this allows economics to retain its amoral character. However, it also encourages economists to focus almost entirely on GDP growth as the source of higher utility and this has come to be an increasingly untenable 

assumption of late.