HAPPINESS

I see that the excellent Arnold Kling had a good jab a little while ago at the "happiness" critics. We have known since at least the times of ancient Lydia and King Croesus that money does not necessarily make you happy. And Hollywood has been proof of it for years. St. Paul too was pretty scathing about money in 1 Timothy 6:10. But Left-leaning economists and psychologists seem to have realized all that only in the last few years. "So if we take your money away it won't hurt" is their conclusion. Odd that people do seem to get really peeved if you rob or defraud them, though! And ask anybody if they would rather spend their own money or have someone else spend it instead and there is not much doubt about what the answer will be. And that's the point: What people want matters. If some arrogant git claims that he can spend my money better than I can, he deserves to be treated like the con-man he is. The fact that overall level of happiness is mainly a personality disposition or trait which remains fairly stable across a wide range of circumstances (e.g. some people are almost always happy and others are almost always mournful) does NOT mean that people are uninterested in improving those circumstances or getting the occasional "high". But Leftists don't care what people want, of course. "We know what's best for you" is their lying mantra.

Marginal Revolution has lots of interesting links on the subject too.

From my point of view as a psychometrician, however, the whole field of happiness measurement is pretty suspect. I spent 20 years measuring psychological traits and have had many papers published on that subject but I have always regarded the measurement of psychological states as too difficult for me. Why? Because what people say about their states seems to be almost the same as what they say about their traits. The best-known example of an attempt to measure both states and traits in the same field is almost certainly Spielberger's work on state/trait measurement of anxiety and I have myself worked with Spielberger's questionnaires. But I found that the questions used to index the two gave generally interchangeable results: People who described themselves as anxious "at the moment" were also highly likely to describe themselves as anxious "in general". And that is not necessarily just a measurement problem, either. It surely stands to reason that people who are anxious "in general" are also more likely to be anxious on any given occasion. That implies to me that very short-term changes in states may be detectable (e.g. the "high" someone gets on being told they have won a lottery) but the sort of medium term change economists are looking for probably is not.

Yet given that traits are by definition both stable and general behaviour tendencies and given that they are almost always shown to be highly genetically inheritable, any consideration of traits as an economic variable is surely beside the point. Economists are looking for the results of something, i.e. a change of some sort, and something that is inherently not very susceptible to change is surely a strange place to look for change. So it seems to me that any study of happiness as an economic variable must specifically look at states or "moods" -- and that does not generally seem even to be attempted. And the tradition of mood research in psychology exemplified by Joe Forgas and others usually seems to treat moods as short-lived rather than as being the sort of long-lasting change that economists have been looking for.

And a cross-cultural note might not go astray here either. There have for many years been international surveys done which purport to find out which countries have the happiest people. But the big difficulty that the researchers found was that happiness is not always an adequately translatable concept. Perhaps the most surprising case of that is that even a language as closely related to English as German does not have any real equivalent to our word "happiness" (nor do they have a good equivalent for our word "pink" and nor do we have anything like an adequate translation of their word "Reich"). The commonest German translation is "gluecklich" but that really means "lucky", and I well remember an old German Jewish man with whom I was discussing that many years ago. He told me: "gluecklich I am but happy I am not". He meant that he was lucky to have escaped Hitler but still missed much of his old life. So can we really have as a key economic variable something that is not even translatable into German?

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ELSEWHERE

I wonder if this ever happens in the USA? Australia's governing conservative party has selected an open lesbian as one of its parliamentary candidates in the forthcoming Federal election. As far as I know there are to be no open homosexuals representing Australia's major Leftist party -- though the leader of the Greens (Bob Brown) is homosexual. The lesbian woman concerned, Ingrid Tall, is a good candidate -- photogenic, intelligent, well-spoken and well-known on TV. How strange that those "homophobic" conservatives recognize merit when they see it! It may be noted that the same "racist" Australian conservatives put the first black (Neville Bonner) into Australia's Federal parliament. Note that BOTH major Australian political parties oppose homosexual marriage so the claim that opposition to homosexual marriage is "homophobic" does not stack up.

Jeff Jacoby has a great summary of John Kerry's "jokes"

Wayne Lusvardi gives another elaboration of his "Straussian" interpretation of why the USA is at war in Iraq. He sees the U.S. presence there as a warning to neighbouring Muslim states.

LOL: "Obviously pandering for votes, candidate John Kerry announced that he would immediately ban the dumping of Canadian garbage in Michigan if elected president." I guess he figures that they have already had enough garbage from him.

Leftist "compassion" vanishes when most needed: "Vagrants in Key West and many homeless have taken up residence in "safe zone sleeping areas" built earlier this year. The city offers showers, laundry facilities, and other amenities... a real problem the city is faced with today is what to do with the homeless population when the entire population of the city has been told to evacuate due to Hurricane Ivan. Well, it appears that some have piled into aging vehicles and left, but those remaining are apparently expected to fend for themselves when Hurricane Ivan hits the island".

Further to my post yesterday about FDR, there is a good note on PID about how FDR's "New Deal" harmed the poor.

There are some new postings up on SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and EDUCATION WATCH. Mirror sites here, here, here and here

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Anti-Americanism is in epidemic proportions in France and Germany but most people don't realize that it is in epidemic proportions in South Korea too. And what do those three countries have in common? They were liberated by America. And what is probably the most pro-American country in the world? Poland. They liberated themselves. Ego defeats rationality all the time.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause

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