The recent discussions of MU here have led me once again to consider some of
my long-standing doubts about the foundations of our field. The basic
psychological underpinning of economics is materialistic hedonism: the goal
of life is pleasure and pleasure is obtained through commodities.
While there may have been a general consensus for this in the time of Marx
and Mill, we are much less willing to subscribe to it today. In this light
I would like to share excerpts from the Washington Post, June 16, 1996, p.
C5. Author Richard Morin writes a weekly column in the Sunday Outlook
section subtitled *New facts and hot stats from the social sciences.*
The Social Anatomy of Happiness
In studies conducted over the past five decades, most people
consistently say they*re happy--including the poorest of the poor, the
disabled and victims of serious accident, people who you*d think have good
reason to be feeling a bit disconsolate.
In fact, researchers now suspect that human beings are genetically
hard-wired to be happy. How else to explain why people are so relentlessly
rosy about their personal well-being--and why new studies show that money,
romance, kids , fancy homes, cars, boats et. al. have surprisingly little to
do with personal happiness?
Psychologist Ed Diener of the U. of Illinois ... has given beepers to
students and had them record whether were feeling happy or not immediately
before they were buzzed. (Eighty percent of the time, they said they were.)
One major study asked random samples of people to rate themselves on a
10-point scale that ranges from *most happy* to *most unhappy.* The average
rating for Americans was 7.3 in 1989, the last year data was available,
Diener reported in the latest issue of Psychological Science.
Overall, he said, studies done in 43 countries found that nine out of
10 people were generally happy, including some folks who would seem to have
less to be happy about. One study found that 68 percent of disabled adults
reported they were somewhat to very satisfied with their lives. *People
with chronic mental problems also report positive levels of well being,* as
to the poor, victims of bad accidents, the unemployed and under-educated,
Diener wrote.
So much joy is apparently tough for some somber academics to take.
*Indeed, it is so amazing to some people that quadriplegics and other
people with severe disabilities could be happy that their self-reports are
dismissed as unbelievable,* he said.
... *The disadvantaged are not quite as happy as the advantaged--but
they are still in the positive zone.* Why? People probably adapt their
goals to their new situation, and then gain pleasure from making progress
toward the new set of goals.*
Diener also suspects happiness is in our genes. *It makes evolutionary
sense that people are built to be slightly happy because then negative
events and emotions can stand out more and grab our attention. ... Also the
positive bias gives us a slight preference toward risk and expansion.* ...
David Lykken and Auke Tellegen and the U. of Minnesota studied
differences in relative happiness among 2,310 twins. They believe that
about 80 percent of a person*s individual happiness is inherited ...
Remarkably, differences in income, education, marital status, or religion
*could account for no more than about 3 percent of the variance in well
being,* they found.
