Comments on: Arms Races, Happiness, and other Goods

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:56:00 +0000

But Will, what if we don’t meta-want to have what we want as much as we meta-want to be happy? Or, maybe we meta-prefer to pay some price in happiness to get what we want, but not any price? How neutral is revealed preference then?

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 11:25:00 +0000

Kevin, If we don’t go the objective route, then the question is whose subjectivism? My argument about revealed preference theory is in effect that revealed preference is a more neutral form of subjectivism.

By: kevin quinn

kevin quinn — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 11:15:00 +0000

Layard is a little late coming to this: Robert Frank has a huge body of work on this, starting with the brilliant *Choosing The Right Pond.* back in the eighties. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith also analyzed the frustrations of the attempt to “better one’s condition” where that is interpreted as a desire for relative success. He goes on to comment, Will-like, that this competition for status revolutionizes the material world, allows for the creation of Culture, and improves the (material) lot of the ordinary workman. I think that to make this postion tenable, one needs to reject a subjective theory of well-being in favor of an objective one. (I am not averse to doing so, but it seems to me libertarians would hesitate to pay such a price.) Otherwise, as Blair rightly emphasizes, the Prisoner’s Dilemma here is devastating. Neither Layard is saying the desire for status is a bad thing; the problem is that we cancel ourselves out in pursuing it. We value both income and status, but reforms such as Layard suggests could give us more income with no reduction in status. For a subjectivist, how can that be a bad thing?

By: McClain

McClain — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:58:00 +0000

Fear of hair plugs is funnier than fear of nuclear annihilation.
Also, you can get all the hair plugs you’ll ever need with a single nuke.
But one hair plug won’t even get you on the subway.

By: monkyboy

monkyboy — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:30:00 +0000

McClain, the word ‘warhead’ springs to mind.

Both nukes and hair plugs are painful and expensive to aquire. If you got ‘em, interested parties are more like to agree to a treaty with you…

I give up, what is the difference between hair plugs and nukes???

By: McClain

McClain — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:29:00 +0000

Oh, and ‘monkyboy:’ in your eagerness to play the troll, you’ve tripped over your own metaphor.
What’s the difference between a hair plug and a nuke?
I’m sure you’ll be able to puzzle out that riddle if you sit still and think about it a little bit….

By: McClain

McClain — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:24:00 +0000

Okay, doom’n'gloom boyz!
America’s going to hell in a handbasket, boo hoo.
Read a little history, do a little traveling, and get back to me on that, OK?
Wish I could bet money against that sort of wishful pessimism. Oh wait: I do! Stock market’s lookin’ pretty good this year….

By: Marcus Stanley

Marcus Stanley — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 14:22:00 +0000

Well, McClain, the rest of the world is mercantilists, actually, which you can argue about but has historically been a pretty effective path to economic development. But what definitely will suck for *us* is when we have to start living within our means again.

By: monkyboy

monkyboy — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 18:11:00 +0000

Hehe, McClain. Do we really care if some guy buys a hairpiece or leases a car they can’t afford to try and get laid? Not really.

The more interesting point is how countries compete for status. North Korea and Iran seem to think that nuclear weapons, the country equivalent of hair plugs, is the way to go. And the rest of the world is trying to stop them. Should make for an interesting decade…

By: McClain

McClain — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 13:06:00 +0000

“The United States will be spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

And its doing it on money borrowed from foreigners.”

That’s hilarious! The rest of the world are massive chump suckers to let us screw them over that badly.
Sucks to be them….

By: Blar

Blar — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:38:00 +0000

Will – I meant to use “good for us” in the most generally sense, to refer to anything worthwhile, not just happiness. You seem to be talking about “what we value” and “what people want” in such a general sense, but the way that you’re using “value” and “want” risks conflating what people actually do seek with what is worth seeking for them. They are not the same, as can be seen if we consider how evolution can “program” us to seek things that help us make copies of our genes but are not particularly valuable for us as people.

“The question is: if people want [status], and they are willing to bear the trade-off between happiness and status in their own lives, why impose the value of happiness by designing the value of anti-status-seeking social policy?”

One answer is that the arms race is “zero sum with respect to relative position.” A bunch of people are sacrificing the creation of new happiness for themselves in order to bring about the transfer of some existing status to themselves. Now, to the extent that the arms race promotes the creation something else of ultimate value, or the creation of happiness via something other than status, this waste of time and effort in status-seeking is less troubling. But it is an inefficiency that suggests opportunities for improving the system.

A second answer is that people are sometimes mistaken. They aren’t all that good at predicting what will make them happy, and they have mistaken ideas about how good it will be once they have more status, so they make decisions that they wouldn’t make if they had superhuman predictive ability and rationality, unclouded by the dictates of inclusive fitness.

I think that the government could make gradual changes to the structure of society that reduce how enticing the status-seeking arms race is and result in people being more likely to end up living lives that are good for them (in the general sense).

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:42:00 +0000

More for Blar, I agree about evolutionary reasons. But I didn’t say that status is good for us, in the sense that it makes us happy, only that we value it. My point wasn’t that we shouldn’t value happiness, too, just that when there is a conflict between values, we can’t just beg the question and demand that we evaluate one in terms of the other.

Arms race. Yes and no. It’s zero sum with respect to relative position. It’s positive sum with respect to absolute welfare. Wealth is produced in the process. More resources come out than went in. And this does make us a bit happier. Layard’s just saying that it’s an inefficient positive sum game,from the perspective of hedonic maximization, given diminishing marginal utility. It’s a waste of TIME we could be spending on vacation.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:30:00 +0000

Gareth, Strictly speaking, Chicago guys don’t care about happiness per se. They care about revealed preference, and it doesn’t matter what people prefer. Happiness, status, whatever.

You can have a collective action problem only if there is a problem. My point is that there isn’t a problem.

By: Benson Bear

Benson Bear — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:01:00 +0000

WillWilkinson, I don’t think you have successfully answered Blair’s points, but with respect to your attempt to do so, the point is that people are only willing to take the tradeoff between status and other goods in their lives because they would be worse off given that *only* they did not take this tradeoff. I am surprised that you don’t see that this has the structure of a prisoner’s dillema, and that it is simply collectively irrational and inefficient (as Blair points out). Did not this author mention this fact? That is why it is argued that there has to be some form of *collective* action to solve this problem.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:03:00 +0000

My take away point from Layard isn’t that we should abolish capitalism. It is that, as a society gets richer, the utility cost of redistribution is less, even if the cost in lost income/wealth is the same.

If you have a prior commitment to the paramount value of liberty in comparison to utility, Layard can be right, and it won’t matter to you. At most, his research generates self-help advice about valuing status less and family time more.

But if you are a Chicago-style libertarian (economic liberty is good because it increases aggregate utility), then you can’t just ignore Layard because maybe it doesn’t. Vast differences in status may generate more unhappiness than the wealth they make possible is worth. Which is not to say it is either possible or desirable to eliminate differences in status, but is to support a social democratic amelioration of them.