Clive Hamilton has set up a new website advocating a wellbeing manifesto. The general argument, as you’d expect from Clive, is that we should focus less on material wealth and use the benefits of economic growth (which I’d interpret in this context as technological progress rather than increased output) to deliver more desirable benefits, such as increases in leisure, better education and improvements in the environment. You can endorse the manifesto if you want and quite a few prominent people have done so .
I’m in general agreement with the ideas set out in the manifesto, though I’m taking my time to think about it before I decide whether to sign. On a quick reading the manifesto seems to capture a lot of points on which Clive and I agree, and omit some of those on which we’ve disagreed (we agree more than we disagree, but not on everything).
John Quiggin 
I read the list of “prominent people”. On a rough guess no more than 10 % of them work in private enterprise.
I’m surprised that anybody has signed it. The argument seems to be that we should use the benefits from economic growth (material wealth) to decrease material wealth to spend on other desirable things. This poses two questions: first, won’t decreasing material wealth in this way mean that there is less to spend on desirable things in future; second, given that the present state of affairs is a result of people’s voluntary decisions to pursue a certain combination of material wealth and other desirable things, doesn’t this amount to telling people that their work/leisure choice is wrong and forcing them to accept one more acceptable to people like Clive Hamilton?
For what it’s worth, I vote that John doesn’t sign the manifesto.
I’m surprised that anybody has signed it. The argument seems to be that we should use the benefits from economic growth (material wealth) to decrease material wealth to spend on other desirable things. This poses two questions: first, won’t decreasing material wealth in this way mean that there is less to spend on desirable things in future; second, given that the present state of affairs is a result of people’s voluntary decisions to pursue a certain combination of material wealth and other desirable things, doesn’t this amount to telling people that their work/leisure choice is wrong and forcing them to accept one more acceptable to people like Clive Hamilton?
For what it’s worth, I vote that John doesn’t sign the manifesto.
Its good to see manifestos sprouting up again, like mushrooms after spring rain. Unfortunately this one seems to be just a rehash of Whitlamite quality of life distributivism over Howardian quantity of goods productivism. NTTIAWWT, but there is nothing new or startling here.
The gist of what Hamilton is saying is that the Wellbeing person is one that is Healthy, Wealthy and Wise in Mind, Body and Soul. And a Good Society is one composed of such persons involved in dense networks of enduring relationships. All too truism.
However there is not even a hint that the manifesto writers have even considered the enormous implications that the technological revolution will have on the evolution of individual biology and the organization of institutional sociology. The evolutionary advantage will accrue to men who can be engineered to become more like mechanisms and machines which can be engineered to become more like organisms with some sort of synthesis down the track.
No doubt these events will closer to the end, rather than the beginning, of the average citizens life span. But the average public intellectual is more comfortable with ideology than technology, so what can one expect.
Go Clive and sign up J.Q.!
Go heart, more than bank balance.
We are forced to work to buy crappy things.
Spend lot’s of time getting them fixed.
John will continue to tell us the advantages of work till we fall over.
Thank oz, that most have enough intelligence not to believe his spin.
Do not buy and save the environment ,you already have the crappy goods you need. Our trade deficit is blowing out!
The “sea change” is a popular phenomenon, and there has been a number of articles and TV programs about it.
There is one thing that all of the people had in common though. They were already extremely wealthy to begin with. It is easy for someone with material wealth to step back for a while and change their perspective, however, the working poor don’t have that option.
It will fail because it relies on government coercion. Instead of advocating change through government coercion that site should be convincing individuals to live their lives differently.
I am aware that he is claiming that existing government policy skews us towards an escalating rat race but legislating a 35 hour week wont help.
He would have a better chance of achieving well-being in individuals if he convinced them that it is in their self-interest to only do a 40 hour week and then head home to spend time with the family.
This is the trouble with seeing government as the agent of change. All parties and everyone with an agenda to push attempts to use the government’s monopoly on coercion to achieve their agenda – whether others want it or not.
Just to nitpick because that’s my style (it may not contribute to happiness)
Number 1 on the list is ‘provide fulfilling work’. Couldn’t agree more as long as it’s not done by government coercion. Endorse the sentiment anyway. But then in no. 2 he bemoans ‘Australians work the longest hours’. How can he be sure that those Australians working the longest hours aren’t disproportionately those who find their work fulfilling? And if they find their work fulfilling, does he still want to go ahead and limit their working hours to 35 hours a week and less in future? Again it’s all false dichotomy-based thinking, a bit like Daniel Donahoo on Online Opinion claiming that blogging comes at the expense of ‘real community’ and ‘real happiness’. Maybe it isn’t an expense to the people who express their preferences.
Case in point: Sydney Morning Herald front page yesterday (5/5/05). Dads spend more time in the commute to work than they do at home with their kids.
A problem that would be alleviated not by doctrinaire lefty coercion but by the end of our socialist roads policy and a move towards rational user-pays cost-internalising land use & transport policy.
Sign up, John.
another reason I wouldn’t sgn up myself (well there are lots of reasons but here’s another one) is his comments on education. I agree that test results can be fetishised but not a word there about *learning* for the sake of learning – physical, emotional and moral wellbeing are mentioned. where is intellectual development? insofar as there is some mention of learning it’s about ‘learning about themselves and the societies around them’. yes, some social science would be good but all this seems to be about recasting schools as de facto social work and navel gazing institutions.
I see it as a statement of values against which we can test government policy, not as a request for coercion.
If we talk about “providing fulfilling work” for instance, it tells us that the federal government as an employer can structure its own activities in that direction. And it would stop them trumpeting the statistics about McJobs, and putting unemployed people into grotesque make work schemes.. etc.
The 35 hour week is fascinating because it is something that all of us have direct experience of, one way or another. Out of work when the person next door is working too much? Writing a blog which competes for attention in an audience which is “time poor”? Teaching at a university where the prep and marking time somehow comes for free? Preparing for that morning meeting the night before? Pushing to fit in some extra study so you can compete in the job market? Getting fat and RSI’d? Wondering why you spend less time with your kids than your father did? Faced with an overwhelmed bureaucracy that can’t deliver on its mission?
And of course, the most obvious one – knowing damn well the forty hour week is a joke, like the uninterrupted weekend.
Competition inexorably pushes the working week upwards. There’s only two ways to stop it – strong Unions or government regulation.
We can all find ways of arguing with bits of this, but the point is that it is a statement of principle. Having said that, I think it is a good bunch of principles, but I am not sure it is the best. They have to emerge from a dialogue with our majority values and our broad culture, and maybe this lot is too representative of the middle class left.
So the government should provide fulfilling work? Then that followed by a bunch of ‘feel good’ warm feelings of things that, again, the government should promote? It is people that changes anything not the bloody government!
Good doctor k, there is no suggestion that the government should provide fulfilling work, merely that it adopt workplace regulations that would allow such work to flourish. We already have coercive rules in labour law. Hamilton is, at his most coercive, arguing for the adjustment of existing laws. And good on him to. He would be the most pilloried public thinker in Australia these days. A sign he’s exposing some raw nerves somewhere.
WRONG PREFERENCES vs MARKET FAILURE
Joseph Clark said: “given that the present state of affairs is a result of people’s voluntary decisions to pursue a certain combination of material wealth and other desirable things, doesn’t this amount to telling people that their work/leisure choice is wrong…” Other comments also take this line.
Yes, intervention to override voluntary choices is based on the premise that people’s choices are wrong, but this is not the same thing as saying that their preferences are wrong. Economists often say that people’s choices are wrong – in the sense of failing to maximise either their personal or society’s aggregate wellbeing – due to various market failures, such as imperfect information, externalities and the like.
At one level, all that is being advocated in suggestions to limit materialism is that we correct for a certain market failure; specifically, the external costs that people, by consuming at ever higher levels, impose by lifting others’ expectations of what constitutes a reasonable standard of living. Get over it!
As I think I mentioned earlier it’s striking how often Clive Hamilton’s work elicits objections about government coercion even though he rarely advocates any particularly coercive policies.
The reality is that he is mostly relying on moral suasion and people are made uncomfortable by moral suasion, especially when it hits home. Since there’s no easy response, they tend to fall back on libertarian rhetoric.
Tom N:
I’m pretty unconfortable with the claim that the villians in a “keeping up with the Joneses” scenario are the Joneses themselves, rather than those who feel irrationally compelled to keep up with them.
“You can’t have one of those because then other people will want one” doesn’t sound like a very comfortable way to order a society.
JQ, a distinction between advocating something and advocating action in order to bring it about is a legitimate one, but here it leaves sceptics chasing shadows. If all Hamilton wants is to suggest that the office workers of Australia spend more time with their kids then fair enough, but it’s not a million miles from “be nice to your Mum” which isn’t usually seen as warranting the full manifesto treatment.
I think the question of what exactly the manifesto is proposing, other than a simple motherhood statement about the rat race et al, is Hamilton’s to answer, rather than something that can be used to dodge critics with the suggestion that if a mere statement of values makes them uncomfortable then they must have something to hide.
If Hamilton’s ideas catch on, then the environmental cataclysm that’s brewing may be delayed by a decade or so.
This is disappointing. I’m not getting any younger. One thing I can look forward to is to die in a significant way. And ecosystemic collapse is a much more exciting way to die than boring old cancer or a coronary occlusion.
Don’t sign JQ.
I don’t know what I find worse in this manifesto – the wooliness of the thinking or the sanctimoniousness with which it comes across. I actually agree with much of the substance, but how does a long list of “should”s actually achieve anything? On wooliness, just a few examples:
if (as is suggested by some commenters above) the suggestion on work is really only intended to say that that regulation should be improved, why does the document actually say “what can governments do?…provide fulfilling work”. Note – it is not a defence to claim that headings don’t count, in fact some readers won’t go to the fine print.
the “wellbeing” vs. “happiness” distinction is not clear. I suspect what’s going on here is really that the happiness agenda has been well staked out – academics are encouraged in their writing that relates to other people’s wirting to create a distinction, often without much difference, so they can claim to have the monopoly in thinking in a field.
on investment in early childhood, the studies actually show that the best return comes from reducing disadvantage in early childhood: ie the best investment is in pre school children from disadvantaged backgrounds and leads to huge returns over their lifetimes. investment in children in comfortable wealthy families makes little difference.
and is anyone else irritated by a manifesto that claims to be about increasing fairness and equality and then in its list of signatories puts the celebrities up front and all the rest of the ordinary people in alphabetical order below? so much for equality! and there’s some correlation in my mind between the cult of the celebrity and increased unhappiness among those who aren’t celebrities.
Katz, your reference to the coming ‘environmental cataclysm’ is a perfect example of the extremism and doom mongering that alienates so many people from environmental issues. The Marxist slogan that capitalism will collapse under its contradictions has been replaced with a green variation. Not surprisingly, given that many dogmatic Marxist academics have repackaged themselves as dogmatic greenies and/or post-modern cultural relativists.
If the greenies in my ex-deparment and the likes of David Suzuki (the green Michael Moore or Miranda Devine take your pick) are anything to go by the biggest problem in modern society is not environmental collapse but the lack of capacity for independent thought.
MB,
I attempted to crack a joke in the spirit of Jonathan Swift.
Swift’s “modest proposal” that the starving Irish eat their own children was also taken seriously.
So I suppose I cracked a successful Swiftian joke.
Aren’t I clever?
I am quite happy working hard – I enjoy my work a lot. I enjoy the time I spend with my family and the time I spend doing things for myself. My wife feels the same. I am justly rewarded for my work and I want a big house, lots of electronic gadgets, high-tech bicycles that cost at least $5,000, luxury cars, send my children to the best private schools, a holiday house and international holidays, and a good sized investment portfolio to support my retirement. My wife likes that scenario, too. If Clive Hamilton doesn’t like or want what we want, good luck to him, but I am quite happy so he can go and jam his manifesto where the sun does not shine.
So, Professor Quiggan, are you going to give up your $240,000 p.a. salary? I didn’t think so.
FEELING COMFORTABLE vs BEING EFFICIENT: A RESPONSE TO PAUL
Paul said: “I’m pretty unconfortable with the claim that the villians in a “keeping up with the Jonesesâ€? scenario are the Joneses themselves, rather than those who feel irrationally compelled to keep up with them.”
What is “irrational” about having a preference for equality, or for one’s utility being influenced by expectations as well as consumption (broadly defined), with expectations being dependent inter alia on living standards on those living in the neighborhood? You are effectively calling people’s hard-wired preferences “irrational”.
As for you feeling “uncomfortable”, do you feel uncomfortable about imposing pollution taxes on factories, or excise taxes on smokers? That’s all a progressive consumption tax is. Your argument is akin to saying that the affected population should be forced to bribe the factory not to pollute. Given the transactions costs, however, I think it is more efficient to make the factory owner buy the rights to the air, not its victims. Similarly, I think it is more efficient to tax the Jones’ consumption; not the far more diffuse victims of their consumption choices.
Razor, that is pretty extraordinary. You seem to be saying that you are happy so anyone else that suggests other people aren’t happy must be wrong.
Or that anyone else who suggests that your happiness is achieved at their expense should get stuffed.
Mm.. good person to work for.
Tom:
A “preference for equality” which operates by decreasing one’s own utility when those around you appear to be materially better off does indeed strike me as irrational or uncomfortable. I can’t think of anything more deserving of the overused “politics of envy” label.
As to whether it’s hardwired – I’d say that’s both unproven and, if true, pretty bad news for the Hamilton manifesto.
As to the proposal for a pigouvian tax on potentially envy-causing consumption (what if I promise to only use my I-Pod indoors?) that’s a perfect example of punishing individuals on the basis of irrational, external preferences. If I legitmately don’t like having filthy darkies living in my street, and their presence makes me unhappy, then why not tax them back to their rural ghettos? (a situation which I suggest, hopefully obviously, has no place being seen as an “externality” notwithstanding the fact that it technically fits the criteria for one).
“The Marxist slogan that capitalism will collapse under its contradictions has been replaced with a green variation. Not surprisingly, given that many dogmatic Marxist academics have repackaged themselves as dogmatic greenies and/or post-modern cultural relativists.”
One cannot be simultaneously a “dogmatic greeny” and a “post-modern cultural relativist”, for the simple reason that one cannot simultaneously assert a claim to certain knowledge of the objective reality of imminent environmental crisis *and* assert the strong social-constructivist view that there is no such thing as certain, objective truth and that therefore the notion of environmental crisis is a discursive myth.
You’d think that wouldn’t you? But in my exposure to post-modernism the limits on objective knowledge tend to be applied with extreme selectivity. Questioning the boundaries of every concept is a wonderful parlour trick which can apparently be fashioned into an academic career, but taken to it’s logical conclusion it tends to render discussion on topics other than how “no one can really know anything” impossible.
I’m in two minds about this stuff. I see the point that an arms race in consumption ends up with everybody losing; if you have a low-cost way of enforcing an arms control treaty everyone can win.
But I also think that such a treaty would be high cost. Changing behaviour on this scale, whether by legal pressure or social ostracism, is inevitably going to involve a lot of coercion. And the attitudes that permit and encourage authoritarianism feed on themselves – give people the notion that they have a perfect right to dictate my working hours and very soon they’ll be thinking they can dictate other parts of my living arrangements.
Besides, it’s not at all clear to me that much all our consumption behaviour *is* due to an arms race. There can be other reasons for working hard, f’rinstance – eg you like your job, or you think it’s important, or you want to make your pile now to retire early, or even that you want enough money to do good works with.
Apart from that, Stephen’s bit about the manifesto’s woolly sanctimoniousness tone is true – I wouldn’t sign it in a pink fit.
David Tilley, your interpretation of what I wrote is completely wrong and infers things that are untrue.
My lifestyle is the type that Hamilton seems to think is an unhappy one. I strongly disagree with him. I am very happy seeking a happy existence which includes material wealth, as much of it as I can accumulate. I don’t care if others are unhappy in their life, whether they live a materialistic or a spiritual one, because each individual is responsible for their own level of happiness. As adults we have the power to decide how we live our life including our attitudes towards our current circumstances.
You also suggest that my happiness is at the expense of other peoples happiness. Please prove your assertion.
Hamilton’s desire to have us live in a manner that he thinks is appropriate makes me unhappy. It is his type which means that we have kill-joy government regulation such as the luxury car tax – now that makes me unhappy.
THE ECONOMICS OF ENVY: A FURTHER RESPONSE TO PAUL
You do not explain how a preference for equality, or for keeping up with the Jones, is “irrational”. Is your preference for social interaction, and the disutility you suffer when that preference is not met, “irrational”? No. What you do about fulfilling that preference may or may not be rational, but the preference itself is not – it is simply a preference you have, and from which consequences flow.
You deride “envy”, but if people are hard-wired to be envious, or even if they in some sense “choose” to be envious, should not policymakers take envy into account? You seem to be simply imposing your preferences on others here – the charge levelled at Hamilton. You think that people should not be envious because envy is not virtuous- just as Hamilton thinks people should not be materialistic (partly) because materialism is not virtuous – and so you will design policy accordingly!
In any case, if you see the Jones’ neighbours’ problem as one of envy, I could respond that a key driver of Jones’ work and consumption choices is a desire to be envied. If you are against respecting preferences based on envy, then presumably you would not have any objections to government actions that effectively “disrepected” the Jones’ envy-based preferences to get ahead also.
That said, I think labelling the “positional externalities” issue as being about the “politics of envy” does not really capture what is going on. Upward influences on expectations, and the adverse welfare effects that flow from them, often operate far more subtlely and diffusely than suggested by that label, and harm the rich as well as the poor. Indeed, for any given distribution of income, whether highly equal or highly unequal, both the Jones and their neighbours would be better off with higher consumption taxes and the slowdown in material advance that they imply.
I’ll leave aside the issue of consumption generated by the desire to cause envy. It’s unproven and certainly no basis for a generalised tax on consumption of the sort proposed. Tax explicitly positional goods? maybe. Certainly my earlier objections relate mainly to basing the tax solely on consumption “harming” others.
Now, envy driven disutility may be “rational” in precisely the same way that racism is, but it is no more acceptable as a basis for policy formation. If people feel bad because other people -ceteris paribus- become more happy then their preferences are identifiably “bad” however you want to frame the boundaries of that concept. I simply don’t buy an attempt to equate envy (“I feel sad when those around me feel happy under certain arbitrary conditions”) with materialism (“I feel happy when I devote my resources to the acquisition of material goods”) as unacceptable preferences, I think the perniciousness of envy can be established independently and that the attempt to equate them reveals the sort of knee-jerk moralistic opposition to materialism that animates Hamilton’s argument. I’d be happy for Hamilton to adopt “I see materialism as in inherent bad, much as other people see emotions like hatred and jealousy” as a mission statement, but I don’t think it would do him many favours.
The final point strikes me as an extremely broad assertion, and one I’d like to see modelled based on explicit assumptions as to utility functions and the effect of the tax before I engage with it seriously.
Simon: Where dos it say ‘prominent people’?
Joseph: As John explained, the argument is that we can benefit from higher productivity by working less rather than producing more.
David H: Poverty in Australia is mainly due to unemployment. The manifisto advocates a fairer distribution of work.
Cameron (and everyone else who keeps going on about coercion): where does it advocate coercion? Does use of the word ‘should’ always imply a willingness to coerce?
Jason: Do you really think that an aspiration to establish a 35-hour week as a standard is so bizarre? Are you really afraid someone will stop you working for the joy of it? You are just doing your share of nitpicking, as you say.
Razor: Your honest answer to this question, please: Would you be happier in a world where everyone else earned $240,000 and you earned $100,000, or one in which everyone else earned $50,000 and you earned $90,000?
Paul: Your responses to Tom suggest you are not really interested in the logic of the argument.
Stephen: I think your crticisms about work and eduaction are unwarranted. Vague isn’t the same as woolly-minded. I don’t understand the point about happiness versus well-being: what in the manifesto turns on this distinction? I do agree with you about the signatures, though.
John: Fred Argy signed.
James: I think the logic of Tom N’s argument is perfectly clear – that the existence of external preferences as to the consumption of others implies that a pigouvian tax on consumption would be welfare increasing. I respond that even were this so, it is unjustifiable as an imposition of external preferences on the actions of the hypothetical Joneses, comparable to legislating to satisfy the preferences of racists.
It’s not clear to me where I have lost the thread of his argument, but I’d love to be enlightned. While you’re at it, I made a point above about the kind of encouraging/compelling shadowboxing you engage in in your post – and the burden to clairfy precisely what you’re on about rather rests with the party advocating reform. Hamilton’s programme is either coercive or trivial, and unsurpiringly people seem to have decided the former possibility is more worth talking about.
Jim, relative wealth doesn’t bother me. The fact that Warren Buffet, Kerry Packer et al have shed loads and I don’t, doesn’t particluarly bother me. Gives me something to aspire to, but doesn’t bother me. My happiness is my own responsibility. For example, most of my friends did the Europe thing post-uni, but I didn’t because I couldn’t afford it. I am not jealous of this – I accept that that is how it was. I also know that when I go to Europe I won’t be back-packing. I don’t drive a luxury car yet, but I will. My kids won’t grow up in hand-me downs and they won’t eat cabbage and mince for dinner so that I can afford the bills for the school fees (as my parents and I did). The left rejoices in the politics of envy. The right believe in freedom and true freedom only comes when an adult truly understands that they are responsible for all aspects of their own lives, including deciding whether to be happy or envious.
I had a lot of trouble understanding the surprisingly strong objections made to the manifesto by many of the right wing commentators upthread. It is after all really just a statement of desired outcomes and a fairly vague and flexible one at that. What’s more, most of the objections seem to be illogical or irrelevant to what the manifesto is saying.
Then I read JQ say:
“The reality is that he is mostly relying on moral suasion and people are made uncomfortable by moral suasion, especially when it hits home. Since there’s no easy response, they tend to fall back on libertarian rhetoric.”
and it all made sense. This manifesto has struck a nerve because it highlights the failures of our present economic course and casts a lot of doubt on the wisdom of ever increasing economic wealth as the primary method of improving society, especially social well-being, which those on the right tend to focus on.
REJOINDER TO PAUL
Paul said: “If people feel bad because other people become more happy then their preferences are identifiably “badâ€? however you want to frame the boundaries of that concept” and “envy driven disutility may be “rationalâ€? in precisely the same way that racism is, but it is no more acceptable as a basis for policy formation.”
If envy is a hard-wired attribute of humans, I cannot see how it is “bad” in a moral sense. Of course, anything that makes people unhappy is “bad” if the goal is welfare maximisation. Also, some actions based on a hard-wired envy preference, such as appropriating the Jones’s possessions, may also be “bad”. But you would no doubt see some actions generated by envy – such as working to earn enough to catch up with the Jones – as “good”. Thus, I do not think that labelling envy itself as “bad” gets you very far in a policy sense – just as labelling racism, or materialism, or abortion, as bad does not per se indicate appropriate policy responses to the pervasiveness of these phenomena.
More importantly, I repeat that thinking of the positional externalities issue in terms of “the politics of envy” is not a useful way of understanding the arguments and processes entailed. It implies an us-and-them view of the world that is not relevant here, for all – irrespective of the distribution of income within society – are affected by rising expectations of what it is to be poor, comfortable or rich in our society, and all would benefit from consumption taxes to slow the material advance.^
_______
You are correct in stating that I’m operating on the assumption that wealth is, preferences aside, a non-zero sum game – though frankly I think a lot of the support for equality is based on at least a subconscious assumption that it’s not. I’ll refrain however from psychoanalysing those I disagree with until we’ve come to some kind of conclusion on the facts of the matter – a courtesy it would be nice to see extended both ways.
Now, the first part of your response rests on the notion that a particular utility function, one which treats the utility of ones neighbours as a negative input, is in some sense “hard-wired”. I’ve challenged this assertion factually, and further suggested that it’s acceptance has profoundly negative implications for Hamilton’s programme, particularly the “lite” version which is advanced (as far as I can tell) whenever it is rheotircally convenient to do so. A world full of people hardwired to be unhappy when materially inferior to their neighbours is not one likely to be morally suaded to buy less.
But in any case, my analogy, racism, has far more evidence backing its “hard-wired” nature than any form of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses effect, but is not therefore an unexptionable part of the utilitarian calculus. Racism is also fairly pervasive, and I also have no difficulty in rejecting that as a moral defence of either it or envy.
Finally, it’s possible to imagine positive actions taken on the basis of racist preference, including the simple example you adopt of working hard, in this case so as to escape the members of the race in question.
I’ll reiterate then that envy, which, to repeat, takes the form in your model of an individual who will be unambiguously less happy each time those around them, whether richer or poorer, acquire additional material goods, as an animating force for government action makes me uncomfortable, and I think it’s an area where the government can legitimately recognise the preferences in question but refuse to act in response to them because they are morally “bad”. I’d suggest further that there’s social support for that – that it’s considered socially unacceptable to suggest that one would be more happy if an otherwise blameless individual was materially worse off – which is why such preferences are so often cloacked in the language of redistribution.
As to the final point, I’ll let you develop it but jump in and say that happiness levels do not appear to have been negatively effected by the long term rise in the material conditions of each level of society.
HARD-WIRING and MORAL SUASION
Paul said: “I’ve challenged this assertion [that “envy” is hard-wired] factually, and further suggested that it’s acceptance has profoundly negative implications for Hamilton’s programme, particularly the “liteâ€? version which is advanced (as far as I can tell) whenever it is rheotircally convenient to do so. A world full of people hardwired to be unhappy when materially inferior to their neighbours is not one likely to be morally suaded to buy less.
Envy not hard-wired??? Look at a toddler playing happily in a sandpit and then watch the jealousy explode and fights ensue when another sproglet with a plastic shovel turns up!
I agree that moral suasion is insufficient to deal with the market failure here. Down-shifters, while maximising their utility, will still suffer psychic costs because of the high consumption levels around them – and will not shift down as much as would be privately optimal in the absence of such influences. Thus, I’m not much of a fan of the “lite” program either, and believe inter alia that consumption taxes are probably warranted.
THE POLITICS OF ENVY vs THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ECONOMICS OF POSITIONAL EXTERNALITIES
Paul said: “I’d suggest further that there’s social support for that [envy being seen as “bad”] – that it’s considered socially unacceptable to suggest that one would be more happy if an otherwise blameless individual was materially worse off.”
As I have mentioned previously, it is unhelpful to conflate the positional externalities issue with conventional ‘envy’ type depictions. No doubt some people see their neighbours’ new BMW and do feel jealous and unhappy as a direct result, but generally the mechanisms through which expectations increase are far more subtle and diffuse.
Most people do not consciously decide at any point that the standard of living their family enjoyed when they were kids is inadequate; they just know intuitively that if they had a house that size and a small box-type TV today, rather than a McMansion and a flatscreen etc that they need to work their butts off to acquire, they’d feel pretty unhappy. In other words, people’s expectations rise through subconscious means and they are, in that respect, themselves “blameless” victims of the process of material increase. On this basis, it is hard to see what moral grounds one could advance for ignoring the costs that this process imposes on them.
If there are no valid moral grounds for ignoring these costs, what is left facing the policymaker is an untaxed externality. In my experience, “envy” arguments are often used by free market types to avoid facing up to the implications of this.
John, The openign sentence (preamble) for the website says,
“Many Australians feel that the political system has let them down, and that governments are not responding to their real concerns.”
and later;
“Many people feel alienated from the political process; the main parties seem too alike and think of progress only in material terms. The challenge of our age is to build a new politics that is committed, above all, to improving our wellbeing.”
and further;
“This manifesto proposes nine areas in which a government could and should enact policies to improve national wellbeing.”
It is all about using government as the agent of change. I think my statement on coercion is justified and not just libertarian rhetoric. I dont see this as any different from an advocacy group seeking to stop gays marry or detain refugees indefinitely.
It’s the agent of change = coercion connection that seems pretty soft. Locating a need for a school in an educationally disadvantaged community and providing it seems not to be an act of coercion. And a huge amount of the government’s business is of this kind.
SWIO, although many of the criticisms above are from the right, some are also from the left. why is this sort of thing a problem from a progressive pov? because it encourages people to think that by signing a manifesto they are actually doing something to bring about change – whereas they are doing nothing of the sort. I won’t quibble with James about whether it is woolly or merely vague – either way, because there is such a wide range of possible meanings it in practice can be interpreted to encompass a vast number of alternative policies (sure, not all – but a very wide range). Some members of the present government would probably express (in fact I am sure some have expressed) similar ideals. for real progress to be made we need concrete ideas for what actually could be done, not just expressions of ideals.
The Manifesto appears to me to be a derivative of the Genuine Progress Indicator, an alternative measure of social and economic progress which Clive Hamilton was associated with a few years ago. I’m surprised that the Manifesto site doesn’t seem to mention the GPI.
Paul,
I withdraw the logic accusation. One or two things in your second comment made me think you’d missed the point – erroneously, as I realised on a second reading. In fact your whole exchange with Tom serves to illuminate the whole externality issue pretty well. So it boils down to this: whether the unhappiness occasioned by relative poverty is more like disutility from pollution, or more like disutility from having black people in one’s street – the one a reasonable sentiment, worthy of inclusion in the felicific calculus; the other an irrational and ignoble sentiment, having no weight in economic policy. It’s hard not to be influenced in this by the choice of terminology: envy sounds thoroughly discreditable, while a (hard-wired) preference for equality sounds like cause for celebration. My sympathies tend to the latter view, but I won’t pretend there’s a simple answer.
In any case, there was always a second resaon for the pigovian tax, namely that the utility from extra income is shortlived and indeed illusory because we are soon habituated to the new comforts. In seeking them, we sacrifice leisure (in particular, time with family and friends). In doing so we accept a permanent loss in exchange for a transitory gain, and irreversibly because our exectations have been ratcheted up.
I strongly reject your argument that these observations are trivial. The basic observation driving these ideas, that beyond a certain point richer societies aren’t happier ones, has profound implications for the measurement and management of economic activity. This is true even if paticular proposals jar with your preconceptions about personal liberty.
We systematically overestimate the amount of wellbeing associated with high incomes and long work hours. That’s right those hardworking trades(wo)men who aspire to or have acquired their McMansions have got no idea. They are in fact unhappy. Clearly what they should be aiming for is an inner city terrace. Or even better be happy with their cream brick in the western suburbs. Got to know where it was that we uneducated selfish spiritually barren peasants went wrong. Was it when we aspired to have a mud hut instead of a cave or when we wanted windows with glass in them. Where is that point beyond which we aren’t happier?
“Throughout history sages have counselled that happiness is not a goal but a consequence of how we live, that it comes from being content with what we have�
Really, so the utilitarian view that happiness is as a matter of fact the ultimate aim at which all human actions are directed and that it is therefore the ultimate standard by which to judge the rightness or wrongness of actions doesn’t mean that happiness is a goal.
We all know where this misguided notion of happiness as a goal rather than being content with one’s lot came from. Those individualistic, selfish, materialistic, competitive market driven capitalist Yanks who are clearly the most unhappy people ever. If only they had been content with their lot and not fought a war of Independence and kicked out King George. The whole world would now be a happier place. Pursuit of happiness, what a wrong turn they took. There is no doubt scientific evidence to support this belief.
Could have thought that the late Pope wrote this manifesto. Certainly the bit about being content with your lot, or rather put up with it and aspire to happiness in another place. Now that has been a message that has resonated through the ages but not necessarily out of the mouths of sages.
I accept that the story that richer societies are more risk averse but it is not the McMansion lot that live in a state of fear believing that lurking beneath every technological advance is an apocalypse waiting to doom us.
This is pious pompous piffle and simply another attack on the aspiring classes. “Advertising makes us more materialistic, even though we know that people who are more materialistic are usually more self-absorbed.� We know that do we? The first proposition is shaky, the second is simply ideology.
Didn’t seem that it is in McMansion land that it’s a must to have a $3000 xoodle.
. “but I am quite happy so he can go and jam his manifesto where the sun does not shine.’ Love it razor, and I am sure McMansion land would feel the same. Silly twits think they know what they want out of this life and that the choices they have made are the right ones for them, eg in causing the kind of political parties and governments they have. Though 4 tradesmen and a shop assistant have signed up.
Wellbeing, rubbish, know your place more likely
is it this “wellbeing ” concept that is the basis of the german “wellness” marketing for flash bathroom gear.
Reading some of these blogs leaves me breathless at how some people’s ideological fixations lead them to interpret quite plain statements in the most bizarre ways. Let me make three general points and one specific one.
I am constantly bewildered at how the libertarians who dominate this blog space interpret any advocacy of social change as meaning support for ‘government coercion’. In fact, for these people all government actions are coercive. Does that mean all taxation is coercion? Are seat belt laws coercive? Are all laws coercion? Of course, the choice of word is tendentious, and shows only how distant the libertarians are from the thinking or odinary citizens.
More than that, this view that government action is equivalent to coercion is profoundly anti-democratic, for it emans that any collective decisions taken by the citizens implemnted by their elected government is morally objectionable.
I think the explanation is that the liberatarians really do believe that history has come to an end and any argument in favour of a new dispensation threatens to disinter history, an intensely threatening prospect because it may undo two decades of neoliberal successes.
This also seems to explain why the Wellbeing Manifesto has been interpreted by many as nothing more than a set of actions that the government must implement (and impose on an unwilling citizenry). In fact it is a program for social change. Its political objective is to contribute to a social movement that would, in time, cause far-reaching social transformation — a call to arms, if you like. It is a sign of the narrowness of intellect, and ignorance of history, that the libertarians cannot imagine a different social order or the possibility of a historical transition.
The third point is the astonshing ego-centricity of the arguments of most bloggers. Judgements about how the world is, and what would improve social and personal wellbeing, are based on a series of statements about the bloggers’ personal likes and dislikes. The advantage of being a social researcher is that one does not assume that one’s own experience is a microcosm of the world, that in fact one’s own experience can be profoundly misleading. A social researcher looks at the evidence. None of the bloggers have considered the evidence — neither the evidence about wellbeing presented in Richard Eckerlsey’s article on the website, or my review of it in “Growth Fetish” or that canvassed so expertly in Richard Layard’s new book “Happiness”. Decades of research by psychologists, economists and sociologists count for nothing for the blogger set on a good rant.
Finally, the fatuous post by Stephen Bartos, a long-time ALP functionary, confirms not so much how utterly bereft the modern Labor Party is of ideas, but the extent to which it is actively hostile towards ideas and how fearful it is of any challenge to the status quo.
Clive – I left the ALP in around 1987 because of concerns I had with it – as you ought to know. I have however considered rejoining recently, because something has to be done about the state of our polity. And you have not responded to my post, just indulged in namecalling. Your characterisation of the manifesto as “quite plain statements” is disingenuous at best. If you want real ideas for change, why not read some of the things I have been writing on immigration, refugees, economic reform, governance: you might be surprised.
I have a lecture to prepare after having spent my last two weeks (including weekends) marking essays and tutoring classes of students sweating on their essay results, so I can only be brief in reply to my old comrade in student union struggle Steve Bartos.
Steve writes:
“for real progress to be made we need concrete ideas for what actually could be done, not just expressions of ideals.”
Agreed. But the concrete ideas need to be set within an intellectual and ethical master-frame on the basis of which they can be argued for and justified to the wider public. The Wellbeing Manifesto, as I read it, seeks to provide such a master-frame. As for vagueness/wooliness, it is hardly vaguer than some of the catch-phrases like “freedom”, “family”, “aspiration”, “security” etc., which have been deployed successfully as rhetorical vessels for certain policies which I think Steve, Clive and myself would agree in being critical of.
I would also agree with Steve that some elements of the Manifesto are likely to chime with the values of members and supporters of the Liberal and National Parties. Might I suggest that this may be a potential strength rather than a weakness?
As for Ros, “What shall it profit a (wo)man if (s)he gains the world and loses her/his soul?”. At a more mundane level, what shall it profit her if she gains a McMansion and its lawns and flower beds turn into a dustbowl because the weather is getting hotter and drier and the dams are near empty?
Having said all that, there is one dilemma which could be usefully chewed over by those of us who support the sentiments in the Manifesto. That is that, whilst desiring a society which has moved beyond the Growth Paradigm in economics and the primacy of material goals in aspirations, it is undeniably the case that the transition, by democratic means, to a society which is ecologically sustainable, socially just and in general conforms to the values in the manifesto will nonetheless require considerable economic growth and enterpreneurial initiative (albeit of a qualitatively different kind to what we’re used to seeing) *and* processes of structural adjustment which will be unsettling for many of those involved, not all of whom will be materially affluent.
It is also likely that many of the specific, practical policies which will be needed to operationalise the values in the Manifesto will be a source of conflict, and that not all of those in opposition to those policies will be doing so on the basis of unenlightened prejudice or defence of unjustified privileges. Something for us to think about.
The manifesto blows it because it couldn’t stick with building the best things in life, it had to attack what the authors believe to be the worst things in life. Thus its core business was exposed, dislike of “the market�. The villains of the piece are individualism, selfishness, materialism, competition , people may not at the same time show trust, self-restraint, mutual respect and generosity. They are mutually exclusive in this ideology. Market transactions can only be zero-sum rather than positive-sum
The manifesto and article from Eckersley claim to be scientific but the ideology overwhelms the scientific considerations. Their revelations spring from I assume David Myer’s and Ed Diener’s SWB
Not all agree with Myer’s and Diener’s view, or the direction of their causal arrow for example. Or this
“If the transitory variations of well-being are largely due to fortune’s favors, whereas the midpoint of these variations is determined by the great genetic lottery that occurs at conception, then we are led to conclude that individual differences in human happiness – how one feels at the moment and also how one feels on average over time – are primarily a matter of chance.â€? David Lykken and Auke Tellegen
The relative constancy of peoples and nations levels of SWB would seem to support this. It is not the case that there is discernible downward trend in Australia for example. Other research to what is presented for the manifesto would in fact indicate that over the last 30 years or so those capitalist Americans have in fact been trending up in satisfaction with life.
But if they want to maintain that the well being theory has much to tell us then they must acknowledge that Diener and Myer say this
“ In individualistic nations, reports of global well-being are high, and satisfaction with domains such as marriage are extremely highâ€? or “But again, there are so many things that differentiate countries – their wealth, their democracy, the extent to which they’re individualistic, and their values, the extent to which religion is strong in the culture. I mean these things all inter-mix, and so it’s hard to disentangle them, to know what’s accounting for say, the greater happiness of “
and both Diener and Myer concedes that there is some gain from monetary gain.
As for the libertarian attack, isn’t the line of this manifesto, which we can choose or decide differently than we do, that we can act to make the future different, despite what has happened in the past.
Or the search for happiness is often confused with the pursuit of pleasure, The Manifesto’s authors should have a word with Erasmus or Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. The easy dismissal of those Epicureans I find somewhat brave.
Certainly there is a religious dislike of happiness being equated with pleasure but even that isn’t universally accepted.
The relative constancy of peoples and nations levels of SWB would seem to support this. It is not the case that there is discernible downward trend in Australia for example. Other research to what is presented for the manifesto would in fact indicate that over the last 30 years or so those capitalist Americans have in fact been trending up in satisfaction with life.
But if they want to maintain that the well being theory has much to tell us then they must acknowledge that Diener and Myer say this
“ In individualistic nations, reports of global well-being are high, and satisfaction with domains such as marriage are extremely highâ€? or “But again, there are so many things that differentiate countries – their wealth, their democracy, the extent to which they’re individualistic, and their values, the extent to which religion is strong in the culture. I mean these things all inter-mix, and so it’s hard to disentangle them, to know what’s accounting for say, the greater happiness of “
and both Diener and Myer concedes that there is some gain from monetary gain.
As for the libertarian attack, isn’t the line of this manifesto, which we can choose or decide differently than we do, that we can act to make the future different, despite what has happened in the past.
Or the search for happiness is often confused with the pursuit of pleasure, The Manifesto’s authors should have a word with Erasmus or Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. The easy dismissal of those Epicureans I find somewhat brave.
Certainly there is a religious dislike of happiness being equated with pleasure but even that isn’t universally accepted.
The relative constancy of peoples and nations levels of SWB would seem to support this. It is not the case that there is discernible downward trend in Australia for example. Other research to what is presented for the manifesto would in fact indicate that over the last 30 years or so those capitalist Americans have in fact been trending up in satisfaction with life.
But if they want to maintain that the well being theory has much to tell us then they must acknowledge that Diener and Myer say this
“ In individualistic nations, reports of global well-being are high, and satisfaction with domains such as marriage are extremely highâ€? or “But again, there are so many things that differentiate countries – their wealth, their democracy, the extent to which they’re individualistic, and their values, the extent to which religion is strong in the culture. I mean these things all inter-mix, and so it’s hard to disentangle them, to know what’s accounting for say, the greater happiness of “
and both Diener and Myer concedes that there is some gain from monetary gain.
As for the libertarian attack, isn’t the line of this manifesto, which we can choose or decide differently than we do, that we can act to make the future different, despite what has happened in the past.
Or the search for happiness is often confused with the pursuit of pleasure, The Manifesto’s authors should have a word with Erasmus or Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. The easy dismissal of those Epicureans I find somewhat brave.
Certainly there is a religious dislike of happiness being equated with pleasure but even that isn’t universally accepted.
Thomas More “the chief part of a person’s happiness consists of pleasure.”
As to dustbowls just as I thought this is not about me being happy it is about the wrongness of my happiness.
Since John Stuart Mill has been invoked three times in the one comment, I would like to respond that I think his conception of a stationary-state economy, supporting a society pursuing post-material aspirations once a reasonable level of material comfort had been achieved, was very much in line with the thinking in the Manifesto.
Ros also says:
“As to dustbowls just as I thought this is not about me being happy it is about the wrongness of my happiness.”
No, my point was that if your happiness requires a certain take on resources and the assimilative capacity of ecosystems, and if there are more people aspiring to this form of happiness than there are resources and assimilative capacity to support it, then something is going to give.
Tom:
On hard-wired preferences:
I think you’ll find that analogising an adult behaviour to something done by toddlers falls a long way short of convincing the sceptics that a behaviour is hard-wired. I am, however, a believer in hard-wired behaviours and am mainly playing devil’s advocate on this point. I’ll concede it for the sake of argument and suggest only that hardwiredness implies neither moral acceptability nor immutability.
On the failure of the “lite”/moral suasion model:
Again, we are in broad agreement here, though it appears neither of us thinks much of non-coercive manifestos calling for shifts in hard-wired values. I feel however your programme overlooks the very real external costs of coercing people to change their patterns of consumption – people hate being made to do what’s good for them as much as they hate the material success of the investment banker down the road.
On positional Externalities and Psychology:
I perceive a very real shift in emphasis in your approach – from the notion that another individual’s consumption makes me less happy with my lot to the notion that consumption patterns generally influence my requirements for happiness.
So far I’ve left aside the very real technical problems with a taxes of the kind you suggest, and am happy to continue doing so, except to indicate that I believe them to be insuperable even if a prima facie case for a pigouvian consumption tax is made out.
Now, there are, I think, two errors which cause that case to unravel. The first is that people are generally happy with their lot in the absence of material progress. I simply don’t believe this to be the case, and that the desire for a bigger house and a better something else will be universal whether than something else is a flat screen television or a toaster oven. We don’t “decide we’d like to be better off than our parents at some point in our lives” we have always wanted to be better off than we were and so did our parents. So you case is not for a consumption tax but for restricting any information leading to awareness of possible improvements in one’s standard of living, whether or not those alternatives are available to the Joneses down the street.
Second, and perhaps more obviously, your model presupposes that, while habit formation/keeping up with the Joneses operates in respect of material consumption, it does not operate in respect of leisure. I would suggest that this is factually wrong, and that people are just as likely to envy the Joneses their free time as their BMW – witness the opposition to “dole bludgers” who are not otherwise in an enviable position. As soon as you accept that envy (preference for equality) operates generally rather than being specific to consumption the whole model falls apart.
James F:
Envy or equality?
I’d agree the terminology has significant rheotrical implications. I believe however that what I took Tom to be talking about is more correctly viewed as envy rather than a desire for equality. (A generalised preference for equality probably does exist, and my criticisms do not apply to it, but it is better viewed as a guiding principle or ideal – it doesn’t dictate generalised redistribution any more than a belief in the principle of democracy necessitates compulsory voting or the election of judges).
In suggesting that people judge their material happiness on a comparitive basis, Tom posits a utility function such that one’s happiness will be increased by reductions in the material wealth of others, regardless of their current wealth relative to your own. That is: a rich, envious individual (to use my terminology) will have their happiness increased by a reduction in the material wealth of those poorer than him. Intuitively, this fits my view of envy and not of “a preference for equality”. I’m inclined to agree with Tom that this effect exists, and it underpins, for instance, your challenge to Razor. I also happen to believe it is an unpleasant part of human nature and one that ought to be opposed, at least symbolically, by social policy. As I suggest above, social mores appear to adopt the same view.
Your second paragraph, in my view, relates to habit formation rather than keeping up with the Joneses – two phenomena I have been taught to view as distinct. Habit formation, being “internal” to the individual doesn’t fall within the exception to utilitarianism I argue exists in respect of certain “bad” external preferences. Rather, I’d suggest that subjective happiness surveys are simply not advanced enough to represent a workable alternative to revealed preference, and that human happiness’ tendancy to return to baseline level after positive or negative experiences can be used to support more or less any policy, be it a reduction in economic grownth or the forced amputation of limbs.
In any case, my criticisms of a habit formation driven consumption tax are the same as those I ultimately make of Tom’s keeping up with the Joneses version – both presuppose that consumption is either comparative or habituated but that leisure is not. Speaking as someone who spent 6 years as a university student, allow me to assert that, factually, this is not the case.
Finally, I feel that “richer society’s aren’t necessarily happier ones” is an odd summary of the message of Hamilton’s manifesto, if not of his work generally. “Government should provide more satifying work” appears unrelated to this thesis, and is closer in spirit to “Government should support motherhood and applie pie”. I have no problem with satisfying work, motherhood, or apple pie but feel there is something odd about a manifesto devoted to saying so. That something, in my opinion, is that the anti-grown movement’s deliberately vague statements are designed to be all things to all men and to make for an engaging game of rhetorical hide-and-seek when their concrete implications are challenged.
Mill was only evoked three times because this dipstick repeated her message three times thus increasing the gobbledygook exponentially.
And Mill’s support for the stationary state included believing that the north and middle of the USA had reached the highest state of economic advance, indeed poverty had been eliminated. Very few would agree with that assessment now, I hope. He was also concerned with the instability and declining rates of profit that might be a problem in the stationary state that was apparently pretty close from his understanding. So he wasn’t employable as a futurist when it came to technology.
So when is a society at a reasonable level of comfort, depends on who you are and what you have got. Is it time to say no more developments on I-pods.
He was evoked with others on the grounds that it was Eckersley that was confused by trying to deny that happiness was about the pursuit of pleasure. An argument that has been around forever and is not yet settled, other than for Eckersley.
If there are more people aspiring to this form of happiness problem, well I don’t think that catastrophe is imminent, you do Paul. Who is it that should miss out though. This argument is far too often advanced, don’t know about you, by those who have a very high level of materialism if one is honest and includes the overseas trips for study and conferences (to advance knowledge not just to have a holiday) etc. etc.
Not sure whether this manifesto makes me think more of another step towards pedantocracy or luddites.