Arlo on Happiness Research

Too much straw on this man. Tyrone wouldn't even have lunch with Arlo.

On the contrary, I think this is far from being a straw man. I think it's pretty much the spirit of this opposite day thing.

Happiness research is an empty box. Is there more total happiness in India or the US? We don’t know and we have no way to measure aggregate happiness and find out. Until we have the ability to objectively measure happiness and aggregate it for large populations, happiness research is just playing with assumptions.

Dan, Obviously, there is more hapiness in the USA. Looking at the current ledger, we have Dipak Chopra and Mother Therasa is dead. QED.

I’d have to agree with NN on the straw question. Why does Arlo boast about the trappings of science as if trappings were an inherently good thing? There are good general reasons to expect scientific methods to be successful. Whether those reasons apply to happiness research I’m not sure, but it’s worth a try.

And of course, the economic problem isn’t over, for a couple of reasons. First of all, a lot of people still can’t afford to worry about the aesthetics of their toilet brushes. Arlo talks as if you could produce like a market economy but then have the output distributed in a way that satisfies everyone’s wants. I think the production goals and the distribution goals are incompatible. Second, both wants and the potential for happiness are unlimited, so the economic problem is always there.

Arlo’s real argument should be not that economics has succeeded but that economics (and everything else, for that matter) has failed. People still aren’t much happier than they were during [pick a time in the past when production was much less than it is today]. There is at least a little bit of reason to be optimistic that happiness research will be the thing that finally doesn’t fail.

The basics for measuring heterogeneity of achieved utils per dollar of income are falling into place (see, e.g., Csikszentmihalyi's and/or Seligman's serious work). Why shouldn't that be an empirical project? Economics is a social science.

Arlo lost me with "happiness research will enable policymakers to tinker with people's wants." No. Happiness research could identify market *and* government failures in util production.

Up until the last paragraph, Arlo wasn't particularly disagreeable.

Does Arnold disagree with anything in the penultimate paragraph?