Where happiness outranks wealth

A post on "Bhutan: Where happiness outranks wealth"

A lot of "happiness" studies, arising in the literature at the intersection of econ and psych, testify to a disconnect between wealth and happiness. Wealth is very important to self-reported happiness until one reaches the level of self-sufficiency. Wealth matters less to self-reported happiness beyond the threshold salary of, in the U.S., around $20,000 a year, and the degree to which wealth matters for greater salaries seems to be a decreasing function of the salary itself; true luxury matters almost nothing to happiness indeed. A striking second result: For the middle class and the rich, it appears only unexpected movements in the level of one's wealth change happiness, and then only for the time it takes for one to get used to the new level. Changes, not levels, matter to the "luxurious psyche." (Plato would smile.) There is even a documented negative movement, that certain members of the richest classes seem to have more worries and anxieties.

The article describes an agency trying to shield its people from this disconnect by managing the accumulation of national wealth. My colleagues might be shocked, but if I were to research the agency I would probably find myself basically in accord with it. Poverty is never a good thing, even (and especially) from a Buddhist or Christian religious standpoint, but at what price prosperity? Only a rationalist in politics would believe technology is always a good thing. A human being is more than just a rational mind but a will and a body. He may react "irrationally" to changes in his environment—irrational from the perspective of one unfamiliar with the human heart—and react in ways permanently damaging. This is even true if one believes people "eventually figure it out" after at first reacting poorly. If society is in some sense an organism, brutal short-term damage can abide and even alter the organism permanently. The organism of my body will recover from a weak blow, yes, but a strong enough blow can cost me a limb or even a heart.

Here is a truly lovely essay written by a 20th-century traditionalist economist who worked in international development: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html. It draws from his experience advising a Buddhist state much like Bhutan on how to develop (and to what extent it should develop according to the Western model) without losing its people to the pursuit of ephemeral values and not the Dharma. The essay takes seriously the percepts of the religion with respect to economics and, since their religion is so different from those of Abrahamic heritage, it is easier I think for modern readers to tolerate and even appreciate it... though on the level of politics he is prescribing the same bitter medicine colored differently and stamped with a fashionable yin and yang.

As an economist I know my science studies "games of choice under constraint" with an eye to draw an analogy between the game and the world—with luck, a statistical analogy that can be tested. As you might imagine the method carries with it a traincar's worth of epistemic baggage. I have never found the time to search through it all and doubt I would be able to tackle it anyway. Regardless, one assumption the science makes, the assumption par excellence which makes much of economics mathematically tractable and which is found universally in every paper i study, is that agents desire more of what they already have. (There is a Greek word for this: pleonexia.) Economic behavioral assumptions, I think, apply to man... I am sorry to use this terminology... only by virtue of his fallen state. I think it is fallen not only because the behavior is logically speaking insatiable but because societies concerned to guard the psyche (rather than the "rights and privileges" of the post-Enlightenment political consensus) find ways to restrict the appetite, sometimes violently. Yet the appetite is the very assumption on which I build models. Given that economic theory depends in many ways on pleonexia, one suspects the theory might not capture the behavior of traditional people. I have a hope one day to test certain behavioral assumptions of economics on members of traditional or (if you'll permit me to add a prefix) neo-traditional societies such as Bhutan. After spending some time in one of their monasteries, I hope they succeed.