I expect Fran and Barbara (at least) to take you to task for calling Yoga a quasi-religion. I suppose you can take yoga and meditation as religions, or as centering techniques. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
Yes. As economic policy, "eliminating unhappiness", not "promoting happiness", should be the strategy.
But GDP is a meme which needs to be usurped. And I'm afraid that without a succinct, mind-concentrating and positive alternative meme, GDP will continue to rule the roost as the bottom-line benchmark for measuring the success of a society.
As such, to turn people's attention and concern from GDP to more important measures, we need a number which can be easily used as a rough benchmark for comparisons. Something like the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI), which factors in "poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, childbirth" among others such as GDP:
██ High human development██ Medium human development██ Low human development██ Unavailable
Wouldn't have be exactly the HDI, but how about something like it? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
And then they build up or tear down policies that affect us all, based on and spinning the one measure that everyone cares about (even if they don't understand it) because that's what the rest of the herd is following. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Ordinary people have plenty of time, attention span, willpower, and intelligence to deal with arcane sports statistics. Yes, there is a league table because we're talking about tournaments to select a winner, but sports league tables have a gazillion columns full of stats.
So, why do we need a single benchmark again?
[Sports fan counterexample by Ralph Nader, used without permission] Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
I think only a minority of people -- a minority of sports fans, in fact -- only the real sports otaku, really get much data beyond who won or lost.
Sure, there are other domains: movies (who won which Oscar prizes, made the most money at the box office, said what in which film, acted with who in which film); fashion (who wore what at which gala event, who was People's sexiest man alive in 2002, etc.); and tons of other pop culture domains where people gather, retain and analyze plenty of data.
But here is the big difference: Just as baseball otaku are a tiny minority of the world population, and just as football otaku are another tiny minority, ditto for movie otaku and fashion otaku and restaurant otaku, etc., economics otaku are also a tiny minority of people in the world.
The difference is this: Economics affects everybody in the developed and developing world. But who won Wimbledon in 2001, who directed the most Oscar-winning films, which restaurants in New York serve organic food, barely affects anyone.
What gives people the "bandwidth" to be informed about and have a good understanding of lots of (often subtle) data on a topic beyond a single (or a tiny handful of) figure(s) is a deep personal interest in that topic.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people do not have a deep personal interest in economics.
So we need to come up with something that most of us can deal with: something that is concise and succinct, but that is reality-based and reflects accurately their living conditions, opportunities and hazards. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
If we could get economists to stop pushing "utility" and stop concentrating on "economics is optimisation [of a single quantity]"...
Snarky tone aside, the first half of the above captures a significant point, which is that utility is (of course) defined to be something a lot like "good" as judged from a personal perspective. The concept diverges from reality, though, because it suggests that different kinds of good are more comparable than (in psychological reality) they are. For example, it implies consistent valuations for benefits a day, a week, and a decade from now -- but human valuations don't work that way. This suggests to me that the concept of "utility" has limited utility. Worst, though, the idea turns toxic when it diffuses away from its origin.
As carefully stated by theorists, "utility" inherently includes (for example) the value of being able to expect a sustainable future, the value of having a clean conscience, the value of being a social cooperator, and so on. Acting according to "self interest" might include selfless devotion to others. Striving to maximise utility in this sense is hard to argue against.
But as understood by people outside the little circle of theorists and their fans, utility mutates into the idea of getting stuff you want, including services and so on. And since rational people "should" maximise their utility, anyone who doesn't grab everything possible is an irrational fool. And since money can be exchanged for stuff, it makes a convenient measure of utility. Hence the sick equation, "GDP = aggregate utility = good".
In short, I'd argue that economic thinking has some surprisingly bad effects not because of what it is, but because of how easily it is debased into the idea that rational behaviour requires amoral acquisition. Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
There is no escaping the fact that decision problems are multidimensional. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
Sometimes the utility and rational choice model is taken as an action, as in implied preferences, where people decide it is pointless to ask people what they prefer and try to see if their behaviour matches their preferences, and instead postulate that preferences are as they need to be to be consistent with behaviour.
Rational choice theory may be an interesting branch of mathematics, but I think to make it the axiomatic foundation of economics is a bit of a stretch. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
The natural trend on the playing fields of Eton, and on MBA courses is to ape the US, because their reformist free-market yadda yadda is so much more glamorous than anything Europe can produce. What Europe needs, and the UK needs especially, is an academic and intellectual push back against free-marketism. Someone needs to start telling different, and more accurate, stories about how the world works. Because at the moment, in both the City and in government, it's the freebooting capitalist model that's captivating hearts and minds.
What Europe needs, and the UK needs especially, is an academic and intellectual push back against free-marketism.
Someone needs to start telling different, and more accurate, stories about how the world works. Because at the moment, in both the City and in government, it's the freebooting capitalist model that's captivating hearts and minds.
GDP has been "captivating hearts and minds" for too long.
We need to come up with a meme that is more "glamorous" than GDP (I use ThatBritGuy's here "glamorous", but I mean compelling).
HDI is one contender. Doesn't have to be a three-letter acronym.
Come to think of it, you came up with a pretty good one yourself. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Measures which focus on happiness instead of GDP or wealth can easily fall into the trap of narrow utilitarianism, the capabilities approach is more complete in that sense.
Measures which focus on happiness instead of GDP or wealth can easily fall into the trap of narrow utilitarianism
Miguel also mentions "utility" in a comment above. Are you referring to the same thing? What exactly do you mean by "utlitarianism"? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics which lends itself to being reduced to "maximising utility". Utility has a technical meaning in economics and decision theory. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
I would add that the technical economic concept of 'utility' has its roots in utilitarian ethical theory.
What I still want to do is moderate this 'technical measure' distinction. Utility as it is used in economics does contain all kinds of philosophical assumptions about mindstates, etc. You can't talk about the declining marginal utility of consumption without making this utility partly a subjective measure of gratification, for instance.
In probability theory and decision theory the St. Petersburg paradox describes a particular lottery game (sometimes called St. Petersburg Lottery) that leads to a random variable with infinite expected value, i.e. infinite expected payoff, but would nevertheless be considered to be worth only a very small amount of money. The St. Petersburg paradox is a classical situation where a naïve decision theory (which takes only the expected value into account) would recommend a course of action that no (real) rational person would be willing to take. The paradox can be resolved when the decision model is refined via the notion of marginal utility or by taking into account the finite resources of the participants. The paradox is named from Daniel Bernoulli's presentation of the problem and his solution, published in 1738 in the Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Science of Saint Petersburg (Bernoulli 1738). However, the problem was invented by Daniel's cousin Nicolas Bernoulli who first stated it in a letter to Rémond de Montmort from 9th of September 1713.
The paradox is named from Daniel Bernoulli's presentation of the problem and his solution, published in 1738 in the Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Science of Saint Petersburg (Bernoulli 1738). However, the problem was invented by Daniel's cousin Nicolas Bernoulli who first stated it in a letter to Rémond de Montmort from 9th of September 1713.
I agree. Bernoulli himself said:
"There is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats is more significant to the pauper than to a rich man though both gain the same amount."
And Gabriel Cramer, a few years before Bernoulli, refers to the role of "good sense":
"the mathematicians estimate money in proportion to its quantity, and men of good sense in proportion to the usage that they may make of it."
I am not sure what you mean by "narrow utilitarianism" as opposed to "utilitarianism" tout court. But isn't the policy approach that you and I agree on (as opposed to the "marketing" approach I am suggesting to replace "GDP" with some other unitary notion like HDI or median PPP income) just another form of utilitarianism as well, to wit, "negative utilitarianism"? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
What I personally meant by a narrow utilitarianism is a utilitarianism which uses a methodological individualism to form a societal calculus of happiness (unqualified, in the sense of Bentham), of which the maximation is taken to be the end-all of decision-making (individual as well as collective).
However, until we come up with truly a "complete"/multi-dimensional approach or mindset to replace the GDP/DJI-oriented mindset, and until people are ready to make such a drastic switch to such a different mindset, would it not be helpful to find some transitional position where we allow people to continue working with an easily graspable, easily comparable single number, like PPP median income or, better, HDI, to start to introduce such "revolutionary" notions as including fairness, socioeconomic equality, freedom from ignorance, freedom from government oppression, and so on, beyond mere GDP? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
These don't provide the basis for a unitary ranking but can be used as an overview. Might be an idea for a diary, actually (I probably won't have the time to do that properly until next weekend, though).
