Jul 28 2006
How happiness relates to my PhD topic…
In my thesis I wrote that happiness cannot be measured. That claims such as you are twice as happy in one state as another are fundamentally not meaningful – how do you assign such specific, mathematical values to happiness. While I wrote this, I did not invent it. It was strongly believed by Arrow, who did much of the early work on economics, and was further popularised by behaviourism. A theory that says it is impossible to know what people are feeling (i.e. how happy they are) but only to see how they behaved.
This forms the basis idea of much of modern economics. Instead of measuring how happy individual people are, you measure their “utilityâ€Â. An abstract concept, that can only compared to another utility by saying it’s higher than, or lower than it. You cannot measure utility in such as away as to say it is better than another utility value by a specific amount, only that it is better. If a person chooses to go left rather than right, we say left gives them a higher utility that right, we cannot say by how much. This simple fact, the inability to measure utility (which is used as if it were happiness) has far reaching implications. Arrow showed that when utility values cannot be compared numerically, it is impossible to create a voting system that is fair.
The reason I wrote about this in a PhD in computer science might seem a bit hard to see at this point, and its not really the point I’m making. But I’m going to tell you anyway, because its not totally off topic. Basically I claimed that if we started with something other than happiness. Something that is measurable. Something we can assign a numerical value to, then much of economics changes, in fact several intractable problems become readably solvable. This simple idea was the heart of my thesis.
But someone else has since come up with a very similar idea, though perhaps more fundamental (and maybe a bit less rigorous).
What if we actually can measure happiness? Directly! Today I have a happiness of 78, yesterday it was 70, I’m 8 happier today than I was yesterday. If that sounds like crap to you, you are not alone. Richard Layard’s book, Happiness however disagrees. He claims that not only is it possible to measure happiness in such a way, but that the actual measurement can be done very simply. Basically, by asking someone! “How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 100 today?â€Â
Just think, if we can measure happiness like that, public policies, work policies, economic policies, all can be designed, and measured to provide a happy society. Something which has to be the best goal we can aim for. Sure people want more money, but only so they can buy a new house, so they can appear successful to their friends, so they can be happy (or other similar reasoning) it all boils down to this. People want to be happy.
Unfortunately, what Richard fails to look at in his book is what was to my mind one of the biggest and most interesting problems with a lot of these self measurement systems. How would you cheat the system? If you have a right wing economic theory you can cheat by pretending that a change will be better for you than it is (Richards book claims that people always overestimate how happy a change will make them). In a left wing economic theory, you can cheat by claiming to currently be worse off than you are. In my thesis, the players were computers, not really capable of such lies, but humans are…
I think your theory is rather intresting and a complex subject to analize. Would you not say we could describe or define the word “happy” as oppssed to trying to measure it. How do you develop a measuring tool, when a person cannot determine true happiness. Yes one would know if they were happy or not but each strives in different ways to obtain happiness. Ask someone who is happily married, kids, job etc, if they are happy and they give on the scale of 100 or say they couldn’t be happier. Later down the line after the marriage is broken, the same person comments “oh Ive never been happier since I left my partner, best thing I have ever done. The trouble with happiness is, it changes with a person through life and circumstance, often altering the perception of the word or feeling. Also goals are changed, one can be happy, stable etc and comfortable within life but expose them to something else or throw in another matter to the equation. It can throw a person of balance, so how can happiness be measured if it is never ending and does not have a limit. It has no shape, no circumfrence, no matter, no volume, there surely can be no mathematical tool to measure something so complex. Well this is just my opinion and view and I have no premises to support my theory or argument, except the experience of life itself.