Summary of Fabian's theory of happiness

On the recommendation of a friend, here is a summary of the 20000-word piece I posted the other day, with a bit of extra biographical detail and most of the innovative stuff cut out. 

When I first got into happiness research in economics my intention was to try to take into public policy the stuff I had studied in philosophy and psychology. I felt like we knew quite a lot about what makes people happy that we weren’t using in public policy. When I later discovered statistics and the kinds of things we can get data on nowadays I became curious about the possibility of testing theories that I had previously considered almost completely unamenable to empirical verification. So I started a PhD in happiness modelling.

But then quite quickly I came to the conclusion that actually the work in happiness for public policy contains altogether too much empirics and not enough theory. The superficiality of the existing theory in this space has resulted in some conceptual confusion between emotional happiness and longer term, more existential, evaluative happiness. Furthermore, shallow theorising means that much of the discourse around happiness and public policy talks as if we should predominantly care about emotional and not evaluative happiness, even though the last 4 thousand odd years of theory suggests completely the opposite. Moreover, the data that are being used to make a lot of these claims about happiness are open to an interpretation (rescaling) that basically makes them useless.

This means that we are testing hypotheses using poor measurement, and potentially compounding our theoretical confusion by misinterpreting data that is full of measurement error. In this climate, I feel that my best course of action is actually to dredge up all that theory I did years ago, integrate it with the empirical literature, and provide the empiricists with a theory that has internal consistency and accords with our introspective intuitions. Once we have such a sound theory, then we can get on with measurement and testing. This paper is about outlining that theory.

Happiness is a function of your hedonic well-being and your psychological well-being. In the literature on hedonic well-being it is typically referred to as subjective well-being, so we will use that here. Subjective well-being (SWB) sounds rigorous but Ed Diener has previously admitted to using the term simply because it sounds more academic than ‘happiness’. SWB comprises two principle elements: your affect or emotional state, and hedonic life satisfaction. Hedonic life satisfaction is distinct from existential life satisfaction. Consider Ghandi during his hunger strikes. We might speculate that he has a very low level of hedonic life satisfaction because he is starving, but he might have a very high existential life satisfaction. His emotional state might perhaps oscillate frequently between despair, hope and serenity.

On the other hand, we might consider the blessed but ambiguous undergraduate. They have grown up in a loving and well-adjusted family, are attending a great school, eat well, lay well thanks to their delightful complexion and physique and have a bright future in general. Their life is very pleasant—a hedonic term. However, they remain restless. They don’t know what they want to do with their life. They don’t fully grasp their values. Their identity suffers from frequent flux. They ‘cannot complain’ about their life—this is the high scoring hedonic aspect—but their anxiety means that they also score low on existential life satisfaction. Their life of new experiences, constant stimuli and abundant friends means it doesn’t matter too much, because these things give them constant little boosts to their emotional state.

Psychological well-being captures your existential life satisfaction. This is a longer term concept that is robust to short term shocks. For example, if you miss the bus, it will make you sad or angry (affect/emotion), but it won’t have much effect on either your hedonic life satisfaction or your existential life satisfaction. If you are an existentially restless undergraduate and you move from one modest apartment to a sublime student pad, this will increase your emotional state briefly, your hedonic life satisfaction permanently and have no effect on your existential life satisfaction.

Positive psychological well-being rests on 6 pillars: personal growth, self-assessment, environmental mastery, relatedness, purpose and autonomy.  Environmental mastery refers to competence: your ability to affect your world in order to make it more amendable to your values. Self-assessment comprises self-esteem and whether you experience harmony between your actual self, your ideal self and your ‘ought’ self (there is a huge section on this in the long paper that I will skip here). Personal growth moves according to the progress you are making on achieving this harmony, particularly with regards to achieving your ideal self. Relatedness takes in social connections. This is complicated in the space between individualism and collectivism. Again I refer you to the longer paper for a more thorough exposition. Autonomy refers to the extent to which your actions and aspirations are volitional vs. extrinsically motivated. Finally, purpose captures your level of spirituality i.e. the extent to which you feel your life is meaningful. For a more thorough unpacking of this stuff I refer you to my piece from a few months ago on the existential approach to the meaning of life.

Religiosity is an approach to spirituality that emphasis ‘ultimate concerns’, which are those that transcend the individual. There are three broad approaches to meaning: eudemonism, faith and what I call the coalescence of being. Eudemonism is about being true to yourself as is quite fatalist. Faith is about submitting your will to an external standards and being held by it. And the coalescence of being is a more complex process of harmonising who you are and who you want to be through self-reflection and environmental interaction, notably with society and your peers.

So happiness is a function of your emotional state and hedonic life satisfaction—subjective well-being—and your psychological well-being (PWB). Individuals try to maximise this happiness function subject to the constraint imposed by their agency. Agency here does not refer to will power—that is captured by fixed effects. Instead, agency refers to objective factors that limit an individual’s capabilities: what they can be and do. The main ones are income, health, education, political power and social status.

State’s (i.e. governments) should focus on giving people agency. The other elements of happiness are subjective and it isn’t the business of governments to get involved in people’s personal matters.

In many studies of happiness the aspects of agency are found to be correlated with happiness. It seems obvious to me that this is indeed a correlation and not a causal relationship. Money doesn’t make you happy—even neoclassical economics admits that. Money allows you to buy things that you have a preference for and these things make you happy. Similar with the opportunities education opens up and the experiences being healthy or powerful makes available to you. In the case of people who genuinely just love learning, for example, this source of happiness is captured within the PWB variable through purpose and personal growth. Same goes for fitness fanatics and politicians. Agency doesn’t make you happy. Acting on agency makes you happy.

Critically, meaning people obviously don’t know what makes them happy, but I don’t want to get into information problems just yet. I can leave that for latter in my life. Someone with minimal agency, like an impoverished rice farmer, will have a hard time scoring high on SWB and PWB. However, someone with a lot of agency, like an upper middle-class university student, won’t necessarily score high on SWB and PWB either unless they know how to use their agency.

At this point I would like to turn to all the reasons why these phenomena cannot show up eloquently on these pathetic happiness scales we use to measure national happiness accounts, but I will leave that for a future post (perhaps once I have finished writing the relevant paper). There is a fair bit on it in the long paper I posted the other day towards the end of the SWB section.

I will finish, however, by saying that too much happiness research fixates on the emotion of happiness rather than the deeper and longer term notion of psychological well-being. If you are psychologically unwell because your life is fake, hollow and extrinsically regulated then no manner of technique to help you smile will make you deeply happy. Indeed, a fixation on the symptoms of psychological well-being rather than the causes e.g. serenity, contentedness and positive affect, will end with you papering over the cracks in your PWB until you have a full blown meltdown. Especially for young people, who will be the main people reading this, it is your PWB that you need to take care of, not your emotional happiness. That will follow as a natural consequence. But note that PWB is much more complex, arduous and time consuming a process than stabilising your emotional state. Don’t cut corners.