Will Wilkinson: Happiness and the Ideological Mediation of Adaptation

Tyler Cowen points us to some remarkably provocative insights by Will Wilkinson, moral philosopher:

Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle » Blog Archive » Happiness and the Ideological Mediation of Adaptation: The truly delicious bits of this new NBER working paper by Di Tella, Haisken-De New, and MacCulloch on adaptation to income and status is the stuff on political leanings:

We study “habituation” to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7,812 people living in Germany from 1984 to 2000. Specifically, we estimate a “happiness equation” defined over several lags of income and status and compare the long run effects. We can (cannot) reject the hypothesis of no adaptation to income (status) during the four years following an income (status) change. In the short-run (current year) a one standard deviation increase in status and 52% of one standard deviation in income are associated with similar increases in happiness. In the long-run (five year average) a one standard deviation increase in status has a similar effect to an increase of 285% of a standard deviation in income. We also present different estimates of habituation across sub-groups. For example, we find that those on the right (left) of the political spectrum adapt to status (income) but not to income (status)...

That is (in case you’re confused), folks on the left get used to money but not status, and the reverse for folks on the right.

This is funny, since I’ve been reading a bunch of papers on inequality, mostly by political philosophers on the left, and they are positively obsessed specifically with the status effects of material inequality. It’s pretty amusing if this is just a reflection of a particular personality type. More generally, the fact that the happiness-effects of various things seem to be mediated by ideological leanings seems to basically ruin the prospect of using happiness research as a neutral, scientific way of assessing policy. It may just end up sort-of-usefully reminding us that one group may like a certain policy and another group may not simply because it makes one group feel better and another group feel worse. It doesn’t settle the dispute: it explains why we’re having it.

Also, ideological mediation is one more nail in the coffin for the introspective method of normative philosophy. If the effects of this or that on people’s sense of well-being is mediated by their ideological cast, then chances are, our intuitions about real and hypothetical cases are probably already deeply infected with our ideological notions--or with the personality traits that lead us to find those notions attractive--and arguments based on these intuitions simply beg all the interesting questions in a subtle way.

Comments

[Count Cant]

"ideological mediation is one more nail in the coffin for the introspective method of normative philosophy"

ummm...kinda silly, actually.

people who practice the "introspective method" in normative philosophy have been aware of this sort of issue forever. there are standard defenses and standard replies, all of which are equally applicable here.

it's not so much "one more nail in the coffin" as it is "very old news".

[Carlos]

¿Maybe the study has the causation exactly backwards? ¿Why assume that political preferences determine the attitude towards income/status and not the other way around?.

[Cranky Observer]

If one could look past the embedded political snark/daggerthrust, one might see an insight that could be a potential issue for Utility Theory.

Cranky

[Paul J. Reber]

Consider the backwards causation. Relatively greater concern with individual income (wealth) sends one to the right-side of the political spectrum. Relatively greater concern with status, a societal construct, sends one towards the left.

As the Count said, it can't be news that people differ in their personal weightings of things like the importance of personal gain versus societal gain. Or that those differences affect your sense of what's right and fair.

Hiding in the numbers there is another curious point that income affects happiness much more strongly than the status measure used -- it takes a smaller move w.r.t the SD to change happiness across the whole sample. I have to say this seems consistent with my intuition and also Tyler's bemusement at worries over the social status effects of being on the wrong end of the inequality spectrum. I'm sure it sucks that people think you are a loser if you're poor, but I think I'd worry first about a lack of income preventing access to things like food, shelter, healthcare and education.

Oh wait, did I just agree with Tyler? I'm not sure that's happened too many times before.

[joeo]

>Hiding in the numbers there is another curious point that income affects happiness much more strongly than the status measure used -- it takes a smaller move w.r.t the SD to change happiness across the whole sample.

I saw this too. Does this mean that there are 2+ as many on the left as on the right in Germany?