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Prospering May Not Make People Happier, but It May Make Them Healthier Robert H. Frank, an economist at the
Johnson School at Cornell University, is the co-author, with Ben S. Bernanke,
of “Principles of Economics.” Many critics of economic growth interpret this finding to
imply that continued economic growth should no longer be a policy goal in
developed countries. They argue that if money buys happiness, it is relative,
not absolute, income that matters. As incomes grow, people quickly adapt to
their new circumstances, showing no enduring gains in measured happiness.
Growth makes the poor happier in low-income countries, critics concede, but not
in developed countries, where those at the bottom continue to experience
relative deprivation. All true. But these statements do not imply that economic
growth no longer matters in wealthy countries. The reason, in a nutshell, is
that happiness and welfare, though related, are very different things. Growth
enables us to expand medical research and other activities that clearly enhance
human welfare but have little effect on measured happiness levels. Subjective well-being is typically measured from responses
to survey questions like, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with
your life these days?” People’s responses are informative. They tend to be
consistent over time and are highly correlated with assessments of them made by
their friends. Positive self-assessments are strongly linked with behaviors
indicating psychological health. Thus, people who report high levels of
subjective well-being are more likely to initiate social contacts with friends
and more likely to respond to requests for assistance from strangers. They are
less likely than others to suffer from psychosomatic illnesses, seek
psychological counseling or attempt suicide. In short, self-assessments of subjective well-being tell us
something important about human welfare. Yet the mere fact that they do not
ratchet up over time provides little reason to question the desirability of
economic growth. The purpose of the human motivational system, according to
psychologists, is not to make people feel happy, but rather to motivate actions
that promote successful life outcomes. To be effective, this system should be
flexible and adaptive, which it is. For example, people who become disabled
typically experience deep depression after their accidents, but often adapt
surprisingly quickly, soon reporting a mix of moods similar to what they had
experienced before. Lottery winners invariably experience joy on receiving
their windfalls, but often describe such feelings as fleeting. Since life is a continuing competitive struggle, this is as
it should be. Accident victims who can recover their psychological footing
quickly will function more effectively in their new circumstances than those
who dwell unhappily on their misfortune. Windfall recipients who quickly
recover their hunger for more will compete more effectively than those who
linger in complacent euphoria. A Holocaust survivor once told me that his existence in the
camps took place in two separate psychological spaces. In one, he was acutely
aware of the unspeakable horror of his situation. But in the other, life seemed
eerily normal. In this second space, each day presented challenges, and days in
which he coped relatively successfully with them felt much like the good days
of the past. To survive, he explained, it was critical to spend as much time as
possible in the second space and as little as possible in the first. These observations highlight the weakness of subjective
well-being as a metric of welfare. The fact that people adapt quickly to new circumstances,
good or bad, is just a design feature of the brain’s motivational system. The
fact that a paraplegic may continue to be happy does not imply that his
condition has not reduced his welfare. Indeed, many well-adjusted paraplegics
report that they would undergo surgery entailing substantial risk of death if
doing so promised to restore their mobility. Similarly, the fact that people
may adapt quickly to higher incomes says nothing about whether economic growth
makes them better off. Critics of economic growth cite its threat to the planet’s
survival. Yet it
is not growth per se that threatens, but rather certain kinds of growth. Driving more S.U.V.’s causes harm, but
taking more piano lessons does not. Any country with a government not beholden
to corporate interests could easily curb environmentally harmful activities
through taxation and regulation, redirecting spending toward things that really
matter. Across developed countries, higher growth rates are actually associated
with cleaner environments, not dirtier ones. The United States is the world’s
largest emitter of greenhouse gases not because of its wealth but in spite of
it. Environmentally sustainable economic growth promises to
increase human welfare in a host of other important ways. For example, as the
economist Benjamin Friedman reports in his book “The Moral Consequences of
Economic Growth”
(Knopf, 2005), societies in which incomes are growing more rapidly also tend to
support their poorest members more generously. Growth will support continuing
investments in workplace safety, preventing tens of thousands of serious
injuries each year. And it will continue to free people to spend additional
time with their families. But growth’s most compelling promise is continuing progress
against premature death, perhaps the most devastating of life’s tragedies.
American families with five children in 1800 often saw two or three of them die
before the age of 10. That this no longer happens has been a landmark
achievement. Intelligently managed growth will hasten our quest to defeat
diseases that continue to strike people down in the prime of life. The mere
fact that rising incomes do not bolster self-assessed happiness levels is no
reason to abandon this quest. Robert H. Frank, an economist at the Johnson School at
Cornell University, is the co-author, with Ben S. Bernanke, of “Principles of
Economics.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/business/26scene.html |
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