<div>That's a powerful editorial--I was particularly struck by your query on "<font face="Times">How can one have a genuinely happy society where one large chunk of it is in the position of </font><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/re-investigating/Nickson.pdf" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" face="Times" color="#002fd7"><u>servicing the domestic and hedonistic agendas</u></font></a><font face="Times"> of another large chunk?" Probably the best work of "legitimational theodicy" on that score is a recent
<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/12/469/">self-help manual</a> that urges readers to say to themselves, as a mantra, "I adore rich people. I admire rich people. And some day, I will be a rich person."
</font></div>
<div><font face="Times"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Times">More seriously, I recommend Richard Sennett's <a href="http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall03/032537.htm">Respect in a World of Inequality</a> on that score, as well as Barbara Ehrenreich's
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Falling-Inner-Middle-Class/dp/0060973331">Fear of Falling</a>.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div>Regarding the happiness researchers: a libertarian think tank has put out an <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa590.pdf">interesting attack</a> on their work by Will Wilkinson. I discuss it in <a href="http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/04/libertarians_ag.html">
this blog post</a>, which I have pasted (in an edited version) below.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>best wishes,</div>
<div>--Frank</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<h3>Libertarians Against Subjectivism</h3>
<div id="author">
<h5>Will Willkinson's <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa590.pdf"><font color="#800080">critique of "happiness research"</font></a> recently appeared on the Cato Institute's website. This is the most comprehensive recent comment on the literature of subjective well-being that I've seen, and raises all sorts of interesting questions for those who are trying to expand the boundaries of economic analysis.
</h5></div>
<p>A little background: A growing number of economists have begun to question traditional measurements of well-being, such as GDP or income, and have focused instead on self-reported "subjective well-being" from interviewed subjects. "
<a href="http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2006/02/forbes_on_happi.html">Happiness research</a>" has come up with some counterintuitive findings, reporting extraordinary levels of life dissatisfaction in apparently prospering liberal democracies.
</p>
<p>Wilkinson takes these social scientists to task for failing to fully describe "the dependent variable—<br>the target of elucidation and explanation—in happiness research." He claims there are four main possibilities:
</p>
<blockquote>(1) Life satisfaction: A cognitive judgment about overall life quality relative to expectations.</blockquote>
<blockquote>(2) Experiential or "hedonic" quality: The quantity of pleasure net of pain in the stream of subjective experience.</blockquote>
<blockquote>(3) Happiness: Some state yet to be determined, but conceived as a something not exhausted by life satisfaction or the quality of experiential states.</blockquote>
<blockquote>(4) Well-being: Objectively how well life is going for the person living it. </blockquote>
<p>Wilkinson provides some great arguments for questioning 1 and 2 as hopelessly subjective desiderata for public policy. He quotes Wayne Sumner, a Toronto philosopher, on 2: "Time and philosophical fashion have not been kind to hedonism . . . Although hedonistic theories of various sorts flourished for three centuries or so in the congenial empiricist habitat, they have all but disappeared from the scene. Do they now merit even passing attention[?]" "Life satisfaction" also comes in for heavy criticism, as epiphenomenal of various uncontrollable variables: "people have different standards for assessing how well things are going, and they may employ different standards in different sorts of circumstances."
</p>
<p>Of course, Wilkinson and I go entirely different directions at this point: he tries to argue that the whole line of research is useless, while I think inconsistencies like the ones he points out demonstrate the necessity of more
<a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/34378/1988">objective</a> and virtue-oriented accounts of well-being. (Or, to be more precise, Wilkinson (like Freud) appears to believe that debates over happiness may ultimately best be settled by brain analysis, while I tend to think the direction of Aristotelian theorists like Seligman & Nussbaum is the way to go.) But his perspective does demonstrate that even those most committed to the idea of individual liberty as a public policy goal are not necessarily wedded to the type of subjectivity in value that would underlie societal recognition of the more extreme claims of pet-owners mentioned in that post.
</p><br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/13/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">pat kane</b> <<a href="mailto:scottishfutures@googlemail.com">scottishfutures@googlemail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<div style="WORD-WRAP: break-word">Hi all
<div><br> </div>
<div>Trebor has asked me to post this blog I published in the Guardian earlier this year - it's an attempt to link the recent happiness/wellbeing debates taking place in the UK, coming off the writings of people like Daniel Kahneman and Barry Schwartz and Richard Layard, and a much less equilibrial vision of human becoming, substantiated by the society and culture of networks, and theorised radically by the autonomists (Virno, Deleuze, Negri, etc). I'm somewhat hopeful (typical North European social democrat) that an enlightened, network-literate state could support well-becoming. The original publication has tons of hotlinks, if you want further depth of research.
</div>
<div><br> </div>
<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pat_kane/2007/02/theres_been_so_much_thats.html" target="_blank">http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pat_kane/2007/02/theres_been_so_much_thats.html
</a></div>
<div><br> </div>
<div>Be interested in your general responses, best pk</div>
<div><br> </div>
<div><br> </div>
<div>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 19px"><font style="FONT: 24px Times" face="Times" size="6"><b>Not wellbeing, but wellbecoming</b></font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 18px"><font style="FONT: 19px Times" face="Times" size="5"><b>Pat Kane</b></font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">February 26, 2007 3:30 PM</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pat_kane/2007/02/theres_been_so_much_thats.html" target="_blank">
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pat_kane/2007/02/theres_been_so_much_thats.html</a></font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">There was so much that discomforted me about the well-being debate last week - probably because I found myself (using an appropriate mental-health metaphor) feeling like Steve Martin in
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.mvps.org/st-software/Movie_Collection/images/2677f.jpg" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>The Man With Two Brains</u>
</font></a>.</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">One brain was delighted that the political argument was shifting away from the old narratives about "work", "prosperity" and "consumption" as the main goals of British life. The other brain was horrified at the level of behavioural meddling and social prescription that this shift seems to imply. And both brains were dragging me round the room in different directions, at the same time.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">I find Richard Layard's <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_layard/2007/02/i_agree_with_oliver_that.html" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>argument</u></font></a> more than a little creepy, if you think about his biography. His first claim to fame was as the core adviser to the incoming New Labour government in 1997 on their "
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://cep.lse.ac.uk/layard/welfare_to_work.pdf" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>welfare to work</u></font></a>" scheme - that classic piece of applied Presbyterianism by Gordon Brown, where "them that shall not work, shall not eat" (or in Brown's words, "
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=54997" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>no fifth option</u></font></a>").
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">Layard's input was to bolster the notion of work - any work - as the essential tool of socialisation. Anything to banish that Brownite spectre of "people sitting around all day, watching television, doing nothing" (a favoure phrase from pre-1997 speeches, and barely changed to this day). This is such a demeaning conception of the human self - that without
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/08/do0801.xml" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>the compulsion of wage labour
</u></font></a>, we will simply sink into indolence and passivity.</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">In that sense, Layard has been entirely consistent as a <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20050304/ai_n11847368/print" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>bureaucrat of bliss</u></font></a>: he still thinks the citizen-worker is too weak-minded to know his or her own best interests, and that policy-makers must herd us all to a median state of happiness. It's the implicit paternalism in the wellbeing debate that constantly rings my alarm bells.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">So if the stats say "marriage makes them more contented", then let's make divorce harder. If the research says "our media landscape saturates us with perspectives and world views, and leaves us dissatisfied", then we must control the media (or even, in one submission to this series, enforce a
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mark_vernon/2007/02/wellbeing.html" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>national switch-off</u>
</font></a> of the telly at mealtimes).</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">Every other day I walk by the Hampstead towers where Beatrice and Sidney Webb planned their giant Fabian schemes to "improve the <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://economics.gmu.edu/pboettke/workshop/Spring_06/JEP_Retrospectives.pdf" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>eugenic stock</u></font></a> of the worker". I often idly imagine their spectres are twirling happily together at the sight of all these social-scientific shepherds, meticulously planning the micro-behaviour (if not eugenically, then at least neuro-psychologically) of the ex-working-class.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">And I mean <i>ex</i>-working-class, because they are now the service class, mostly - which is the deepest problem underlying our angst about wellbeing. How can one have a genuinely happy society where one large chunk of it is in the position of
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/re-investigating/Nickson.pdf" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7">
<u>servicing the domestic and hedonistic agendas</u></font></a> of another large chunk?</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">This is the great psychological wound, ever more exacerbated since the workfare reforms of 1997, which causes disillusion and alienation and general grumpiness in this country. Among younger generations, who have now
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pat_kane/2006/07/dangerous_desirous_youth.html" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>grown up</u>
</font></a> nourished and watered by the globalism and diversity of the internet, this servile future induces a particularly acute form of cynicism.</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">The book was much <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1389821,00.html" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>derided </u></font></a>at the time, but Nick Barham's Dis/connected got something right about youth culture in Britain. Faced with so little real opportunity to realise their cultural and digital sensibilities, many youths are conducting an "
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/30/2044216" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>exodus</u></font></a>" into their
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,2018787,00.html" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>own worlds</u></font></a>. Which, yes, can include environmental activism as well as gun culture, joyous drug-fuelled raving as well as isolated depression, McWorld as well as Jihad.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">The authorities might fret about youth disconnection from the norms of society. But their policy and institutional responses, particularly in education, show no imagination whatsoever. The spectrum of creative life-options that face our energetic millenials, thanks to the dull workfare-ism of Brown and Layard, is pathetic. Add to that the workaholic culture of too many of their parents, neglecting child-care in favour of jobs that seem close to absurdist in their lack of meaning and purpose, and the unhappiness of young people's existence is all too understandable.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">Let's push on through to the other side of this debate. As some <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/neil_clark/2007/02/wanted_an_erich_fromm_party.html#comment-440640" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>commenters</u></font></a> have acutely noted, the wellbeing merchants are often frustrated old collectivists, looking for a new set of research stats to justify the construction of a solidarity and consensus that was left behind with the industrial era. Never mind trying to restore this lost unity (which was a negative, defensive, bruised-and-battered unity at that). Can't our policy-makers begin to see that their best role is to give us the support and resources to help us navigate our deeply complex societies?
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">Some great old gurus have been quoted in this debate - Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt - but I'd suggest that we should also be reading
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reclaiming-Work-Beyond-Wage-based-Society/dp/0745621287/sr=8-1/qid=1172260910/ref=sr_1_1/026-6744557-4262020?ie=UTF8&s=books" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>Gorz</u></font></a>, <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/rifkin207.htm" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7">
<u>Rifkin</u></font></a>, <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/" target="_blank"><font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>Negri</u></font></a> and <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=06/01/17/2225239" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>Virno</u></font></a>. From them, some obvious policy suggestions.</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">Revive (and destigmatise) social housing, so that we can live well yet cheaply. Make all higher education free at the point of use, in order that the cognitive gap between the "serving" and the "serviced" classes become even more untenable. Strongly regulate capitalism (shorter working weeks, citizen's incomes, powerful public infrastructures and networks) so that men, women and children can experiment with new mixes of the productive and the emotional in our lives.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">In short: support our autonomy, don't prescribe our happiness.</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5">It's not well-being our state should be in the business of enabling, but <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze" target="_blank">
<font style="COLOR: #002fd7" color="#002fd7"><u>well-becoming</u></font></a> - our multitude of life-journeys towards meaning and purposefulness, not some steady-state of managed contentment. The "happ" in happiness comes from the Norse, and it means "luck" or "chance": this week's parade of neo-Webbs should remember that. Help us to be strong and capable, so we can live interesting, surprising, memorable lives. Other than that, get your hands off my soul.
</font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times; COLOR: #002fd7" face="Times" color="#002fd7" size="5"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://theplayethic.typepad.com/" target="_blank">
<u>theplayethic.typepad.com</u><u></u></a></font></p>
<p style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 16px"><font style="FONT: 16px Times; COLOR: #002fd7" face="Times" color="#002fd7" size="5"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/category/the_politics_of_wellbeing/" target="_blank">
<u><b>Click here</b></u></a></font><font style="FONT: 16px Times" face="Times" size="5"><b> for a full list of articles in the Politics of Wellbeing debate. </b></font></p>
<div><span style="WORD-SPACING: 0px; FONT: 13px Arial; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); TEXT-INDENT: 0px; WHITE-SPACE: normal; LETTER-SPACING: normal; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px">
<div style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12px">Pat Kane</span></div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12px">+44 (0)7718 588497</span></div>
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<div style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.patkane.com/" target="_blank">http://www.patkane.com</a></span></div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><br> </div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 12px">All mail to: <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:patkane@theplayethic.com" target="_blank">patkane@theplayethic.com</a></span>
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