Target Public Policy at Suffering, Not Happiness, Says Researcher
Public policy designed to alleviate human suffering rather than to
increase happiness should be the goal of policymakers, argues an Alma
College author and researcher.
“We know that certain factors such as unemployment, poverty and
attenuated social connections make people unhappy, but we don’t know
much about how to make already happy people happier,” says William
Gorton, an assistant professor of political science at Alma College.
“Research indicates a person making $50,000 is just as happy as one who
makes $3 million. But people who are genuinely poor are not likely to
be very happy,” he says.
Alleviating human suffering, misery and unhappiness is the focus of
“negative utilitarianism,” a political theory that originated with 20th
century philosopher Karl Popper. In contrast, standard utilitarianism
calls for public policy aimed at increasing overall human happiness.
“Popper wrote that we aren’t very good at predicting how to make people
happy,” says Gorton. “And ratcheting policy to make already happy
people happier has the potential of being dangerous to democracy
because it could reinforce the power of government to an unhealthy
degree.”
New research findings in the field of positive psychology reinforce
Popper’s ideas, says Gorton, author of the academic book “Karl Popper
and the Social Sciences.”
“Popper’s concept has much to recommend it, especially given the
finding from positive psychology that most efforts to increase
happiness are likely to prove fruitless if the targets of such efforts
are already mostly happy, as most people are,” says Gorton.
“In essence, people seem to reach a happiness saturation point,” says
Gorton. “People in the Middle Class are nearly as happy as the wealthy,
but poor people are often miserable.”
Efforts have begun to create a gross national happiness index to
measure factors that influence a nation’s happiness, says Gorton.
“There are different ways to measure happiness,” says Gorton.
“One is to simply ask people on a scale of 1 to 10 to identify their
happiness level. On these scales, the average is usually 6 or 7.
Another way is to rate all the factors that correlate to happiness,
such as access to healthcare, economic mobility, unemployment rate, job
security and aggregate wealth.
“But comparing the happiness of different societies can be difficult
because different cultures have different expectations,” he says. “The
United States is pro-happiness. But in Eastern Europe, for example,
there’s a stigma associated with expressing happiness; it shows a
shallow person. China downplays individual happiness and emphasizes
community happiness.”
Gorton presented “Rethinking Popper’s Negative Utilitarianism in Light
of Positive Psychology” at the 2007 annual meeting of the Midwest
Political Science Association.
Posted: Mon, August 27th, 2007 at 1:48PM
