TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction to the Conference on Law and Happiness - Eric A. Posner, Cass R. Sunstein
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0001
[happiness, good life, hedonics, law, public policy, cost-benefit analysis, tax, crime, damages]
In recent years the study of happiness—or “hedonics”—has developed into a formal field of inquiry, cutting across a broad range of disciplines and offering insights into a variety of crucial questions of law and public policy. This book brings together the best and most influential thinkers in the field to explore the question of what makes up happiness—and what factors can be demonstrated to increase or decrease it. The purpose of the law and happiness conference was to encourage greater collaboration across disciplines and reflection on the implications of happiness research for law and public policy. Several of the papers explore continuing methodological challenges to the happiness approach, the empirical data, and the implications for public policy in a general sense. The other papers address the implications of happiness research for specific areas of the law, including the determination of damages, crime, tax, and cost-benefit analysis. (pages 1 - 4)
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Measuring Well-Being for Public Policy: Preferences or Experiences? - Paul Dolan, Tessa Peasgood
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0002
[well-being, public policy, policy maker, subjective evaluation, income, preference satisfaction, policy making]
Policy makers seeking to enhance well-being are faced with a choice of possible measures that may offer contrasting views about how well an individual's life is going. This chapter suggests that the choice of well-being measures should be based on three general criteria: first, the measure must be conceptually appropriate (that is, measuring the right sort of concept for public policy), second, it must be valid (that is, is it a good measure of that concept), and third, it must be empirically useful (that is, does it provide information in a format that can be readily used by policy makers?). Preference-based measures are compared to experience-based measures according to these criteria. Neither set of measures meets ideal standards, but experiences do fare at least as well as preference satisfaction, and subjective evaluations perform much better than income alone as a measure of well-being. (pages 5 - 32)
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Happiness Inequality in the United States - Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0003
[happiness, happiness inequality, United States, well-being distribution, black-white happiness gap, gender happiness gap, income distribution]
This chapter examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972–2006. While there is no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There are large changes in the level of happiness across groups: two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap has been eroded, and the gender happiness gap has disappeared entirely. Paralleling changes in income distribution, differences in happiness by education have widened substantially. An integrated approach is developed for measuring inequality and decomposing changes in the distribution of happiness, finding a pervasive decline in within-group inequality during the 1970s and 1980s that was experienced by even narrowly defined demographic groups. Around one-third of this decline has subsequently been unwound. Juxtaposing these changes with large increases in income inequality suggests an important role for nonpecuniary factors in shaping the well-being distribution. (pages 33 - 80)
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Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology - Martha C. Nussbaum
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0004
[positive psychology, Martin Seligman, pleasure, satisfaction, happiness, philosophy, public policy, ethics, Utilitarians]
Psychology has recently focused attention on subjective states of pleasure, satisfaction, and what is called “happiness.” The suggestion made in some quarters is that a study of these subjective states has important implications for public policy. Sometimes, as in the case of Martin Seligman's “positive psychology” movement, attempts are made to link the empirical findings and the related normative judgments directly to the descriptive and normative insights of ancient Greek ethics and modern virtue ethics. The aim of this chapter is to confront this increasingly influential movement within psychology with a range of questions from the side of philosophy. Often these questions have a very long history in the discipline, going back at least to Aristotle; the more thoughtful Utilitarians, above all Mill, also studied them in depth. Some of these questions are conceptual; others are normative. (pages 81 - 114)
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Two Recommendations on the Pursuit of Happiness - Christopher K. Hsee, Fei Xu, Ningyu Tang
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0005
[sustainable happiness, adaptation-prone consumption, wealth, adaptation-resistant consumption, consumption, happiness]
This chapter examines how to increase the average happiness level within a generation and across generations. While any improvement in wealth and consumption will likely increase happiness, the increased happiness may or may not last long. There are two recommendations to make the increased happiness sustainable. First, to invest resources to promote adaptation-resistant consumption rather than adaptation-prone consumption—this seeks to make the increased happiness sustainable within a generation. The second recommendation is to invest resources to promote inherently evaluable consumption rather than inherently inevaluable consumption—this seeks to make the increased happiness sustainable across generations. (pages 115 - 132)
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Hive Psychology, Happiness, and Public Policy - Jonathan Haidt, J. Patrick Seder, Selin Kesebir
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0006
[hive psychology, relatedness, well-being, hive hypothesis, synchronized movement, joy, public policy, self-loss, social capital]
This chapter considers three hypotheses about relatedness and well-being including the hive hypothesis, which says people need to lose themselves occasionally by becoming part of an emergent social organism in order to reach the highest levels of human flourishing. It discusses the recent evolutionary thinking about multilevel selection, which offers a distal reason why the hive hypothesis might be true. The psychological phenomena such as the joy of synchronized movement and the ecstatic joy of self-loss, which might be proximal mechanisms underlying the extraordinary pleasures people get from hive-type activities. It is suggested that if the hive hypothesis turns out to be true, it has implications for public policy. Finally, the chapter suggests that the hive hypothesis points to new ways to increase social capital and encourages a new focus on happy groups as being more than collections of happy individuals. (pages 133 - 156)
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Illusory Losses - Cass R. Sunstein
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0007
[illusory losses, hedonic damage, health problems, hedonic loss, legal system, jury, judgment errors, injury, capability loss, compensation]
Recent empirical work demonstrates that healthy people make large mistakes when evaluating the welfare of those suffering from apparently serious health problems. Significant adverse conditions often inflict little or no hedonic damage—sometimes because people adapt to them, and sometimes because those who suffer many losses do not, after a time, focus on them. These findings have important implications for the legal system, especially for awards for pain, suffering, and hedonic losses, where juries are likely to overestimate the effect of injuries on happiness. There are two important qualifications. First, some injuries, such as chronic pain, do inflict significant hedonic losses because people cannot adapt and inevitably focus on them. Second, people may suffer capability loss without suffering hedonic loss, and that loss should be compensable. The legal system might be improved by civil damages guidelines to correct hedonic judgment errors by juries. Broader implications include the appropriate priorities for governments attempting to improve the welfare of their citizens. (pages 157 - 194)
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Pain and Suffering Awards: They Shouldn't Be (Just) about Pain and Suffering - Peter A. Ubel, George Loewenstein
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0008
[pain, suffering, compensation, pain-and-suffering awards, happiness, noneconomic damages, injury]
This chapter challenges the conventional view that pain-and-suffering awards should be interpreted literally as a compensation for feelings of pain and suffering. People adapt to conditions as serious as paraplegia and blindness, returning rapidly to near-normal levels of happiness, which means that pain-and-suffering awards based literally on pain and suffering would be small. The argument made that compensation for these types of conditions should be larger than would be dictated by pain and suffering alone because people legitimately care about more than just the pain and suffering that results from an injury; they also care about a variety of other factors, such as their capabilities to perform various functions, that often do not affect happiness. It is proposed that the outlines of a method for determining noneconomic damages that divides the problem into three judgments, each to be made by the constituency most competent to make it. (pages 195 - 216)
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Death, Happiness, and the Calculation of Compensatory Damages - Andrew J. Oswald, Nattavudh Powdthavee
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0009
[bereavement, death, happiness, compensatory damages, adaptation, income, happiness regression equations, emotional loss, emotional harm]
This chapter presents a study of the mental distress caused by bereavement. The greatest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse, the second greatest from the death of a child, and the third from the death of a parent. It explores how happiness regression equations might be used in tort cases to calculate compensatory damages for emotional harm and pain and suffering. The chapter examines alternative well-being variables, discusses adaptation, considers the possibility that bereavement affects someone's marginal utility of income, and suggests a procedure for correcting for the endogeneity of income. Although the chapter's contribution is methodological and further research is needed, some illustrative compensation amounts are discussed. (pages 217 - 252)
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Happiness Research and Cost-Benefit Analysis - Matthew Adler, Eric A. Posner
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0010
[happiness, cost-benefit analysis, subjective well-being, injury, income]
A growing body of research on happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) shows, among other things, that people adapt to many injuries more rapidly than is commonly thought, fail to predict the degree of adaptation and hence overestimate the impact of those injuries on their SWB, and, similarly, enjoy small or moderate rather than significant changes in SWB in response to significant changes in income. Some researchers believe that these findings pose a challenge to cost-benefit analysis and argue that project evaluation decision procedures based on economic premises should be replaced with procedures that directly maximize SWB. This view turns out to be wrong or, at best, premature. Cost-benefit analysis remains a viable decision procedure. However, some of the findings in the happiness literature can be used to generate valuations for cost-benefit analysis where current approaches have proved inadequate. (pages 253 - 292)
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What Does Happiness Research Tell Us About Taxation? - David A. Weisbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0011
[taxation, happiness, tax models, progressive consumption tax, empirical data, tax rates, marriage penalties, age-dependent taxation, status, income]
This chapter analyses the consequences of happiness research for taxation. It focuses on the finding that happiness depends on status as well as income, examining how adding status concerns to standard optimal tax models changes the results. It then compares the empirical findings of the happiness literature to see whether they provide the type of data needed to parameterize the models, arguing that the models need different types of data than most happiness studies emphasize. The chapter also looks at Robert Frank's arguments for a progressive consumption tax based on the findings of the happiness research. It finds that these claims are not supported by the current models or empirical data. Finally, the chapter considers a number of other potential implications of happiness research for taxation, including marriage penalties or bonuses, special tax rates for the disabled, and age-dependent taxation. (pages 293 - 324)
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The Effect of Crime on Life Satisfaction - Mark A. Cohen
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226676029.003.0012
[crime rate, quality of life, life satisfaction, neighborhood safety, health, crime, home burglary]
Crime often ranks at the top of public concern, and a majority of the public report they sometimes worry about crime. Yet it is little known about crime's impact on day-to-day quality of life. This chapter provides new evidence using a combination of objective crime risk data and responses to subjective evaluations about quality of life. It is found that county-level crime rates and perceived neighborhood safety have little impact on overall life satisfaction. In contrast, the effect of a home burglary on life satisfaction is quite large—nearly as much as moving from excellent health to good health. In monetary terms, estimation for a compensating income equivalent is nearly $85,000 for a home burglary. Thus, while being burglarized has a large and significant effect on a victim's overall life satisfaction, neither county-level crime rates nor neighborhood safety appear to have very large effects on daily life satisfaction for the average American. (pages 325 - 354)
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Index
