This was great! I'm a psychologist working in a neighboring area and there was still stuff here I hadn't heard before, like the aspiration treadmill.
One thing I wonder about: is fallible memory really a problem for the kinds of questions we usually want to ask about happiness? For the cold pressor task and colonoscopy studies where people prefer the experience where they technically experience more pain, we could say that people were "tricked" and they actually *should not* prefer that experience because there's more area under the pain-curve. But if they remember it for the rest of their lives as feeling nicer than the supposedly better experience, isn't that what matters? If we want to know what experience ultimately leaves people better off, we're mainly concerned with their remembering selves rather than their experiencing selves.
Fallible memories do seem like problems if we want to answer questions like "are people happier on Mondays or Saturdays?" and we only ask people retrospectively rather than using experience sampling methods (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00353.x). But usually what we want to know is "are these people generally happy right now?" and for that it seems fine if they've changed their minds or forgotten about how their past experiences felt in the moment. In fact, there's evidence that the negativity of negative experiences fades in people's memory faster than the positivity of positive experiences, and this helps people feel generally good in the moment (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128000526000032). In that case, a fallible memory is a feature rather than a bug.
Anyway, thanks for writing––I'm looking forward to reading what you write next!
I think that if the memory is valuable, it is probably valuable only for the positive experience that memory brings, and therefore it is the same kind of value as the original momentary experience and can/should be added up with it when analyzing the occurrence.
Maybe the memory of an experience is worth more than the experience itself - after all, a memory does last longer and has a larger impact on your life overall. I think it is fundamentally the same worth, though - that of hedonia or eudaimonia. So we can't ignore the moment entirely - we still need to be able to calulate that.
If the memory is worth *way* more than the original experience though - which might be what you're getting at, idk - then maybe it isn't worth calculating your momentary happiness at all, and we should just focus on remembered happiness. That would be pretty helpful for happiness science!
Hey man, I was delighted to find this post and subscribe. My doctoral dissertation in progress is an argument that measuring subjective-wellbeing is a solution to a lot of the classical antimonies of welfare economics, and measurement issues form a big part of it, so this post was very useful: (See my thesis notes here if you're interested: https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/draft-zero-of-my-phd-thesis )
Anyway, I think for me the interesting tension is this- how good does a method have to be before it is, to use a phrase "good enough for government work" when it comes to measuring economic progress and the effects of policies? I think philosophers and methodologists like myself really love picking away at methodologies for the study of subjective-wellbeing, but what we often forget is that the other side of the equation for measuring welfare isn't some ultra sophisticated lovey-dovey holistic measure of social and economic effects, it's unweighted willingness to pay and cost-benefit analysis.
Indeed I sometimes think that methodologies like Kaldor-Hicks crowd out measures that I'd prefer *because they wear their weaknesses on their sleeve*. Whereas SWB measures as a yardstick for policy are *debatably* bad, Kaldor-Hicks is just *openly* bad- but something about that brazenness seems to win out.
How does one draw the line when it comes to measures of SWB. What sort of objections should be seen as intellectual curiosities, matters of concerns for academics, and what sort of objections should be seen as grave and direct enough to threaten a methodology's work in public decision making?
Hey there, thanks for subscribing! I've read and enjoyed quite a few of your Substack posts. Will check out your thesis notes!
To be honest, I think most of the technical issues with happiness measurement are solvable (unless the aspiration treadmill turns out to be real). I also think those are less bad than the technical issues with the more "economic" methods like revealed preference, which have to deal with a bunch of biases and intransitivity issues which I see as much harder to solve.
But it'll probably all come down to the deeper critiques of happiness measurement - for example, what if we're measuring something other than the "happiness" which has moral significance? What if happiness is so deeply culture-bound that we can't possibly compare it across continents? I don't think either of those are all that likely, but if true, they would severely weaken the entire field of happiness studies.
"what we often forget is that the other side of the equation for measuring welfare isn't some ultra sophisticated lovey-dovey holistic measure of social and economic effects, it's unweighted willingness to pay and cost-benefit analysis."
Is it more possible that there is a multi-dimensional theory of economic wellbeing? I one tried to PCA different countries' developmental status against their average cultural dimensionalities, and found that less than 9 dimensions is enough for everything. Maybe for different cultures, they optimize for different forms of wellbeing.
Seems very possible; it could explain the Latin-American happiness paradox (Latin-American countries are happier than their economic circumstances predict) if Latin-America is optimizing for some kind of social wellbeing, for example.
Personally, I like the term "components of wellbeing" more than "forms of wellbeing", though I'm not quite sure why. Maybe because it implies a combined "total wellbeing" which could be somehow calculated from all its components.
This was great! I'm a psychologist working in a neighboring area and there was still stuff here I hadn't heard before, like the aspiration treadmill.
One thing I wonder about: is fallible memory really a problem for the kinds of questions we usually want to ask about happiness? For the cold pressor task and colonoscopy studies where people prefer the experience where they technically experience more pain, we could say that people were "tricked" and they actually *should not* prefer that experience because there's more area under the pain-curve. But if they remember it for the rest of their lives as feeling nicer than the supposedly better experience, isn't that what matters? If we want to know what experience ultimately leaves people better off, we're mainly concerned with their remembering selves rather than their experiencing selves.
Fallible memories do seem like problems if we want to answer questions like "are people happier on Mondays or Saturdays?" and we only ask people retrospectively rather than using experience sampling methods (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00353.x). But usually what we want to know is "are these people generally happy right now?" and for that it seems fine if they've changed their minds or forgotten about how their past experiences felt in the moment. In fact, there's evidence that the negativity of negative experiences fades in people's memory faster than the positivity of positive experiences, and this helps people feel generally good in the moment (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128000526000032). In that case, a fallible memory is a feature rather than a bug.
Anyway, thanks for writing––I'm looking forward to reading what you write next!
Thanks for the comment!
I think that if the memory is valuable, it is probably valuable only for the positive experience that memory brings, and therefore it is the same kind of value as the original momentary experience and can/should be added up with it when analyzing the occurrence.
Maybe the memory of an experience is worth more than the experience itself - after all, a memory does last longer and has a larger impact on your life overall. I think it is fundamentally the same worth, though - that of hedonia or eudaimonia. So we can't ignore the moment entirely - we still need to be able to calulate that.
If the memory is worth *way* more than the original experience though - which might be what you're getting at, idk - then maybe it isn't worth calculating your momentary happiness at all, and we should just focus on remembered happiness. That would be pretty helpful for happiness science!
Hey man, I was delighted to find this post and subscribe. My doctoral dissertation in progress is an argument that measuring subjective-wellbeing is a solution to a lot of the classical antimonies of welfare economics, and measurement issues form a big part of it, so this post was very useful: (See my thesis notes here if you're interested: https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/draft-zero-of-my-phd-thesis )
Anyway, I think for me the interesting tension is this- how good does a method have to be before it is, to use a phrase "good enough for government work" when it comes to measuring economic progress and the effects of policies? I think philosophers and methodologists like myself really love picking away at methodologies for the study of subjective-wellbeing, but what we often forget is that the other side of the equation for measuring welfare isn't some ultra sophisticated lovey-dovey holistic measure of social and economic effects, it's unweighted willingness to pay and cost-benefit analysis.
Indeed I sometimes think that methodologies like Kaldor-Hicks crowd out measures that I'd prefer *because they wear their weaknesses on their sleeve*. Whereas SWB measures as a yardstick for policy are *debatably* bad, Kaldor-Hicks is just *openly* bad- but something about that brazenness seems to win out.
How does one draw the line when it comes to measures of SWB. What sort of objections should be seen as intellectual curiosities, matters of concerns for academics, and what sort of objections should be seen as grave and direct enough to threaten a methodology's work in public decision making?
Hey there, thanks for subscribing! I've read and enjoyed quite a few of your Substack posts. Will check out your thesis notes!
To be honest, I think most of the technical issues with happiness measurement are solvable (unless the aspiration treadmill turns out to be real). I also think those are less bad than the technical issues with the more "economic" methods like revealed preference, which have to deal with a bunch of biases and intransitivity issues which I see as much harder to solve.
But it'll probably all come down to the deeper critiques of happiness measurement - for example, what if we're measuring something other than the "happiness" which has moral significance? What if happiness is so deeply culture-bound that we can't possibly compare it across continents? I don't think either of those are all that likely, but if true, they would severely weaken the entire field of happiness studies.
"what we often forget is that the other side of the equation for measuring welfare isn't some ultra sophisticated lovey-dovey holistic measure of social and economic effects, it's unweighted willingness to pay and cost-benefit analysis."
Well said.
Is it more possible that there is a multi-dimensional theory of economic wellbeing? I one tried to PCA different countries' developmental status against their average cultural dimensionalities, and found that less than 9 dimensions is enough for everything. Maybe for different cultures, they optimize for different forms of wellbeing.
Seems very possible; it could explain the Latin-American happiness paradox (Latin-American countries are happier than their economic circumstances predict) if Latin-America is optimizing for some kind of social wellbeing, for example.
Personally, I like the term "components of wellbeing" more than "forms of wellbeing", though I'm not quite sure why. Maybe because it implies a combined "total wellbeing" which could be somehow calculated from all its components.