In early July, Cassie Pritchard argued on Twitter that liberalism had failed; it bet the farm on economic progress making people happier, but although it delivered impressive economic progress, happiness had failed to follow.
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happiness → argue → progress
In late July, I countered that Pritchard had made a mistake by comparing happiness to income, when the literature instead supports a correlation of happiness with log(income).
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literature → counter → log(income
Add the log term, and most happiness-income relationships reappear, and liberalism goes back to looking pretty good.
Last week, Pritchard responded on her Substack.
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Pritchard → add → Substack
I don’t have the interest to give this the full treatment it requires, but she deserves some response, so I’ll make a few points.
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I → have → points
Pritchard argues that the effect of income on happiness, though real, is small:
In short, a correlation does exist, and it’s plausibly causal.
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it → argue → happiness
But it’s pretty small.
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it → ’ → ?
Well, Alexander cites another article from Killingsworth that gives us the correlation across the entire dataset of individual observations, not just across these smoothed-out groups: “the correlation between average happiness and log(income) is 0.09 in the experience sampling data...the effect of an approximately fourfold difference in income is about equal to the effect of being a caregiver...and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.”
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effect → cite → headache
(Emphasis added).
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Emphasis → add → ?
So, according to Alexander’s strongest sources, quadrupling one’s income from $50,000 to $200,000 explains less impact on your happiness any given day than a bad hangover.
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quadrupling → accord → hangover
This is not a suitable foundation on which to build an entire political program--or even most of one.
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This → build → one
Why didn’t he deal with the smallness of the income effect in his post?
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he → deal → post
I don’t know, but he may have misinterpreted my original tweet as saying income doesn’t matter at all, in which case this data functions as an effective rebuttal.
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data → know → rebuttal
If that’s what happened, I don’t begrudge Alexander for it; Twitter context-collapse comes for us all.
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collapse → ’ → us
Pritchard states that the effect of her income change is the same as requiring a person to be a full-time caregiver for a disabled elderly relative, then dismisses that as too trivial to matter.
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effect → state → that
This is bizarre; I’ve seen strong healthy men get PTSD from having to be full-time caregivers.
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men → see → PTSD
It’s one of the most profound life changes imaginable, and Pritchard just mocks it as pathetically small, then starts speculating about my motives for not admitting how utterly insignificant it is!
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it → ’ → motives
Is it weird that Pritchard’s source lists becoming a full-time caretaker as only one-third as bad as having a headache?
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source → list → headache
Because it asks about point-in-time happiness, all things that happen at a specific point in time will seem large compared to protracted state changes in lifestyle.
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that → ask → lifestyle
Put another way, since rich people are rich every day, the proper comparison is having a headache every day.
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comparison → put → headache
I thankfully don’t get many headaches, but my wife has migraines.
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wife → get → migraines
I can tell when she’s having them because she locks herself in her room with all the lights off and moans for several hours.
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lights → tell → hours
Being in this state day in and day out sounds too horrible to contemplate - so 3x as bad as the already-terrible badness of having to be a caretaker for a disabled elderly relative seems about right.
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sounds → sound → relative
If quadrupling my income is really one-third as good as going from a permanent headache to normal and healthy, I should be trying harder to quadruple my income!
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I → quadruple → income
(I don’t drink much, so I can’t speak from experience, but I bet having hangovers every day, or even one-third of a hangover, would also be pretty bad.
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having → drink → hangover
Since we apparently disagree on the badness of forced caregiving, headaches, and hangovers, it might be helpful to look at Pritchard’s ultimate source (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010) for some other anchors.
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it → disagree → anchors
The difference between married people and divorced people.
3x the difference between normal-weight people and obese people
The point-in-time difference between it being a weekend vs. a weekday.
This is merely a 4x income difference; Pritchard and I are alternately discussing the antiquity-modernity difference or the First-Third World difference, both of which are 100x income differences.
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both → divorce → which
Since 100x is greater than four cubed, we ought to be able to stack all of these, and say it’s like the difference between being an obese person stuck at the office on Monday morning after a nasty divorce, vs. spending a Saturday afternoon with your true love while you’re both thin and beautiful.
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you → stack → love
(or if you prefer national-level comparisons to personal ones, remember that a quadrupling of national income represents about 3x the happiness difference between pre-pandemic America vs. worst-part-of-COVID-lockdown America.)
Much of the rest of Pritchard’s post then goes on to savage me for paying any attention to such a trivial difference which she has so thoroughly proven to be irrelevant; I can only say that none of the anchors above seem irrelevant to me and so I deny that income is irrelevant either.
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income → prefer → me
I’ll skip over those parts and focus on some of her other claims.
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I → skip → claims
She next points out that happiness scaling with log(income) might be an argument for redistribution:
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scaling → point → redistribution
Remember, happiness scaling with log(income) rather than with income means that each marginal dollar of income procures less happiness than the last.
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dollar → remember → last
This means that giving an amount of money to poor people (like through redistribution) improves happiness a lot more than if the same amount went to richer people.
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amount → mean → people
Killingsworth says this himself: “decision-makers that seek to improve collective happiness might find that preferentially increasing incomes of those who earn the least generates a large ROI for collective happiness.
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who → say → happiness
This study finds an extremely robust income-happiness correlation, and yet redistribution emerges as an essential policy concern, distinct from growth.
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redistribution → find → growth
Clearly, if our ends are maximizing happiness, Alexander’s monomaniacal focus on output is misguided.
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focus → maximize → output
People can—and should—prefer certain redistributive tradeoffs even if they have negative effects on growth.
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they → prefer → growth
Alexander anticipates this response to some extent, but handwaves it away in his discussion of an international dataset.
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Alexander → anticipate → dataset
I know extreme adjectives are in fashion these days, but I think it’s unfair to call me monomaniacal: I say several times in my post that other things besides income also matter, and we should pursue those too.
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we → know → those
I am responding to her claim that income doesn’t matter; this shouldn’t require reciting a list of every other thing that does.
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that → respond → thing
I endorse redistribution and have written about this elsewhere, at length.
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I → endorse → length
…and 306 more, not listed.
