Wellbeing and Health

From "No Shame, No Blame: Secrets of Living Well" produced by Vanderbilt Health and Wellness

Gratitude and Wellbeing

I heard psychologist Dacher Keltner, a founder of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, on the radio this morning calling for more gratitude as a counterweight to the materialism of the season.The work of Keltner and others has shown that gratitude is closely associated with health and overall wellbeing.
The value in gratitude for our sense of self is related to the sorts of positional consumption arms races that Bob Frank has written about.  (The value of "positional goods" owes more to their scarcity and social identity aspects than to their material properties: the real utility of that $3000 Birkin handbag (to carry stuff around) is about the same as a plastic shopping bag.)  We adapt to new material circumstances quickly and then aspire to more. When I started my career, my imagined dream position was where I am now; and yet, in arriving here, my dreams and aspirations have changed and expanded so that I still fell as if I am missing something in my life.

Such aspiration is important, gives meaning and direction and energy to our lives (as I argue in The Good Life). There is a lot of subjective value in anticipation, as an article in the Atlantic highlights. And yet it can also be a source of constant discontent if not combined with gratitude for what we have. This is a propitious time of the year to think not about what we lack but also what we have--and it is a useful exercise to do this while thinking about what we wanted ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

Research also shows that experiences matter more than things in overall wellbeing--we remember them better and they increase of overall sense of life satisfaction. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues have shown in a number of studies that money spent on experiences (rather than objects) provides more enduring happiness among subjects. As with positional goods, experiences are tightly linked to identity--in many ways our identities are built from experiences.

Stuff is certainly important, but as Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton note in Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, new-ness wears off quickly and is often followed by disappointment. We need things, but the meaning of things goes beyond their material properties--a thing, anything, also serves as a vessel for our ideas, a container for our hopes and dreams. And our aspirations often give more meaning to objects than they can handle, leading to disappointment.

So, while gratitude cannot replace aspiration, it is a necessary counterbalance for wellbeing.

The Good Life: Page 99 Test

The Page 99 Test blog takes its cue from Ford Madox Ford, who remarked "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

I was asked to apply the Page 99 Test to my new book, The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing:
          In this era of globalization, of transnational corporations and ubiquitous internet access, it is easy to forget just how different national economies sometimes are—and what we might learn from different ways of organizing markets.

         Germany’s soziale Marktwirtschaft (“social market economy”), also known as Rhenish capitalism, places a greater emphasis on stakeholders . . .   CONTINUE READING at Page 99 Test: http://page99test.blogspot.com/2014/11/edward-f-fischers-good-life.html

Measures of Happiness and Wellbeing

Who are the happiest people in the world? In what countries do we find the highest life satisfaction? These are different questions, with different answers. Cheery contentment (hedonic happiness) is not the same as long-term wellbeing (eudaimonia), as I argue in The Good Life.

Martin Seligman, in his book Flourish, writes that "Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, and the other Latin American countries are a lot happier than they should be given their low gross domestic product." High GDP might not guarantee happiness or wellbeing--but it also doesn't hurt as a comilations of wellbeing indices assembled by Korn Ferry shows:  

World Database of Happiness Top Ten:

1.     Costa Rica

2.     Denmark

3.     Iceland

4.     Switzerland

5.     Finland

6.     Mexico

7.     Norway

8.     Canada

9.     Panama

10.  Sweden

The Legatum Prosperity Index

1.     Costa Rica

2.     Denmark

3.     Iceland

4.     Switzerland

5.     Norway

6.     Finland

7.     Mexico

8.     Sweden

9.     Canada

10.  Panama

 

The Legatum Prosperity Index

1.     Costa Rica

2.     Denmark

3.     Iceland

4.     Switzerland

5.     Norway

6.     Finland

7.     Mexico

8.     Sweden

9.     Canada

10.  Panama

And Gallup has a new "Positive Experience Index" (measuring the occurrence of certain positive experiences the previous day) that tilts heavily Latin America:
 

Gallup’s Positive Experience Index

1.     Paraguay

2.     Panama

3.     Guatemala

4.     Nicaragua

5.     Ecuador

6.     Costa Rica

7.     Colombia

8.     Denmark

9.     Honduras

10.  Venezuela

11.  El Salvador

21st Century Capitalism, Inequality, and and the Policy Toolkit

Capitalism qua capitalism is a topic of serious discussion for the first time in the U.S. in a very long time, at least among the NY Times/Atlantic/New Yorker reading demographic. It has been spurred by post-2008 real world conditions and channeled through Thomas Piketty's new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A surprisingly weighty tome to top the Amazon non-fiction list, Piketty's book marshals a massive amount of data to show the recent rise in inequality to new gilded age heights. In itself that is not a revelation, but Piketty observes that it is not driven by high incomes (the executive salaries that routinely make headlines) but rather by returns on capital.  He illustrates the growth of the economy versus returns on capital (figure taken from Kruger review of Piketty):


The first amazing fact captured in this diagram is the dramatic drop in the rate of return from capital during the 19th century--the shift away from feudalistic rent-taking to competitive capitalist production. And now the troublesome divergence that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s.

There is good evidence to suggest that a certain degree of inequality is correlated with economic growth.  Too much inequality, however, disarticulates the production and consumption sides of the economy, constricts the opportunities open to the majority of people, a poses serious ethical dilemmas over what is acceptable. Where to draw the line is a technical and moral question, one that we tend to avoid.

Still, there is hope and even some practical solutions. Piketty calls for a 15% tax on capital and an 80% tax on incomes over $500,000.

Piketty's work reminds me of Jon Shayne's interview of Andrew Smithers (previously blogged here) in which Smithers shows the divergence of earning shares going to labor and going to profit:

Smithers argues that executive compensation has introduced a number of incentives that encourage managers to maximize short term profits at the expense of long-term investment in labor and productivity. This is troubling, and unhealthy for the economy in the long haul, as future collective prosperity is foregone for immediate rewards.

In terms of speculation that produces little social benefit, Jon points out that one alternative would be for the capital gains tax rate to become progressively lower over time (i.e. rewarding holding and long-term investment). Economist Bob Frank promotes a steeply progressive consumption tax that would discourage the arms race of conspicuous consumption of positional goods.

From nudges to smart regulation, there now exists a policy toolkit to fix our economic, political, and social woes. If only we would use it.

Minimum Income, Wellbeing, and Deirdre McCloskey on Parisian Beggars

Let us accept, if just for argument's sake, that the goal of politics and economic systems is the provisioning of the good life, as variously conceived, as broadly and fairly as possible. How then to achieve that aim? On the one hand, it would seem to require a commitment to individual freedom, old school Enlightenment style liberalism: people should be empowered to choose their own good life. At the same time, it also requires a commitment to common goods, the collective basis for individual flourishing and the source of much of our social wellbeing. In Sunday's NY Times, Tony Schwartz makes the case that our lasting successes and and life satisfaction are based on doing something that really matters, having the sense "that we're truly adding value in the world" (also the argument in my forthcoming book on The Good Life).

Economist Deirdre McCloskey has been wrestling with this contradiction throughout her career (which began as Donald McCloskey). In a chapter in Cash on the Table, she observes that economists overvalue self-interest and anthropologists overvalue social goods--and that both miss the complicated interplay.  As she explains to Paul Solman in a recent PBS NewsHour interview, this isn't just theoretical. She generally supports market approaches, but she also advocates a guaranteed minimum income on the grounds of moral values:
I was on a subway in Paris a long time ago, and this guy came into the car, and the first thing he said was: I’m 24 years old. Because he couldn’t beg if he was 27 years old — that’s when the minimum income came in. That is, if you were 27 in France, you got a minimum income. So he couldn’t persuasively beg. I’d like people who can’t make enough income to be helped out this way.

In the context of the developing world, guaranteed minimum incomes are a variant of conditional cash transfers (paying folks to keep their kids in school and healthy) and unconditional cash transfers. Give Directly gives $1000 to selected households in Kenya and Uganda; families do not apply, they are identified as needy and given the windfall. Overhead costs for such programs are minimal compared to traditional aid, and supporters argue that folks themselves know best what they need to get ahead.

Supporters of a minimum income argue that it both prevents extreme poverty and can encourage entrepreneurial behavior (by reducing the costs of failure). And more than just entrepreneurial ventures it can allow a greater range of life projects and wellbeing. 

Romance, Wellbeing, and the Work of Love

For a long time, historians thought that romantic love (as we understand it, in a Hallmark Valentine's kind of way) was a Western invention, constructed by the romantic troubadours in French courts of the thirteenth century (see this piece by Catherine Winter).

Recent years, and the rise of brain scanning technologies and evolutionary psychology, have seen the conventional wisdom shift. Most explanations of romantic love these days focus on serotonin and dopamine levels, blood flow and MRIs; and these biological mechanisms are postulated to have emerged early in human history to promote pair bonding and care of our especially helpless young.

But it does not have to be either social construction or evolutionary mandate. Social and psychological triggers can flip the switch on chemical processes in our brains. This is the argument I make on a new PRI show titled The Really Big Questions, hosted by Dean Olsher.  My bit starts at 38:00 into the episode.

In previous posts I have argued that wellbeing requires a lot of not always pleasurable work. Fulfillment is distinct from giddy happiness; and it derives from the hard work of becoming the sort of person you want to be. Likewise, as I claim in the Love episode of The Really Big Question, more than biochemical, and it requires a lot of hard work.

Wellbeing and Wages

Inequality has a huge impact on wellbeing, more so than even absolute income levels. A lot of what we feel about how we are doing, depends on how those around us are doing and our relative standing.
President Obama has been turning attention to inequality lately, and development measures have long taken it into account in terms of general economic wellbeing. And a number of recent studies from psychology, behavioral economics, and management not only help explain this, but point the way toward more optimal solutions:

Mat Richtel reports on recent research that suggests "a deeply rooted instinct to earn more than can possibly be consumed, even when this imbalance makes us unhappy" and that higher income levels may promote "mindless accumulation." In an experimental setting (and uses pieces of Dove chocolate as pay), researchers found that higher earners would work harder to accumulate more chocolate than they would be able to eat (during a limited period after the round of play), while low earners were content to work at a more relaxed pace. The pull of endless accumulation, it seems, can be so powerful as to overwhelm choices that might result in greater overall wellbeing.

Adam Davidson, in his excellent column in the NY Times Magazine argues that "paying [workers] and treating them better, will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and--surprisingly--larger corporate profits." Citing research by Marshall Fisher (Wharton School) and Zeynep Ton (M.I.T.), he shows that good paying jobs are not only better for workers but also in many ways for the bottom line, to less turnover to more engagement.

Purpose and Wellbeing

As Tony Schwartz (in the NY Times) argues in a recent column: a sense of purpose--contributing to something meaningful and larger than yourself--is a core element of life satisfaction, wellbeing, and the good life. He quotes Nietzsche's observation: “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

We often hear purpose and passion as extolled virtues these days: find your passion, live life with a purpose. This is the sort of self-help that resonates with the demographic represented by readers of the Times.

Indeed, yesterday's paper ran an article about Martha Beck ("the merchant of happiness") who has built a small empire around life coaching: she says “Everything I’ve ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this — I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this — if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it." 

But, as readers of this blog will know, having a larger purpose in life is not the exclusive purview of the affluent and middle classes. The poor as well as the rich give purpose to their lives; it is in many ways what makes us human. And such larger purposes must not be as lofty or laudable as the passions featured in the paper: political extremism, racist ideologies, and other such projects may increase individual wellbeing among their adherents while harming collective goods.

Higher Pleasures, the Work of Wellbeing, and Public Policy

Perhaps the good life is not a state to be obtained, but, as Aristotle suggests, it is the the pursuit and the journey that give meaning and fulfillment. Striving for the good life involves the arduous work of becoming: creating meaning, aspiring for something better, the act of becoming the sort of person and living the sort of life one deems worthy and desirable. 

Thus, the good life is not made up of simple "happiness." It requires trade-offs, often forgoing hedonistic pleasure for long term goals. I have previously written on the distinction between hedonic happiness (are you happy right now?) and eudaimonic wellbeing (with its longer horizon of life satisfaction), showing that the two can well be at odds with one another.

Steven Mazie, on BigThink.com, argues that the current fashion for happiness studies distracts us from what is really important: "Not every costly, challenging endeavor we take up is a recipe for happiness, but our world and our individual lives would be sapped of all meaning if we made life plans based on the results of happiness studies like these [measures of hedonic happiness]. Who would learn Chinese or advanced calculus? Who would spend all night volunteering in hurricane relief emergency shelters? Who would ever have a child?"

Mazie calls on John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures in his attempt to calculate utilities: "If, on reflection, we would refuse to give up Pleasure A in exchange for a bottomless trough of Pleasure B, that’s a good sign Pleasure A is a higher pleasure for us. If we wouldn’t forfeit our religion or our children for the promise of a keg of cold beer that never runs dry, we should consider the former to be more valuable than the latter. Lower pleasures are fantastic — and reading the results of laughable happiness studies may well be one of them — but they are not the pulp of life."

Indeed, when we look to provisioning the good life as broadly as possible, as we should in markets and government, we must take care not to privilege hedonic happiness over long-term wellbeing.

(On a separate but related note: The WSJ reported this week that its CEO Council identified five top priorities for the country: immigration reform, education reform, tax reform, business-government cooperation, and health-care quality. It is remarkable not only that these could all have been pulled from an Obama speech, but also that they are all broadly consistent with a wellbeing approach to policy, even if the devil is in the detail of means to these ends.)

Prosperity, Poverty, and Wellbeing

Prosperity, wellbeing, the good life--this elusive condition that we are all presumably striving for--is notoriously difficult to measure. We have long used income as a shorthand for wellbeing, but we are now realizing how limited that is as a proxy. An adequate income is certainly necessary, but alone is insufficient, for wellbeing. Part of the problem in measurement, as I argue in my forthcoming book on The Good Life, is that often precisely what is most valuable in life in least quantifiable, such as dignity, aspiration, and larger purposes.

Nonetheless, the urge to measure and rank countries produces lots of interesting data. The Legatum Institute's prosperity index uses 8 equally weighted sub-indices to calculate prosperity:
1. Economy
2. Entreprenuership and opportunity
3 Governance
4. Education
5. Health
6. Safety and Security
7. Personal freedom
8. Social capital
Nathan Gamester reports their 2013 findings in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, and there are several interesting results:

• Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and Sweden come out on top
• Since 2009, the United States has dropped from 12th to 24th
• Germany has gone from 16th to 9th
• Guatemala has drop from 82nd to 90th (out of 142).

German Eggs, Guatemalan Coffee, and the Good Life

(wordcloud created with worditout.com)

German Eggs, Guatemalan Coffee, and the Good Life: An Anthropological Look at Markets, Values and Wellbeing (my new manuscript) presents a simple proposition: the ends of the economy, as well as politics, should be provisioning the good life for people as they themselves conceive it.  The rub is, of course, that while we may all want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails.  The book examines wellbeing in two very different cultural contexts, teasing out lessons for the good life and how best to achieve it.   

We look to middle class German supermarket shoppers and to impoverished Maya farmers in Guatemala, uncovering how they use the market as consumers and as producers in pursuit of the good life.  In both places, the good life implies more than mere happiness: it implies wellbeing, fulfillment, the meaningful existence Aristotle termed eudaimonia.  An adequate income is absolutely necessary, but alone is insufficient, for overall wellbeing.  As other research has noted, health and physical security, family bonds and social relations are also important.  But my research points to several additional key elements of the good life that go beyond material standards of living:

·         Agency and Aspiration: Aspiration, a view of the future based on ideas about the good life, gives direction to agency, the power to act and to control one’s destiny 

·         Opportunity Structures: The will—agency—is alone not enough; there must also be a way, a set of structures (social, economic, legal) that provide real opportunities to realize one’s aspirations

·         Dignity and Fairness: The exact contours of “fairness” vary across cultures, but everywhere wellbeing depends on how one is treated in relation to others, socially as well as economically  

·         Commitment to a Meaningful Project: Having a purpose that is larger than one’s self provides a crucial sense of meaning to life; being a part of such larger projects is fundamental to wellbeing and the good life

I illustrate these themes through thick descriptions of German eggs and cars, Guatemalan coffee and cocaine—things to which people attach their aspirations and desires for a good life, both extraordinary and mundane. 

Buying eggs may be one of life’s more mundane tasks, something most of us do without much thought beyond occasionally comparing prices.  But egg shopping in Germany compels one to make an explicit moral decision with every purchase, to lay bare the price one puts on certain values.  Since 2004 Germany has required all eggs to carry a numeric code that denotes how the chickens were raised.  Among German shoppers we find a broad concern with the moral provenance of eggs, which they explain in terms of ecological conscientiousness and a salient cultural notion of social solidarity.  They see such consumer choices as a way of pursuing their vision of what the world should look like, of the good life for themselves and others.

 

While you may not have spent much time thinking about where yours eggs come from, there is a good chance that you have considered the origin of your coffee, if only to order the Antigua mild or Colombian blend at your coffee shop.  Much high-end gourmet coffee these days is grown by poor, smallholding Maya farmers in the highlands of Guatemala.  The high altitude lands to which they have been relegated over the centuries turns out to be ideally suited for producing the complexly flavored coffees preferred by today’s affluent consumers. These Maya farmers have entered the coffee market in pursuit of something better for themselves and their families, a productive if imperfect path for achieving their own visions of the good life.

In this book, we see how elements of wellbeing are expressed by German consumers and Maya producers, what this means for their visions of the good life, and what they can tell us about wellbeing. 

To understand what the good life could be calls for empirical study of how the world works (the “is”), but also a critical analysis of how things got that way and moral reflection about how the world might be different (the “ought”).  I conclude by suggesting a “positive anthropology” that works between the is and the ought, documenting the ways people around the world conceive of and work toward wellbeing to glean practical as well as theoretical lessons for approaching the good life. 

The entire manuscript draft is available (in A4 format if you are printing) at tedfischer.org/assets/German_Eggs_Guatemalan_Coffee_and_the_Good_Life_A4.pdf and I would welcome comments.