Monthly Archives: November 2011

must you be good to be happy?

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He who would live rightly should let his desires be as strong as possible and not chasten them, and should be able to minister to them when they are at their height by reason of his manliness and intelligence, and satisfy each appetite in turn with what it desires. … No, in good truth, Socrates—which you claim to be seeking—the fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness, and the rest of these embellishments—the unnatural covenants of mankind—are all mere stuff and nonsense.

— Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias 492, trans. W.R. Lamb, via Project Perseus

Socrates responds that to be happy, you must be virtuous. That would be a good news, because then we would have self-interested reasons to be altruistic and just; everything would hang together nicely. At roughly the same time, far to the east, the Buddha was saying much the same thing.

But pure philosophical arguments probably don’t support their view. Unless one defines happiness as virtue in a way that stretches ordinary language, it is possible to be bad and happy. There are people like Callicles among us. They do not have selfish reasons to be good, because being bad works fine for them. For them, happiness is pleasure, the satisfaction of preferences, or the sheer wielding of will, and they are lucky enough to succeed.

But it is true–and important–that for most people, being good is the best path to being happy. Several different streams of empirical research flow in this direction, but I am thinking of the work of Corey Keyes. Keyes is challenging the assumption that our most serious mental-health problem is mental illness, and we can cure it. Actually, we only treat symptoms of mental illness, and not very successfully. More to the point, mental illness is not our only problem.

Keyes analyzes large national surveys that ask numerous questions about mental and emotional states. He treats each question as a “symptom” of underlying conditions that cannot be directly measured with single survey items. The standard way to find underlying conditions is factor analysis. If our major problem were mental disorders, then factor analysis would detect one underlying issue: mental illness, whose absence would be mental health. Everyone could be placed on a single continuum from mentally ill to free of illness.

But factor analysis actually finds two independent continua. One runs from mental illness to its absence. The other runs from “flourishing” to its opposite, “languishing.”

From the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand

“Flourishing,” in turn, turns out to encompass three major elements: 1) positive emotions; 2) positive psychological functioning (such as believing that your life has purpose, or having warm and trusting relations); and 3) positive social functioning (which includes positive beliefs about other people, confidence that one’s own daily activities are useful for others, and belonging to a community). “Languishing” is basically the absence of flourishing.

As someone trained in moral philosophy, I immediately want to ask whether the elements of “flourishing” are the true virtues, the elements of a good life. But for our purposes here, that is not the primary question. The question is whether you have self-interested reasons to want to flourish (as Keyes defines that state) .

Keyes has assembled powerful evidence that you should want to flourish even if you are only concerned about yourself. Flourishing predicts physical health later on, to a powerful degree. For example, not flourishing boosts the risk of cardiovascular disease to roughly the same degree as smoking does. Although languishing is different from mental illness, the two correlate. In fact, your odds of having a diagnosed mental illness later on are just as bad if you are languishing now as if you have a mental illness now. If you would like to be free of mental illness in a few years, it’s just as important to start doing purposeful good work for others as it is to treat your depression or anxiety.

Several very significant conclusions follow:

  1. For most people, virtue is a condition of happiness. There may be some modern-day Callicles who are happy and bad. Keyes’ research is statistical; statistics have variance. There are outliers. But by far the best bet is that you will be better off mentally and physically if you feel that you regularly help other people, see valuable potential in other people, hold positive attitudes toward diversity, and belong to a caring community.
  2. Languishing is a big problem. Only 17% of American adults are both flourishing and free of mental illness. Many people do not feel they are helping others or belong to caring communities, and they are tangibly worse off as a result.
  3. Languishing remains a prevalent problem for highly advantaged people, such as average White North American male adults. (In fact, African Americans are less likely to languish.) That reinforces the point I made recently that social justice is not sufficient. Even if we doubled our prosperity and distributed the wealth equitably, we might all languish.
  4. If we do want to make people happy, we must make them socially virtuous. Classical liberalism and all of its philosophical offshoots rightly argue that governments should not make people good. That would violate their freedom; it wouldn’t work; it would degenerate into tyranny; and it implies a contradiction, because virtue that is coerced does not have the inner significance of virtue freely chosen. I agree with all of that. But if governments cannot make people virtuous, perhaps culture and civil society can. Or perhaps governments can remove barriers and disincentives to virtue, such as public schools that teach children to compete instead of cooperate. In any case, merely ignoring the problem will leave us with only 17% of adults fully mentally healthy.

Sources: Corey L.M. Keyes, “Promoting and Protecting Mental health as Flourishing,” American Psychologist, vol. 62, no. 2 (2007), pp. 95-108; Keyes, “The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 43, no. 2, (2002), pp. 207-222; conversations with Keyes.

transparency is not enough

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In a recent focus group conducted by Lake Research Partners (and cited in this report for the Campaign for Stronger Democracy), one participant said: “I don’t want to just watch it happen…I want to do something about it.” He was arguing that transparency–disclosing information about the government–is insufficient. A transparent government may still be beholden to wealthy special interests; knowing the gory details won’t enhance one’s trust, confidence, or willingness to participate. Lake Research Partners concluded that the public wants accountability, not transparency.

In a preliminary discussion of these results that I attended, Ellen Miller from the Sunlight Foundation insisted that transparency is a necessary precondition of accountability. Maybe, but it is not sufficient. If you are angry when politicians take money from wealthy interests, then knowing that both major party candidates accepted millions will only disempower you. It won’t change anything.

So we need accountability–but what does the public mean by that? Other research suggests that Americans don’t want a system of carrots and sticks for performance. They think of “accountability” in more personal and relational terms. Famous individuals who behave badly should be punished. Leaders should share our values and motivations. We should feel that we know or could know them personally. In a nation of 300 million, that either means mediated relationships (observed on TV) and anecdotal stories of public shame and punishment–neither of which we should trust–or it means fundamental structural reform. Campaign finance reform would help. Decentralizing power would give many more people opportunities to know and work with public officials. In practice, that could mean granting more power to school boards and juries.

Note that I have shifted–deliberately–from transparency to accountability and from there to active participation. I don’t believe there is any substitute for that.

Planning for Stronger Local Democracy

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Here is a spectrum of public engagement appropriate for local governments in the United States. The activities range from “circulating information” to giving the public a role in “deciding and acting.”

It is based on a spectrum developed by the IAP2, but I have pasted this version from a new report entitled Planning for Stronger Local Democracy: A Field Guide for Local Officials. Written by Matt Leighninger, the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium,  and Bonnie Mann, Project Manager at the National League of Cities, this report is a practical guide for public officials who recognize a “‘Catch-22’ dilemma: public trust in government has declined steadily, while the active support and engagement of citizens has become increasingly critical for solving public problems.” The local officials who figure as positive examples in the report have figured out how to engage the public in governance–to mutual benefit.

The first part of the report is organized around a series of major questions, each accompanied by additional specific questions, examples of success, and other advice. Some of the major questions are nitty-gritty, such as “What are the legal mandates and restrictions on how you interact with the public?” Other questions indicate that formal structures and processes are not the only factors that matter; local officials ought to be concerned about civil society as a whole. For example: “How well are neighborhood associations and other grassroots groups serving their neighborhoods?” Still other questions raise essential issues of diversity and inclusion. For example: “In what ways are recent immigrants and other newcomers connected, or disconnected, from the rest of the community?”

The second part of the report is a guide for “Developing Shared Civic Infrastructure.” The practical outcomes could range from using social media more effectively to changing laws or even building physical spaces where people can meet.

If it’s true that distrust for government and for other citizens is preventing us from governing ourselves as a democratic people, then this report ought to be required reading for all leaders.

making college much cheaper

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Imagine a college with 1,000 undergraduate students. If they all take eight seminars a year, if every class enrolls 20 students, and if each professor has a very manageable teaching load of five courses per year, the 1,000 students need 80 faculty members. If those 80 professors are paid, on average, the national median for an associate professor in the social sciences ($60,064) plus benefits ($20,028), then the total faculty payroll will cost $6,407,360. That comes to $6,407.36 per student per year.

Private colleges and universities are now charging almost eight times as much for a year’s education. Why?

  • Their usual bill includes room and board and various services, such as health plans and career counseling, as well as courses.
  • Universities are buildings, labs, lawns, stadiums, and admissions offices as well as courses and teachers.
  • Lots of people work at colleges beside professors. As I wrote here, “Harvard, for example, employs 5,102 “administrative and professional” staff (excluding clerical and technical workers and those in “service and trades”). Harvard has 112 full-time professional and administrative workers in its athletics department alone. This compares to 911 tenured faculty (or 2,163 total faculty).

When I suggested creating a  “no frills” college from scratch, various friends who work in student affairs, community engagement centers, and other parts of universities wrote privately to ask if I was disparaging their contributions. I would not want to do that. Many adults who work at colleges and universities educate as much and better than many faculty. The distinction isn’t even important to me. But if 80 professors could teach 1,000 students in small classes, then I think 100 educators (including some deans, coaches, counselors, co-curricular leaders, etc.) could serve a student body of 1,000. Even if those educators were paid $60,000 each plus benefits, the per-student cost would still be about $8,000.

I recognize that rent must be paid, lights lit, and diplomas printed. But would it not be possible to build a private, non-profit college whose base tuition was $10,000, whose curriculum was entirely devoted to seminars and labs, and which could employ students on financial aid to perform a substantial portion of its work?

Mitt Romney and the Median Voter Theorem

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(Wye River) The sagacious Nate Silver thinks that the odds slightly favor a Republican victory in the 2012 presidential race, and that’s partly because if Mitt Romney wins the nomination, the GOP nominee will be a relative moderate. Silver thinks a moderate Republican nominee would perform about 4 percentage points better than a hard-right nominee would, and that could easily be the edge.

It’s not that most voters are moderates, but rather that a moderate candidate stands as close as possible to the majority of people. This is not always true, but it can apply even when voters are polarized. In the following hypothetical distribution, few of the voters are moderates, yet a mildly right-of-center candidate would draw all of the conservatives plus some of the moderates and could win. At least, he would do better than a hard-right candidate who would cede more moderates to the Democrat:

My question is whether Romney would get the advantages of being perceived as a moderate. He’s an unusual case, with a record of strongly–even passionately–endorsing opposite positions when he runs for different offices. If he’s very lucky, that could work out as the functional equivalent of moderation. Perhaps voters will average out his various positions and conclude that he’s really a moderate. Or perhaps people will mainly notice the positions Romney has taken that they happen to like. Instead of being placed in the middle of the spectrum, a shape-changing candidate could appear near every individual voter’s position on that voter’s own map. That would be even better than moderation.

But if Romney isn’t so lucky, he could see the opposite result. Everyone could remember the positions Mitt has taken that are different from their own. Then Romney would be the opposite of a moderate. Instead of standing in the middle–reasonably close to everyone–he would emerge as everyone’s enemy.

I would guess that the reality will be a mix of the two. I think stories like this one in the Washington Post will make conservatives think Romney is no ally without persuading moderates and liberals that he is a friend: a costly result. But the conservatives won’t have any other option, and some moderates will buy Romney’s conciliatory rhetoric during the general election campaign. The question is not whether Romney is a better GOP candidate than Perry or Cain (who are astoundingly weak), but whether he is as much better as the “moderate” label would suggest.