Author: ken

The Endless, Inconclusive Pursuit

There are several problems with making happiness the goal of life.  It’s elusive, constantly shifting.  It’s ephemeral.  And it also leaves out too much of what makes life satisfying.

Four years ago, Arthur Brook argued in Gross National Happiness:  “what’s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your . . . belief that you have created value in your life or others’ lives.”

More recently, Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, has joined the discussion.  Acknowledging happiness is not enough, he writes:  “Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”  It can’t just exist in your own head.

According to The New York Times, the idea is getting some government support.  David Cameron, the British, prime minister, has called for a measure of “GWB,” for general well-being.  This is a step beyond “GNP,” Gross National Product, the sum total of the goods and services produced in a country, the standard measure of success used by economists.  We seem to be slowly waking up to the fact that money alone doesn’t buy happiness – and that, even if it did, happiness is more complex than we had thought.  (See “A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness.”)

The tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan has been calculating “GNH,” Gross National Happiness, for years, and several other countries have shown interest in finding similar measures of general welfare and fulfillment that go beyond mere income.  In a Buddhist country, to be sure, happiness has always been thought of as more than the state of mind we tend to assume it is.  GNH includes health, education, community, environmental safety, and many of the other factors current critics argue we need to take into account.

An important reason for finding new measures is that the link between wealth and happiness has become a kind of default assumption in our culture.  After over two hundred years of living in a society dominated by capitalism, we tend to take for granted that virtually everything can be reduced to money.  Many of us know that it’s not exactly true, but it has become a kind of common sense to think that money is the key to security and success, and that most problems in our world can be solved with more goods or services.

Arthur Brook’s stress on meaning or Martin Seligman’s focus on what he calls “flourishing” are both welcome attempts to get us out of this conventional mindset.  But redefining such cultural assumptions is a slow process.  If we adopt new measures, that will change our view of what success is, and it’s not likely that everyone will be equally pleased with what they discover.

We may find that we are far less “wealthy” than we thought we were.

 

 

 

 

What Money Really Buys

There are four basic attitudes to money, according to Brad Klontz, a research associate professor at Kansas State University.  He calls them “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance.

The first three are rather simple to grasp.  Those who avoid money may believe that they do not deserve it or they fear the dangers of having it.  Either way, not surprisingly, they tend to have low incomes and net worth. Interestingly, they also tend to be younger, which probably reflects their inexperience.

Those who fall into the money worship and money status camps suffer in opposite ways:  They believe either that an increase in income or a windfall will solve all their problems, or they hunger after the status derived from the things money can buy.  According to Klontz, they easily get into debt, as they see money as the key to life.

All in all, the best script to have is “money vigilance.” “People with this disorder,” writes Klontz,  “do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly.”  He warns: “excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand… they paid off their credit card bills each month.” (See, “Net Worth, Self Worth, and How We Look at Money.”)

“Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Klontz concludes. Looking at his research, however, we can reach two other conclusions.

For one thing, we shouldn’t expect that money will make us happy.  This is not a new idea, of course, but the extent to which so many people succumb to believing that it can get them what they most want in life is alarming.  The best we can expect to feel is reasonably comfortable and secure – but the price of that security is continual vigilance.

The second point is how truly important money has become in our society.  This, too, is not an original point.  But we can easily forget how money can dazzle us with false expectations and cause us to lose perspective.  It is not merely a medium of exchange, as economists tell us.  It has become our dominant value, with the power to arouse false beliefs.  The credit bubble we are still recovering from and the continuing rampant greed of investors are both illustrations of this.

Klontz, who published his research in the Journal of Financial Therapy, notes how difficult it is for people to change their financial behavior:  “most people will treat financial change the same way they do lifestyle changes after heart surgery: only about 10 percent maintain healthier lives two years after the surgery.”

That’s how deep a grasp it has on our minds.

 

Three Different Points of View

Many were jubilant after the announcement of Bid Laden’s death.  But what were they so happy about?

Their celebrations expressed the joy of victory, as if we had literally won the “war on terrorism.”  A brilliant, daring maneuver had finally annihilated the diabolical enemy.

The president celebrated in a more sober way:  “Justice has been served.”  He expressed the view that it was essential to pursue and kill the man who was the architect of 9/11, but that Al Qaeda continued to be a threat.  He clearly wanted to acknowledge the bravery and skill of those who accomplished the mission, but he downplayed any trace of triumph.  It wasn’t the end of anything but Bin Laden’s life.

The Arab world seemed detached, even disinterested.  Bin Laden had become more a symbol of anti-Americanism than a real force, a point that is being made clear throughout the disruptions and achievements of the Arab Spring.  The new rebellions are all about protesting the corruption of the “Old Turbans.”  The people wanted democracy and financial opportunity — not the restoration of fundamentalist beliefs.

For them, Bin Laden’s death was ironic.  No doubt for many he was still appreciated as the mastermind who humbled America with his ingenious attack, using our own planes against us.  No doubt, they also enjoyed our embarrassment over ten years, as the world’s most powerful nation seemed unable to capture the world’s most wanted criminal.  But for most, the man himself had lost much of his relevance.

That’s not to say that his followers could not still pose dangerous threats or that the capture of vast amounts of intelligence won’t make a difference in combatting future plots.  But the Arab world – and the West – had moved on.

The videos captured in his compound reinforce the image of his irrelevance.  They show him rehearsing his anti-imperialist tirades, dying his beard, and watching reruns of his former TV appearances.   As The New York Times described it, he was “wrapped in an old blanket watching himself on TV, like an aging actor imagining a comeback.  A senior intelligence official said other videos showed him practicing and flubbing his lines in front of a camera.” (See “Bin Laden’s Secret Life in a Diminished World.”)

According to Gilles Kepel, a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, Bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks led the West to reinforce its support for the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.  That, in turn, delayed reforms that might have occurred sooner.  The jubilant celebrations of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt and the continuing struggles throughout the Middle East, he argued, might otherwise have taken place earlier.

His point is that “Bin Laden was dead already,” and he suggests the celebrations were over before the Navy Seals stormed his compound.

 

 

 

 

And Find Ways to Feel Good About It

The mind unconsciously works to protect self-esteem.  Without trying, we enhance perceptions of our own attractiveness and intelligence.  More troubling, we tend to tread lightly on our ethical and moral failings.

Two professors of management, Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunzel, recently reported on how widespread an issue this is in business.  They concluded:  “people consistently believe themselves to be more ethical than they are.”

Faced with pressures to protect colleagues or clients, or to improve their own image, they tend to bend the rules, overlook damaging information, and, often, just fail to remember inconvenient facts they know.  Legally, of course, they can be punished for “willful misconduct” or gross negligence.”  But many examples of what the authors call “ethical fading” fall into the gray area of judgment and discretion.

Reporting on their findings in The New York Times, they noted that sometimes the very procedures designed to discourage ethical lapses can make them more likely to occur.  Disclosing conflicts of interest, for example, can have the effect of absolving those who have the conflict from further worry about it.  It can also offer clients a false reassurance that the problem has been detected and resolved.  But the reality of temptation is not so easy to dispose of, and indeed, can be easier to give into temptation if one’s conscience has been cleared.  (See, “Stumbling Into Bad Behavior.”)

Similarly, they note that paying a fine for polluting the environment or neglecting safety measures can ease the pain of guilt.  The price can make an action look more like a transaction than a transgression.  In fact, if there is a price that can be paid, it can become simply another cost of doing business.

This is not a problem than can be dealt with easily.  Efforts to impose regulation and establish departments to monitor compliance with ethical standards invite subversion and conspiracy.  They often lead to struggles between “us” and “them,” and ingenious “solutions.”  Such measures, on the other hand, send strong signals that there are serious problems requiring attention.

The authors state:  “True reform needs to go beyond fines and disclosures; if we are to truly eliminate conflicts of interest we must understand the psychology behind them.”  That’s true – but awareness and mindfulness will not be enough by themselves to keep the relentless, unconscious forces of self-interest and self-esteem at bay.

Casual ethical lapses have to become more risky and painful.  Enlisting the anxiety of danger and the fear of consequences will help people become more aware of the risks they run.  In the long run, those are the forces needed to counteract “ethical fading.”

We can’t stop people from breaking the law or putting their colleagues and clients at risk.  But we can make the danger more prominent and more difficult to deny.

 

 

 

Deficits in Britain and America

Both countries face “broadly similar deficit challenges,” as The New York Times put it in a recent story.  “Britain aims to close a fiscal gap of about 10 percent of gross domestic product. The comparable figure in the United States is 9.5 percent.”  That’s where the similarities end.

The Conservatives in Britain propose to cut costs and raise taxes, a common sense approach to reducing the gap between income and expense.  But according to The Times, this puts them “markedly to the left of the mainstream Republican position in the United States.”

The Chair of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, “proposes to slash spending by $5.8 trillion but would allow most of the spending reductions to be offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts.”  In other words, the Republicans claim that tax cuts will spur growth, and that will inevitably lead to greater tax revenue.  (See, “Pain of British Fiscal Cuts Could Inform U.S. Debate”)

Freshman representative Joe Walsh recently claimed: “Every time we’ve cut taxes, revenues have gone up.”  And it’s not just the newly elected republicans aligned with the Tea Party who think that way.  Last year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) asserted:  “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue.” (See The Huffington Post.)

But actually there is a lot of evidence — conclusive evidence, as many economists in the U.S. have pointed out, including conservative economists.  The story on The Huffington Post cited Alan D. Viard, a former White House economist under George W. Bush:  “Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There’s really no dispute among economists about that.”  Last year, former Reagan economist Bruce Bartlett assembled the data on his blog to prove that tax cuts do not stimulate greater tax revenue.  (You can check it out by clicking “Republican Tax Nonsense.”)

So how can it be that in America so many politicians make statements that are at variance with their own experts?  Can it be that Americans are more irrational?  Do they have an easier time simply believing what they want to believe?

To be sure there has always been a strain of flamboyance in American politics, but the explanation has to do with our different political systems.  Politicians in America are too busy perpetually campaigning for election.  They don’t really talk to each other — unless behind closed doors.  And the media report everything they say as news, whether or not it makes sense.  Some attention is paid to facts, but most attention is given to what the public comes to believe in response to what politicians say.  As a result, the line between what is really happening in the world and opinion is perpetually blurred.

Politics is an industry in America, one that employs tens of thousands of consultants, lobbyists, advisors, writers, pollsters, staff members, public relations and advertising specialists.  It spends billions yearly.  Dependent upon massive infusions of money to work, it relies on stakeholders who, of course, expect influence in return.  Needless to say, the wealthier stakeholders get to wield the greatest influence.

The scale is different in Britain.  Election campaigns are shorter.  They tend to be local.  Politicians can still talk to each other, and take time to study the issues.

The miracle in America is that government works at all – though there are moments when even the staunchest admirers of the system have their doubts.