Can reliable international comparisons of human flourishing be made using subjective survey data?

 

The idea that human flourishing is the proper measure of a good society goes back to Aristotle, but modern attempts to compare flourishing internationally using subjective survey data raise difficult questions. That is illustrated in the scatter chart shown above - which compares the degree of human flourishing in different countries as measured by the new Global Flourishing Study (GFS) with average life evaluation data for those countries using the methodology of the World Happiness Report (WHR). The GFS flourishing index is based on surveys covering various aspects of human flourishing, while the WHR data derives from the Cantril Ladder approach: a single question asking people to rate their lives on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 representing the worst possible life and 10 representing the best possible life.

One would expect people who give a relatively low rating to their lives under the WHR approach to be assessed as having a relatively low degree of flourishing under the GFS approach, and vice versa for those who give their lives a relatively high rating. Surprisingly, the chart suggests little correlation between the two indexes. People in Tanzania, Egypt and Kenya, for example, have lower average life evaluation ratings than people in Sweden, the U.S. and Australia, yet are assessed under GFS methodology to have higher average levels of flourishing.

This divergence raises three questions which the following sections of this essay address:

• Does the methodology of the GFS incorporate more reliable standards for international comparisons than the WHR/Cantril approach?
• Is the GFS approach to measuring human flourishing consistent with Aristotelian ideas about the nature of flourishing?
• Do composite indexes provide a more reliable basis for international comparisons of opportunities to flourish?

Reliability of GFS Methodology

The Global Flourishing Study includes over 200,000 survey participants in 22 countries. The countries were selected to maximize coverage of the world’s population and to ensure geographic, cultural and religious diversity. It is a longitudinal panel study with intended annual survey data collection for 5 years. The domains of flourishing covered in the study encompass health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships and financial security.

More confidence can be placed on analyses using subjective data for individual countries than on cross-country comparisons because the former pose fewer problems in interpretation of survey questions. (Recent trends in indicators of subjective wellbeing in some wealthy countries are suggesting that young people are experiencing greater difficulty flourishing in those countries. I strongly support research directed toward improving understanding of why this is occurring and have made a personal contribution to this work.)

My main concern in this essay is with excessive reliance on subjective data in making international comparisons. The authors of the GFS note that caution is needed in interpreting cross-national differences (VanderWeele, 2025, p.647) but that has not prevented attention being drawn to  country rankings.

The scatter charts shown below suggest that at a national level there is more correlation between GFS flourishing and “happiness” and “life satisfaction” indicators than between GFS flourishing and WHR life evaluation. Nevertheless, the GFS index suggests that people in some countries are flourishing despite relatively low average scores for happiness and life satisfaction.

 

The happiness question is: “In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel?” The life satisfaction question: “Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?” There has been extensive research related to the question of what standard of comparison people use in responding to such questions. Some research has suggested that people compare their current state to an adaptation level — a running average of past experience when asked to rate their happiness or life satisfaction. A large body of work suggests that relative income often matters as much as or more than absolute income for self-reports on wellbeing. Cross-cultural research has found that the implicit comparison standard vary by culture. Moreover, seemingly trivial contextual factors can dramatically shift happiness and life satisfaction reports.

In some ways, the GFS is more susceptible to standard of comparison problems than a simple life satisfaction or happiness survey:

• Self-rated health is known to be heavily reference dependent. People assess their health relative to age peers, to their own past health, or to an idealized standard. Which reference point dominates varies by culture and age.
• Questions relating to meaning and purpose are especially vulnerable to context effects, because "meaning" is a highly abstract judgment with no obvious natural metric. Whatever has been made salient by preceding questions — religious identity, family, work — is likely to dominate the response.
• Questions about honesty, generosity, self-control and so on invite comparison to either an ideal standard or a perceived social norm. Those standards can diverge sharply.

The Cantril ladder approach used in the WHR was designed to be self-anchoring to address some of those problems. By asking respondents to define "best possible life" and "worst possible life" for themselves, this approach sidesteps the problem of imposing a culturally specific conception of flourishing.

However, the perceptions that respondents have of the best possible and worst possible life depend on the reference group they use as a basis for comparison. That would not pose a problem if there is broad agreement among people throughout the world on what constitutes the best possible and worst possible life. Perhaps such broad agreement exists, but I am not aware of definitive research findings about that.

Aristotelian perspectives

Modern researchers who seek to quantify the extent to which people are flourishing often refer to Aristotle as a source of inspiration for their focus on a broad concept of human flourishing rather than on happiness as an emotional state. That raises the question of whether the GFS approach is consistent with Aristotelian perspectives.

The GFS view of human flourishing as multi-dimensional is certainly consistent with Aristotle’s approach. The domains identified in the overview of the GFS seem to be broadly consistent with Aristotle’s understanding of the basic goods of a flourishing human (VanderWeele, 2025).

However, from an Aristotelian perspective, it is disappointing that the study does not acknowledge the central importance of practical wisdom (phronesis) to individual flourishing. Practical wisdom is the intelligent management of one’s life with a view to attaining the goods necessary to one’s own flourishing. The exercise of practical wisdom is so intimately related to actualization of unique potentialities in the context of available opportunities that it makes sense to view flourishing as synonymous with “the exercise of one’s own practical wisdom” (Den Uyl and Rasmussen, 2016, p. 33). 

Some research associated with the GFS has focused on mastery which is assessed by asking: “How often do you feel very capable in most things you do in life?” (Kim, 2025). There is some overlap between mastery and practical wisdom: the exercise of practical wisdom involves more than theoretical knowledge – it requires development of skills necessary to navigate real circumstances toward genuine flourishing. The mastery concept captures something of this efficacy dimension — the sense that one can actually direct one's life rather than being at the mercy of circumstances.

An important difference between mastery and practical wisdom is evident in the measurement of mastery in the GFS. Self-reported mastery ranges from 90% of the population in Mexico to 39% in Japan. Do such divergent responses reflect differences in the exercise of practical wisdom or differences in the incidence of hubris and modesty in different populations? There is no way of knowing. Responses to the mastery question capture a subjective sense of control which may have little to do with wisdom. Genuinely wise people with accurate perception of their own limitations do not necessarily score highly in their responses to the mastery question.

My point is that the exercise of practical wisdom – an activity integral to human flourishing – defies measurement using subjective survey data. There would be no point in including survey questions about the exercise of practical wisdom because the perceptions people have about the quality of decisions they make is often a poor guide to actual decision quality. A person of deficient character or limited understanding may feel entirely satisfied with their choices while lacking the practical wisdom required to make good choices.

Comparing opportunities using composite indexes

In deciding what to measure, it seems to me to be particularly important to understand the purposes for which measurements are being made. The overview of the GFS states:

“What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, what we aim for and the policies put in place to achieve those aims. We hope that the GFS itself, and the understandings that arise from it, will shift discussion and policy toward the promotion of flourishing” (VanderWeele, 2025, p.647).

That may be true, but it may also be a recipe for futile or counterproductive government interventions.

It seems to me that the central importance of practical wisdom to individual flourishing provides a strong reason to be modest about the ability of governments to promote human flourishing. The most governments can do is to influence opportunities available. The way individuals respond to those opportunities rests in their own hands.

 It is important to recognize that governments can have a profound impact on the opportunities for human flourishing. One of the most important contributions they can make is to reduce the negative impacts of their policies.

In Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I identified five basic goods of a flourishing human:

·        Wise and well-informed self-direction

·        Health and longevity

·        Positive relationships

·        Living in harmony with nature

·        Psychological well-being (Bates, 2021).

I noted that it is possible to teach people about the virtues of wise and well-informed self-direction, but it is doubtful that anyone has ever learned to exercise much practical wisdom in the management of their lives without having to accept responsibility for the choices they make. From a public policy perspective, it makes more sense to focus on the opportunities of people to exercise self-direction than to attempt to measure the quality of choices that they make. That is why I focused on objective measures of liberty in discussing opportunities for self-direction (Bates, 2021, pp. 65-6).

In considering opportunities for health and longevity, I argued that objective data on healthy life expectancy is a better indicator than self-reported health of differing prospects for individuals a long and healthy life in different countries (Bates, 2021, pp. 67-8).

Subjective data on levels of trust were suggested to measure differing opportunities for people to have positive relationships with others (Bates, 2021, pp. 68-9).

I discussed the complex relationships between economic growth and opportunities to live in harmony with nature (Bates, 2021, pp. 70-73).

Subjective data (WHR life evaluation) was used to indicate differing opportunities for people to enjoy psychological wellbeing (Bates, 2021, pp. 74-5).

Other researchers have also seen merit in using a mixture of subjective and objective indicators in making international comparisons of opportunities to flourish. The OECD’s Better Life Index is an example of a composite index that incorporates both objective and subjective components.

Conclusion

The scatter chart that opens this essay poses a genuine puzzle: why do country rankings of the Global Flourishing Study and World Happiness Report diverge so sharply? This essay has argued that the divergence reflects real limitations in both instruments rather than a straightforward vindication of either. Subjective survey data is susceptible to comparison-basis problems — the implicit standards people use when evaluating their lives vary by culture, context, and the framing of preceding questions — and these problems are considerably more serious for international comparisons than for within-country research. The Cantril ladder's self-anchoring design offers some protection against the imposition of culturally specific conceptions of flourishing, and its results have reasonable face validity when set alongside objective indicators of living standards and liberty. But whether people in different countries anchor the ladder's endpoints in comparable ways remains an open empirical question.

The more fundamental difficulty is philosophical. Both the GFS and the WHR treat subjective self-assessment as the primary evidence of flourishing. Aristotle, whose conception of eudaimonia inspired modern flourishing research, would have been skeptical of this. Flourishing in the Aristotelian sense is not simply a matter of feeling satisfied with one's life; it requires the exercise of practical wisdom — the intelligent, well-informed management of one's life in pursuit of genuine goods. People's perceptions of the quality of their choices are often unreliable guides to whether they are actually exercising such wisdom. This is not a limitation that better survey design can overcome; it reflects something important about the nature of flourishing itself.

These considerations point toward a more modest and pluralistic approach to international comparisons. Objective indicators — of liberty, healthy life expectancy, trust, and material security — can identify the opportunities available to people in different countries to lead flourishing lives. Subjective data retains value, particularly for tracking trends within countries over time. What neither approach can do is measure the quality of the choices individuals make within the opportunities available to them. That, in the end, is for individuals themselves to determine — which is precisely why the central policy implication of an Aristotelian perspective is not the promotion of flourishing by governments, but the protection and expansion of the conditions under which people can flourish for themselves.

References

Bates, Winton Russell, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing (Hamilton Books, 2021).

Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Douglas B. Rasmussen, The Perfectionist Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Kim, Eric S. et. al. “Mapping demographic variations in sense of mastery across the world a cross-national analysis of 22 countries in the global flourishing study”, Scientific Reports, 15 (2025).

Lomas, T. et. al. “Exploring associations of three evaluative subjective wellbeing measures (Cantril's ladder, life satisfaction, happiness) with 15 childhood and demographic factors across 22 countries”, Scientific Reports, 16, (2026).

VanderWeele, T. J. et. al. “The Global Flourishing Study: Study profile and initial results on flourishing”, Nature Mental Health, 3(6) (2025) pp. 636–653.

How difficult would it be for individuals to adjust to zero economic growth?

 

It would not be difficult for governments to achieve zero economic growth. They would just need to do more of the things that they are doing at present to slow down the adoption of new technology, create policy uncertainty, protect inefficient firms and industries from competition, and reduce the incentives for people to work. I could make a more detailed list of policies they could adopt, but I am not in the business of advising politicians about how to achieve zero growth.

Those who argue for lower economic growth don’t talk much about adverse psychological impacts that people might experience as a consequence. They seem to assume that if economic growth was stopped, average life satisfaction would stay where it is now. The basis for that assumption is that in high-income countries, further increases in income offer negligible benefits in terms of increased life satisfaction. That is consistent with the views of Richard Easterlin, who was made famous by his pathbreaking research on the relationship between economic growth and indicators of subjective well-being. Easterlin argues:

“At a point in time, happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time the long term growth rates of happiness and income are not significantly related.”

That passage is quoted in an article by Michael Plant which provides quite a strong defense of Easterlin’s position.

In my view, Easterlin is broadly correct. As incomes rise, additional economic growth can be expected to make a progressively smaller contribution to psychological well-being (as commonly measured by average life satisfaction ratings). Nevertheless, people may have good reasons to seek to have higher incomes. As I discussed in Chapter 1 of Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, psychological well-being is only one of the goods of a flourishing human.

However, the main point I propose to make in this essay is that adoption of policies to achieve zero economic growth would be likely to pose substantial psychic costs (psychological adjustment costs) for many people as they are forced to revise their expectations downwards. I begin the essay by discussing international data on the perceptions that people have about their standard of living relative to their parents and then link that data to average life satisfaction.

1.        Are perceptions of standard of living relative to parents related to economic growth?

In the latest round of the World Values Survey (WVS 2017-22) respondents were asked the following question about their standard of living: “Comparing your standard of living with your parents’ standard of living when they were about your age, would you say that you are better off, worse off or about the same?” (I downloaded that data for as many countries as possible using the WVS’s excellent facility for online analysis.)

Matching the WVS data with World Bank data on per capita income (NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD) and rate of growth in per capita income (NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG) left me with a data set covering 63 countries. I used income data for 2002, and growth data for the period from 2002 to 2022. The reasoning behind that was to separate the growth experience prior to 2002 (reflected in income levels for 2002) from subsequent growth experience.

(It would have been nice to be able to conduct this analysis using a larger data set, but beggars can’t be choosers. I hope that one day someone will attempt to replicate and extend the study using a data set for a larger number of countries.)

Countries were allocated to four groups of approximately equal size:

• Low-income, low growth e.g. Pakistan, Kenya
• Low-income, high growth e.g. China, Indonesia, India
• High-income, low growth e.g. U.S.A., Germany, Australia
• High-income, high growth e.g. South Korea, Singapore.

The average percentage of those who consider themselves to be better off than their parents at a comparable age is shown in Figure 1a. As might be expected, a higher percentage of people are in the “better off” category in the high-income and high growth countries.

Figure 1b shows that the percentages in the “worse off” category are lowest in the high income and high growth countries.

Figure 1c shows that the percentage who are “about the same” is higher in the low growth countries than in the high growth countries.

Overall, this analysis suggests that perceptions of standard of living relative to parents are positively related to past economic growth experience of the countries in which people live. Historical growth experience, reflected in per capita income levels in 2002, and more recent growth experience over the last 20 years are both relevant.

2.        Do perceptions of standard of living relative to parents differ according to the age of respondents?

As might be expected, Figure 2a shows that in the high income, low growth countries older people are less adversely affected by low growth than are young people. The fact that more than half of respondents aged 50+ still perceive their standard of living to be better than that of their parents, presumably reflects the benefits of higher economic growth rates earlier in their working lives.

The picture presented in Figure 2b is consistent with that in Figure 2a.

Figure 2c indicates that there is not much difference between age groups among respondents who perceive that their standard of living is about the same as that of their parents.

Overall, perceptions of standard of living relative to parents do differ somewhat according to the age of respondents. In particular, in the high-income countries, low growth has a greater adverse impact on young people than on old people.

3.        Are life satisfaction ratings influenced by perceptions of standard of living relative to parents?

Figure 3 shows average life satisfaction ratings for each of the four categories of countries and each of the three categories of responses to the question about standard of living relative to parents.

Several observations may be made:

First, average life satisfaction ratings are higher for the high-income, low growth group than for other countries. It is somewhat surprising that life satisfaction is not as high, or higher in the high-income, high growth group. It might be interesting to speculate about that result, but my focus is on the question of whether perceptions of standard of living relative to parents influence life satisfaction ratings.

Second, average life satisfaction ratings of those who perceive their standard of living to be about the same as their parents are not much lower than for those who perceive their standard of living to be higher than that of their parents.

Third, average life satisfaction ratings of those who perceive their standard of living to be lower than that of their parents are substantially lower than for those who perceive their standard of living to be higher than that of their parents. That is true for all four groups of countries.

The important point to note is that the perception of having a lower standard of living than parents had at a comparable age has a substantial adverse impact on life satisfaction ratings.

Implications

The implications of the observed relationship between perceptions of standard of living relative to parents at a comparable age and economic growth experience are obvious. Lower economic growth is likely to result in increasing percentages of people having lower living standards than their parents. If economic growth is brought to a halt, the percentages who perceive that their living standards are lower than those of their parents would presumably end up approximately equal to the percentages who perceive that their incomes are higher than those of their parents.  

The implications for average life satisfaction of an increase in percentages who feel worse off than their parents at a comparable age are also obvious from the analysis presented above. An increase in the percentage of people who perceive that they have a lower standard of living than their parents is likely to result in a decline in average life satisfaction. The extent and duration of the associated decline in psychological well-being could be expected to vary depending on the resilience of individuals.

The analysis suggests that the psychic costs of adjustment to zero economic growth would initially fall most heavily on young people. In countries where per capita incomes are relatively high, older members of the population have been able to retain the benefits of higher economic growth that occurred earlier in their working lives.

In an earlier study focusing on Australia I found that in the 18-54 years group 33% felt better off than their parents; 48% felt worse off, and 19% felt that their incomes were about the same as their parents’ incomes at a comparable age. Consistent with the findings of the current study, those who felt worse off than their parents had substantially lower life satisfaction.

The Australian study looked more deeply at the group who feel worse-off than their parents, to observe the extent to which their life satisfaction experiences interacted with their resilience. As might be expected, the results indicated that people with relatively high resilience were able to maintain relatively high life satisfaction despite feeling worse off than their parents were at a comparable age.

Implications of three different kinds follow from acknowledging that lower economic growth causes an increasing proportion of the population to experience the psychic costs associated with disappointed expectations.

First, at an individual level, those affected are posed with the problem of how to adjust to the new set of circumstances. They may need the support of family and friends, and possibly professional help, to moderate the psychic costs involved.

Second, governments, and those advising them, need to consider whether there are more sensible ways to pursue policy objectives. The psychic costs associated with zero economic growth make this outcome less desirable, irrespective of whether it is pursued deliberately or occurs as a consequence of the incompetence of those responsible for economic policies.

Third, observers of interactions within social and economic systems need to consider likely responses of voters who are disappointed that it has become more difficult to achieve the goal of being able to maintain a standard of living at least as high as that of their parents. Voters can be expected to blame government policies for their predicament. From a social science perspective, the interesting question is whether government policy responses are more likely to restore economic growth or make the problem worse.

Conclusions

This essay has focused on the likely impact on average life satisfaction at a national level of policies to achieve zero economic growth. Data from the World Values Survey has been used to examine the relationship between the perceptions of respondents about their standard of living relative to their parents at a comparable age and economic growth in the countries in which they reside. That data has then been linked to average life satisfaction.

The main findings are:

Perceptions of standard of living relative to parents are positively related to past economic growth experience of the countries in which people live.

In the high-income countries, low growth has a greater adverse impact on young peoples’ perceptions of their standard of living relative to parents than on the corresponding perceptions of old people.

The perception of having a lower standard of living than parents at a comparable age has a substantial adverse impact on life satisfaction ratings.

These findings imply that lower economic growth rates would be likely to result in an increasing proportion of the population having lower living standards than their parents, and hence, lower average life satisfaction. The psychic costs of adjustment to zero economic growth would initially fall most heavily on young people.

Zero economic growth would have implications for individuals, governments and social scientists:

• At an individual level, those whose expectations have been disappointed are posed with the problem of how to adjust.
• Governments and their advisors are posed with the problem of considering whether there are more sensible ways of pursuing policy objectives.
• Social scientists are posed with the problem of assessing whether voters in different countries are more likely to respond in ways that will fix the problem by restoring economic growth, or to make it worse by favoring policies that will lead to economic decline.

The problems of psychological adjustment to lower economic growth should no longer be ignored.

Addendum

I have received the following comment by email from Arthur Grimes, Senior Fellow, Motu, Wellington, New Zealand:

"This is an excellent article - thanks for the contribution to understanding these issues.

Another angle is to think about how people's life satisfaction reacts when incomes in their country grow more slowly than comparable and/or neighboring countries. There are a couple of studies that show an analogous situation to your results; i.e. people in more slowly growing countries feel worse off (in subjective wellbeing terms) than do people in higher growth countries."

My response:

One of the articles that Arthur referred to is: Arthur Grimes and Marc Reinhardt, ‘Relative Income, Subjective Wellbeing and the Easterlin Paradox: Intra- and Inter -national Comparisons’, published as Chapter 4 in: Mariano Rojas (Ed.) The Economics of Happiness: How the Easterlin Paradox Transformed Our Understanding of Well-Being and Progress (Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019).

The abstract of the article is as follows:

“We extend the Easterlin Paradox (EP) literature in two key respects. First, we test whether income comparisons matter for subjective wellbeing both when own incomes are compared with others within the country (intra-national) and with incomes across countries (inter-national). Second, we test whether these effects differ by settlement-type (rural through to large cities) and by country-type (developed and transitional). We confirm the intra-national EP prediction that subjective wellbeing is unchanged by an equi-proportionate rise in intra-country incomes across all developed country settlement-types. This is also the case for rural areas in transitional countries but not for larger settlements in those countries. International income comparisons are important for people’s subjective wellbeing across all country-settlement-types. Policy-makers must therefore consider their citizens’ incomes in an international context and cannot restrict attention solely to the intra-national income distribution.”

In combination with my results, the findings of the article suggest to me that a range of different reference points are relevant to life satisfaction ratings. Arthur has provided another reason to expect people in more slowly growing countries to feel worse off (in subjective wellbeing terms) than do people in higher growth countries.   

How important is resilience to individual flourishing?

 

Everyone knows that resilience is important in coping with misfortune. However, it may be more important than I had thought.

My attention was grabbed recently by a newspaper article discussing a study suggesting that people with higher levels of resilience may live up to 10 years longer. The study was discussed in an article (possibly gated) by Lucy Dean in the Australian Financial Review (8 Sept, 2024) which also draws on an interview with Justine Gatt, director of the Centre for Wellbeing, Resilience and Recovery at UNSW and Neuroscience Research Australia.

The Longevity Study

The findings of the study by Aijie Zhang et al were published in an article entitled ‘Association between psychological resilience and all-cause mortality in the Health and Retirement Study’, in BMJ Mental Health (2024;27:e301064).

The study was based on the experience of 10,569 U.S. adults aged ≥50 (mean chronological age  67 years ) in the Health and Retirement Study (2006–2008). Mortality outcomes were determined using records up to May 2021.  During that period, 3,489 all-cause deaths were recorded.

The questionnaire used to measure resilience covered qualities such as perseverance, calmness, a sense of purpose, self-reliance and the recognition that certain experiences must be faced alone.

After adjusting for potential confounding factors, the researchers observed a decrease in the risk of death by 38% in the quartile with higher psychological resilience scores, compared with the group with the lowest scores.

The authors note that their findings are consistent with studies that have shown a significant positive correlation between life goals and self-rated health, with life goals moderating the relationship between self-rated health and mortality. Maintaining a positive self-perception of ageing has a positive effect on functional health, and optimism independently protects against all-cause mortality. Other studies demonstrate that individuals with poor social relationships have an increased risk of death.

The Compass Wellbeing Scale

Justine Gatt leads a project which aims to identify the underlying markers of wellbeing and to improve understanding of the underlying mechanisms that contribute towards resilience to stress and adversity.

In this project, mental wellbeing is measured using the 26-item COMPAS‑W Wellbeing Scale which provides a ​“composite” measure of wellbeing; that is, a measure of both subjective (hedonia) and psychological wellbeing.

The COMPAS‑W scale encompasses measures of composure, own-worth, mastery, positivity, achievement and satisfaction. The existence of a relationship between the Compass scale and resilience is based on the view that factors associated with resilience, include:

• The capacity to make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out
• A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities
• Skills in communication and problem solving
• The capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses
• A feeling that you are a master of your environment and in control
• A general positive outlook on your life and satisfaction with everything you have achieved

Justine Gatt argues these are skills that people can learn and develop for themselves. 

The research on resilience is ongoing, but the qualities encompassed in the Compass scale are obviously worth fostering.

Does your well-being depend on your PCNs?

 

The accompanying graphic suggests that it does. It is from Michael A Bishop’s book, The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being, published in 2015.

What is a PCN? A PCN is a positive causal network, or feedback loop. The general idea behind PCNs is that a person has a high level of well-being when they are experiencing a self-perpetuating cycle of positive emotions, positive attitudes, positive traits, and successful engagement with the world.

Bishop wrote the book to provide positive psychology with a solid foundation based on “a bit of fairly conventional philosophy of science”. He argues that the philosophical literature on well-being (hedonism, informed desire theory, and Aristotelianism) is too fragmented to provide positive psychology with a solid foundation.

The author observes that positive psychology offers practical, science-based advice about well-being. The explosion of scientific research on well-being has revealed homeostatically clustered sets of feelings, emotions, attitudes and behaviors. That provides the basis for positive psychology to be viewed as the study of the structure and dynamics of PCNs.

Bishop demonstrates that much research in positive psychology can be viewed in that light.

Consistency with my view of well-being

In my view, it makes sense to view psychological well-being as being at the opposite end of the spectrum to mental illness. Felicia Hupert and Timothy So viewed it as being on the opposite end of the spectrum to anxiety and depression. Those authors identified ten symptoms of well-being: competence, emotional stability, engagement, meaning, optimism, positive emotion, positive relationships, resilience, self-esteem, and vitality. They examined relationships among those symptoms in a study using data from a representative sample of 43, 000 Europeans. (‘Flourishing Across Europe’, Soc. Ind. Res. 2013.)

The view of psychological well-being adopted by Hupert and So seems to me to be easier to understand than Michale Bishop’s view that it consists of PCNs. Nevertheless, the two views don’t conflict. At one point Bishop actually suggests that it is possible to understand PCNs by contrasting them with negative or vicious causal cycles involving negative thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviors and dysfunctions.

Do PCNs constitute “The Good Life”?

As a neo-Aristotelian, the main objection I have to Bishop’s book is its title.

I am not particularly concerned that Bishop’s approach might be at variance with that of psychologists who claim to have an Aristotelian approach to positive psychology. Those people are well-intentioned but the indicators they use seem to be somewhat removed from what Aristotle had in mind when he expressed the view that human flourishing is a virtuous activity of the soul.

I guess that Aristotle would see a strong positive link between virtue and PCNs. After all, he saw virtue as being about not just about doing the right thing but also taking pleasure in it. Of course, Aristotle also acknowledged that people could obtain pleasure (but not eudaimonia) without being virtuous.

That raises the question of whether it is possible for a villain to have a high level of psychological well-being. In my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing I expressed a view implying that villains can’t have high level of psychological well-being:

“It may be possible for a villain to score highly on positive emotion and self-esteem, but I doubt that a villain could obtain a high overall score in a competently administered psychological assessment.”

I based that view on research findings relating to the dark triad.

Bishop presents a different view:

“In a culture in which cruelty is rewarded, a person naturally disposed to cruelty can have success and a high degree of well-being. This is not a consequence to jump for joy about. It’s just a sobering fact about our world that bad people can have well-being.”

Bad people can certainly have the outward signs of success in a culture in which cruelty is rewarded but I suspect that, even in that cultural context, people who take a stand against cruelty may tend to have stronger PCNs. (I could be wrong about that. It is an empirical question.)

In their book, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, Roger Bissell and Vinay Kolhatkar suggest that humaneness is constitutive of a psychic state humans desire and cite evidence opposed to the widespread belief that ruthless people tend to get ahead in life, love, and especially business. (For references, please see my essay entitled ‘Is it possible for humans to flourish if they don’t live good lives?’, recently published on The Savvy Street).

Irrespective of whether bad people can have high PCNs, no Aristotelian could accept that they are flourishing. The view that bad people can live “good” lives is also opposed to the folk view of what it means to live a good life. (Please see the essay cited above for references and discussion.)

Conclusions

In his book, The Good Life, Michael Bishop argues that positive psychology should be viewed as the study of the structure and dynamics of positive causal networks (PCNs). PCNs are self-perpetuating cycles of positive emotions, positive attitudes, positive traits, and successful engagement with the world.

The view that psychological well-being is deeply rooted in strong PCNs seems to be consistent with the view that it lies on the opposite end of the spectrum to anxiety and depression.

The title of Bishop’s book is at variance with his view that it is possible for bad people to have strong PCNs. I am not convinced that it is possible for bad people to have high PCNs. Irrespective of whether that is so, however, people of bad character certainly do not live “the good life”.

Is "scout mindset" a worthy objective of personal development?

 

If someone had mentioned “scout mindset” to me a week ago, I would probably have thought they were referring to mottos of the scouting movement such as “Be prepared!” and “Do a good turn every day!”. Since then, I have had the opportunity to read Julia Galef’s book, Scout Mindset, Why some people see things clearly and others don’t, which was published last year.

I think this is a remarkably good book - even though it has left me feeling somewhat more modest about the accuracy of some of my perceptions.

Scout mindset versus soldier mindset

Julia Galef defines scout mindset as ‘wanting your “map” – your perception of yourself and the world – to be as accurate as possible’. The scout aims to form a map of the strategic landscape. The scout mindset is characterized by accuracy motivated reasoning and guided by the question: Is it true?

By contrast, “soldier mindset” is aimed at fighting off threatening evidence. It is directionally motivated reasoning, evaluating ideas through the lenses of “Can I believe it?” and “Must I believe it?”

Galef suggests that soldier mindset is our default setting, and argues that in many, if not all situations we would be better off abandoning it and learning to adopt a scout mindset instead.

I am inclined to the view that intuitive thinking is our default setting, and that there are often good reasons to be reluctant to abandon intuitions and expectations that are based on patterns that have we have observed in the past. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to argue that most of us have a tendency to keep fighting conflicting evidence long after it should have persuaded us to change our minds. That is the soldier mindset. When we adopt a scout mindset, we begin to assimilate the evidence and re-assess our views sooner – perhaps by engaging in reasoning akin to Bayesian updating of probabilities.

Galef explains that there are several reasons why people tend to adopt a soldier mindset. It enables them to avoid unpleasant emotions by denial or by offering comforting narratives. It helps them to feel good about themselves by maintaining illusions. It helps them to motivate themselves by exaggerating their chances of success. It helps them to convince themselves so they can be more successful in convincing others. It enables them to choose beliefs that make them look good. It also helps them to belong to social groups of like-minded people.

The author suggests that scout mindset is more useful to us than for our ancestors. I have some reservations about that claim. Scout mindset would have been a useful attribute for our hunter and gatherer ancestors when they were searching for food. Nevertheless, she is persuasive in arguing that, by comparison with your ancestors, “your happiness isn’t nearly as dependent on your ability to accommodate yourself to whatever life, skills, and social groups you happened to be born into”.

In subsequent chapters, Galef proceeds to discuss how to develop self-awareness, thrive without illusions, change your mind, and develop a scout identity. In what follows, my focus is selective. Readers seeking a more comprehensive review should also read Jon Hersey’s article in Quillette, which persuaded me to read the book.

It seems to me that the strongest objection that people raise to having accurate perceptions of themselves is that self-delusion serves them well. The strongest objection to seeking accurate perceptions relating issues of public policy is that it is not worth attempting because the individual voter’s influence on policy outcomes is insignificant. I will look at those objections before discussing scout identity as an objective of personal development.

Does self-delusion serve us well?

A substantial amount of psychological research purports to show that people who deceive themselves are happier than realists. Galef points out that these research findings are based on measures of self-deception that lack any objective standards of reality as a basis for comparison. They use measures of self-deception that conflate positive beliefs with illusions. For example, the measurement methodology assumes that people who claim that they never get angry are deceiving themselves. Similarly, people who claim that they always know why they like things are assumed to be deceiving themselves.

It is not necessary for us to deceive ourselves about the probability of success before embarking on new ventures. Galef refers to Elon Musk as an example of an investor who has proceeded with ventures even though he has a clear-eyed view that they have a low probability of success. When asked why he has said:

“If something is important enough you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure”.

A gamble can worth taking if the expected payoff (value of each outcome x probability of occurrence) is positive.

There can also be an issue of perspective involved in assessing probability of success. I find it helpful to think in terms of adopting a player mindset rather than a spectator mindset. On the basis of past performance, spectators might be justified in assessing that the player has low probability of success in a particular event. However, a coach who knows a great deal about the player’s capability might have good reasons to suggest to her that the spectators are under-rating her chances. Encouraging the player to adopt a mindset that makes use of her inside knowledge might induce her to take a more positive attitude toward training etc. My point is that adopting a player mindset is an exercise in realistic self-appraisal, rather than self-deception.

Julia Galef is not alone in being critical of empirical research which purports to show that holding positive illusions about oneself tends to promote happiness. As previously noted on this blog Neera Badhwar has also taken that position, and has argued strongly that realistic optimism about oneself and one’s future beats unrealistic optimism. Badhwar also notes that Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, leaders of the human potential movement, viewed realism as central to mental health and well-being. She notes that in Rogers' view the fully functioning individual is open to experience, distorting neither his perceptions of the world to fit his conception of himself, nor his conception of himself to fit his perceptions of the world. I find this particularly interesting in the light of Rogers’ use of Alfred Korzybski’s notion that “the map is not the territory”. Carl Rogers recognized that our maps do not serve us well if they are not realistic.

Why seek accurate maps of public policy issues?

Readers who are familiar with Chapter 6 of Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing will be aware of my concern that individual voters lack incentive to become well-informed about policy issues. Most voters are either apathetic about politics, or view it in the same way as they view sporting contests. They cheer for their team and jeer at their opponents.

Galef discusses Bryan Caplan’s concept of rational irrationality. In explaining what he means by rational irrationality Caplan suggests:

“In real world political settings, the price of ideological loyalty is close to zero. So we should expect people to ‘satiate’ their demand for political delusion, to believe whatever makes them feel best” (The Myth of the Rational Voter, p 18).

Galef rejects the view that voters are rationally irrational on the grounds that it implies that they are “already striking an optimal balance between scout and soldier”. She seems concerned that if she were to accept that rational irrationality is widespread, she would have to appeal to the desire of the readers of her book to be good citizens, and/ or to love truth, in urging them to adopt a scout mindset.

However, it seems to me that readers of this book who have any interest in politics are more likely to be Vulcans than Hooligans – to use the terminology of Jason Brennan (in Against Democracy, 2016). Vulcans try to avoid bias, while the Hooligans are the rabid sports fans of politics. The Hooligans are so wedded to soldier mentality that their beliefs are determined by the social groups that they identify with. The only hope of persuading these soldiers to modify political beliefs that are at variance with reality rests with the ability of scouts to persuade the generals (opinion leaders they respect) to modify their views.

Galef has little respect for those Vulcans whose reasoning resembles that of Spock in Star Trek, but has plenty of advice for people who really want to avoid bias in beliefs relating to policy issues. For example, she discusses the research of Phil Tetlock, which suggests that people who are willing to make subtle revisions of forecasts of global events in response to new information tend to make more accurate forecasts than academic experts.  

The author also has some interesting advice for people who want to reduce bias in their beliefs by exposing themselves to views outside of their echo chambers. Exposing partisans to the views of their political opponents tends to reinforce their existing views. She suggests:

“To give yourself the best chance of learning from disagreement, you should be listening to people who make it easier to be open to their arguments, not harder. People you like or respect, even if you don’t agree with them.”

Scout identity

Galef notes that identifying with a belief can wreck your ability to think clearly because you feel that you have to defend it, which motivates you to feel that you have to collect evidence in its favour. She suggests that activists are likely to be most successful if they hold their identity lightly enough to be capable of engaging with the views of opponents and making clear-eyed assessments of the best ways to achieve goals.

The author presents several arguments for seeking to adopt scout identity, but suggests that the most inspiring one is “the idea of being intellectually honorable: wanting the truth to win out, and putting that principle above your own ego”.

In reading The Scout Mindset, I was struck by parallels between the argument presented for adoption of scout mindset and the views of Robert Kegan on stages of mental development from a socialized mind, which enables people to be faithful followers and team players, to a self-authoring mind and self-transforming mind. Readers wishing to investigate further might find it helpful to read Immunity to Change, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. (I discuss the book here.) 

Conclusions

In my view Julia Galef makes a strong case for people to seek to have realistic maps - perceptions of themselves and the world that are as accurate as possible.

The author successfully challenges research findings claiming that self-deception contributes to happiness of individuals, and she provides useful advice to those seeking to make their maps more accurate.

Galef offers particularly useful advice for people seeking better mapping of public policy issues. If you want to become less biased, listen carefully to the views of opponents you respect rather than seeking exposure to opponents you do not respect.

I agree with the author that the most important reason to seek to have realistic maps is because that is intellectually honorable. Scout mindset is a worthy objective of personal development.

Would a good society seek to maximize a social welfare function?

 This article is about my personal experience in attempting to understand social welfare, the concept of a good society, and my role as an economist involved in the processes of social choice. I decided to write about this topic after writing an article for Savvy Street on the related topic, “Can social planning enhance individual flourishing?”

When economists talk about maximizing social welfare, they are referring to a concept that appears to have something to do with the well-being of people. However, the concept is best viewed as a signaling device to suggest that the social planner claims to have obtained insights about society from studying an abstract mathematical model. Such signaling is not helpful to consideration of the merits of policy proposals.

Maximizing social welfare can encompass policies that would enlarge the economic pie (national product) so that there is potential for everyone to be given a larger slice. In that case, it might be reasonable to argue that the policy would receive widespread support among citizens. A good society - one that is good for the people who live in it – could be expected to adopt such policies. However, claims about pursuing social welfare objectives make such policies no more attractive than if they are advocated to simply expand opportunities for individual flourishing.

Maximizing social welfare can also encompass policies to redistribute the economic pie in a manner that advocates believe will somehow enhance the collective well-being of citizens.  When maximizing social welfare is said to require redistribution of the cake, some citizens will be advantaged at the expense of others. It is possible for some policies of this nature to receive widespread support (e.g. provision of a basic social safety net) but that is less likely when extensive redistribution is proposed to equalize the utility that different individuals obtain at the margin from additional income.

Whose welfare function should we maximize?

The idea of social welfare maximization implies the existence of a social welfare function reflecting insights about determinants of collective well-being and expressing the “general will’ of the people. It was over 50 years ago that I began to realize that this idea is highly problematic. My libertarian friends might find this hard to believe, but it happened while I was studying welfare economics.

An article by Francis M Bator influenced me greatly, although perhaps not in the way the author intended. As I was reading Bator’s article - ‘The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization, The American Economic Review, 17(1) March 1957 - I remember feeling that this was an object of great beauty. I suppose the article seemed beautiful for the same reasons that abstract art can seem beautiful. Bator provides a geometric presentation of the derivation of a production possibilities curve, then proceeds to derivation of the utility possibility frontier, which he then crowns with a social welfare function, as shown in the diagram above.

Bator’s description of that diagram left a lasting impression on me. He tells us that BB represents the grand utility possibilities frontier, showing at each point the maximum utility for person X given any feasible level of utility for person Y, and vice versa. He then proceeds to explain the “bliss point”, Ω, in the following words:

“To designate a single best configuration we must be given a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function that denotes the ethic that is to “count” or whose implications we wish to study. Such a function – it could be yours, or mine, or Mossadegh’s, though his is likely to be non-transitive – is intrinsically ascientific.”

What Bator meant by ascientific is that the function involves ethical valuations. However, the point that has stuck in my mind is that despite the heroic assumptions Bator was making in constructing his beautiful geometric edifice, he did not try to pretend that it could be crowned with a social welfare function aggregating the preferences of all citizens. The function depicted “could be yours, or mine, of Mossadegh’s”. (Mohammad Mosaddegh was an Iranian prime minister who held office from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown - apparently in a coup orchestrated by M16 and the CIA.)

Is it possible to make sense of the diagram? 

As I look at the diagram now, the idea of choosing between the utility levels of different people seems problematic. It would also be problematic to some modern utilitarians whose social welfare function is defined simply in terms of maximizing average life satisfaction (making the implicit ethical judgement that everyone deserves to have the same life satisfaction). In that case, if the axes measure the life satisfaction of X and Y, the bliss point would be defined by the intersection of the possibility frontier and a 45⁰ line drawn from the origin. The 45⁰ line would represent all points where X and Y have equal life satisfaction – X and Y would each have maximum life satisfaction at the bliss point.

However, I reject that modern utilitarian view. It seems to me to reflect an inadequate understanding of the determinants of individual flourishing. As argued in Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, even though average life satisfaction may be a reasonable indicator of the average psychological well-being of large groups of people, psychological well-being is just one of the basic goods of a flourishing human. In my experience, when people are encouraged to offer more than perfunctory responses to questions about how they are faring, they tend to talk about a combination of different things such as their aspirations and the choices they have made, their health, and their personal relationships. Satisfaction is relevant, but does not encompass all relevant aspects of human flourishing.

To make sense of the choices represented in the social welfare function depicted, I would need to replace “utility” with “opportunity to flourish”. Even then, I would need good reasons to make an ethical judgement about whether X and Y deserve to have their opportunity to flourish enhanced or restricted.

What are the implications for social choice?

While Bator’s description of the social welfare function let the cat out of the bag for me, I remember reading about Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem at about the same time. I think the main lesson I took away was that the processes of government must inevitably be somewhat dictatorial. That makes it important to have constitutions that protect liberty and electoral processes that are capable of kicking tyrants out of office.

While studying welfare economics, I also took a course in public choice in which I had my first exposure to The Calculus of Consent, by James M Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch. That book and other writings by Buchanan have had a profound impact on my views about the good society and the role of economists.

Buchanan and Tulloch noted that when individuals are considering constitutional rules that they expect to be in place for a long time, they are uncertain as to what their own interests will be in any of the whole chain of later collective choices made according to those rules. Such uncertainty may enable people to set aside their current economic interests in making constitutional choices. One implication is that individuals will tend to choose somewhat more restrictive rules for social choice-making for areas of potential political activity that could involve violation of liberty.

Buchanan and Tulloch link liberty directly to the concept of a good society:

“The acceptance of the right of the individual to do as he desires so long as his action does not infringe on the freedom of other individuals to do likewise must be a characteristic trait in any “good” society. The precept “Love thy neighbor, but also let him alone when he desires to be let alone” may, in one sense, be said to be the overriding ethical principle for Western liberal society.” (p 217).

 Buchanan later warned that the norms that underlie democratic institutions are under threat when politics is allowed to become little more than a ‘commons’ through which competing coalitions seek mutual exploitation.  (For further discussion of this please see Chapter 6 of Freedom, Progress, and HumanFlourishing).

What should economists do?

Economists who advise on public policy often view themselves as social planners who are advising benevolent despots. They are frequently disappointed to find that those whom they advise give higher priority to political and personal goals than to publicly stated economic objectives, or lack the political power to implement recommendations.  

James Buchanan suggested that economists should adopt a contractarian approach, with a focus on the consequences of rules and, in particular, on the question of what rules of the game individuals might accept voluntarily as participants in an authentic constitutional convention. In providing an example of this approach, Buchanan suggested that such a convention would be unlikely to endorse rules of the game which allow majorities in a single generation to impose public debt burdens on subsequent generations of taxpayers. (Nobel prize lecture).

My career

The focus of my career in public policy advice was partly contractarian. For most of my public service career I had the good fortune to work in agencies of the Australian government (predecessors of the Productivity Commission) which undertook research and published reports on the economic implications of changing the rules of the game for economic development. The focus of much of this work was assessing effects of barriers to international trade and other forms of industry assistance.

I note that my career was only partially contractarian because the agencies were required to make recommendations to the government according to specific terms of reference for individual inquiries and more general guidelines. The specific terms of reference were sometimes designed to ensure that governments received politically palatable recommendations, but the research and policy analysis published in inquiry reports, and in annual reports, informed policy-making processes in ways that led eventually to adoption of rules of the game more favourable to free trade.

The advisory agencies were given general guidelines including having “to have regard to the desire of the Australian Government …  to improve and promote the well-being of the people” and to “improve the efficiency with which the community’s productive resources are used”. I do not believe that the collectivism reflected in the reference to people and privately owned capital as “the community’s productive resources” had one iota of influence on the research and policy analyses conducted by the agencies.

I have endeavored to maintain a focus on the implications of different “rules of the game” in the public policy aspects of my subsequent consulting career and my writing on freedom and flourishing on this blog and in my books. There have been some lapses, but I hereby forgive myself 😄 . It has not always been easy to avoid falling into the trap of viewing oneself as a social planner advising a benevolent despot.