What determines opportunities for a long and healthy life?

This post is about the reasons why opportunities for people to live long and healthy lives are much greater in some countries than in others. In the preceding post the prospect of a long and healthy life was identified as one of five basic goods of a flourishing human.

So, which are the countries in which an individual chosen at random would be likely to have the best prospects of a long and healthy life? The OECD’s Better Life Index gives top ratings on health to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel and Ireland. The health indicator used in that index may not be reliable, however, because it incorporates self-reported health along with life expectancy at birth to take account of the quality of life as well as its length. Self-reported health seems to be unduly influenced by cultural factors. For example, while life expectancy in Japan is among the highest in the world (more than 2 years greater than in Canada) less than 40% of people in Japan rate their health as good or very good (the comparable figure for Canada is 88%). 

Objective evidence published in The Lancet articles on Global Burden of Disease indicate that the difference between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy (the number of years people can expect to live in good health) is about the same in Japan and Canada (13 years for females and 10 years for males).

The Lancet study, which covers 195 countries and territories, indicates that healthy life expectancy (HALE) is highest in Singapore and Japan, but also relatively high in other high income countries. 

HALE is strongly correlated with life expectancy (LE). The difference between HALE and LE rises somewhat as LE rises: on average from 6.4 years for a country with LE of 50 years, to 10.8 years for one with an LE of 80 years. The difference is typically about 2 years greater for females than males, but LE for females is about 5 years greater than for males in middle and higher income countries.

The accompanying graph shows that substantial increases in HALE have occurred in many countries since 1990. The increases have generally been most pronounced in countries with relatively low life expectancy.

There seems to be little support for concerns that additional years of life are frequently not worth living. For countries with low LE in 1990, average increases in LE of 12 years were associated with increases in HALE of 10.5 years. For countries that already had high life expectancy in 1990, average increases in LE of 5 years were associated with increases in HALE of 3.7 years. It seems likely that many individuals would consider an additional year of life to be preferable to the alternative, even if accompanied by some ill-health.

Research seeking to explain differences in longevity among countries suggests that health care spending, higher income and education have beneficial impacts. An OECD study of 35 countries (mostly high-income) found that health expenditure made the greatest contribution to increased longevity (42 months) over the period 1990 to 2010, followed by education (15 months) income growth (13 months) and reduced smoking (5 months). The study found the impact of increased health spending to vary between countries, with relatively small gains in longevity experienced in the U.S. despite large increases in health care spending.

War and violent crime have a major impact on life expectancy in some parts of the world. For example, life expectancy among men who live in the north of Mexico apparently declined by about 3 years in the period 2005 to 2010 as a result of an increase in the homicide rate associated with drug wars.

Some of the important drivers of increased longevity have a common cause: health care spending has tended to account for a higher share of GDP as per capita GDP has risen. Econometric studies have suggested that this increased spending may be driven largely by demographic and technological factors, but income growth makes it possible.

The more fundamental determinants of opportunities for a long and happy lives are the factors contributing to the economic development that has led to high average income levels. There are virtuous circles involved in this process. As previously discussed on this blog, a plausible story of economic development also needs to take account of virtuous circles involved in interactions between culture and economic freedom. Where culture and economic freedom support markets, people have added incentives to gain reputations as being worthy of trust others in order to obtain the benefits of mutually beneficial exchanges. As people become more trustworthy and trusting, and more respectful of the rights others, they could be expected to support greater economic freedom. Economic freedom, and a culture supporting innovation, result in further economic development and economic development promotes a culture supporting greater economic and personal freedom. As part of this process, improvements in population health could be expected to contribute to higher labour productivity and further enhance income levels.

The economic development story outlined above implies that we should expect healthy life expectancy (HALE) to be higher, on average, in countries with higher levels of economic and personal freedom. In order to test that, HALE data for 155 countries have been matched with data from the Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index. The chart below shows that average HALE is about 10 years greater for the countries in the fourth quartile, with the highest freedom levels, than for countries in the first quartile, with the lowest freedom levels.

Conclusions

The countries in which a person chosen at random seems likely to have the best prospects of having a long and healthy life are characterised by high average income levels. Estimates of healthy life expectancy (HALE) published in The Lancet’s global burden of disease project are highest in Singapore and Japan. Since 1990, there have been substantial increases in HALE in most countries.

Health spending, income growth and education have contributed substantially to increased longevity. The more fundamental determinants of opportunities for people to have long and healthy lives are the cultural and institutional factors that have contributed to economic development. Evidence that high HALE is associated with high levels of human freedom supports an economic development story taking account of virtuous circles involving market freedom, cultures supporting freedom and health improvements.

What are the basic goods of a flourishing human?

A good place to begin is with the discussion of the basic goods of “the good life”, by Robert and Edward Skidelsky in their book How Much is Enough (2012). The relevant discussion is in Chapter 6, entitled ‘Elements of the Good Life’. I published a somewhat critical review of the book on this blog some years ago, but I saw some merit in the authors discussion of human flourishing.

The authors adopt the following criteria to identify basic goods:

Universality: not specific to eras or cultures;

Finality: not just serving as a means to a more basic good;

Sui generis: not incorporated in some other good;

Indispensability: lack of the good leads to loss or harm.

I accept those criteria.

The authors identify the following seven basic goods:

• Health: ‘‘the full functioning of the body, the perfection of our animal natures”.
• Security: ‘‘an individual’s justified expectation that his life will continue more or less in its accustomed course, undisturbed by war, crime, revolution or major social and economic upheavals”.
• Respect: an individual’s feeling that others ‘‘regard his views and interests as worthy of consideration, as things not to be ignored or trampled on”.
• Personality: ‘‘the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good”.
• Harmony with Nature: ‘‘a sense of kinship with animals, plants, and landscapes”.
• Friendship: ‘‘all robust, affectionate relationships”, including work relationships etc. as well as family relationships.
• Leisure: “that which we do for its own sake”, not just time off work.

That list summarises 17 pages of discussion, so it may not do justice to the authors’ deliberations. Nevertheless, it provides a basis to consider whether items have been identified appropriately, and whether anything important has been left out.

Health is obviously an essential characteristic of a flourishing human. The authors want to discourage “an obsession with longevity”, but it is reasonable to assert that flourishing involves living healthily for the term of one’s natural life.

Security is important, but it serves as a means to other goods, including a long and healthy life and psychological well-being (an important omission from the authors’ list of basic goods).

Having others respect of one’s views and interests feels good, but it isn’t indispensable to individual flourishing. Respect for one’s natural rights (life, liberty and property) is certainly indispensable, but serves as a means to other goods, including the ability to live a long and healthy life, interact with others for mutual benefit, and to the acquire human and physical capital that contributes to flourishing.

“Personality” does not seem to capture adequately the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good. The authors use the term personality, rather than autonomy or practical reason, because it implies “spontaneity, individuality and spirit”. Those aspects of personality could be more appropriately incorporated under psychological well-being. The basic good corresponding to framing and executing a plan of life seems to me to be best described as accepting responsibility for self-direction.

Living in harmony with nature is important to human flourishing, and not just because of environmental impacts on human health and well-being. As I see it, the motivation for living in harmony with nature stems from deep-seated intuitions about our kinship with other living things.

Friendship doesn’t seem the most appropriate word to capture the wide variety of relationships that the authors put under this heading. The relevant basic good seems to me to be positive relationships.

Leisure is usually thought of as time off work, rather than engagement in doing things for their own sake. Martin Seligman uses the term ‘engagement’ to refer to the relevant basic good in his book Flourish (2011).

The other four elements of well-being identified in Seligman’s PERMA acronym (discussed here) are positive emotion, relationships, meaning and achievement. Of these, Skidelsky and Skidelsky only directly acknowledge relationships as an element of the good life. It seems to me that positive emotion and a sense of achievement are essential characteristics of a flourishing human.

Meaning requires a little more discussion. Seligman defines ‘meaning’ as belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self. This makes sense if serving the self means pursuit of personal pleasure. Those who see their lives as meaningful could be expected to value more things in life than their own pleasure.

So, here are the basic goods that I would expect a flourishing human to have:

1.  The prospect of a long and healthy life.
2. Wise and well-informed self-direction.
3.  Positive relationships with family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and trading partners.
4. Psychological well-being: emotional stability, positive emotion, satisfaction with material living standards, engagement in doing things for their own sake and learning new things, perception of life as meaningful, a sense of accomplishment, optimism, resilience, vitality, integrity, and self-respect.
5. Living in harmony with nature.

What do I plan to do with this list? My interest is in the factors that lead to differences in opportunities for human flourishing in different countries. For example, which are the countries where some person chosen at random is likely to have the best prospects of a long and healthy life? How can we explain why the prospects for that individual are better in those countries?

Such questions will be explored in later posts.

What was Aristotle's secret of happiness?

Aristotle held that being happy is the same as living well and doing well – it involves fulfillment of potentials inherent in each individual human. From this perspective, happiness is activity in conformity with virtue. It is acquired through practice in much the same way as one might learn an art or craft. Aristotle’s view rests on the view that emotions are not inherently good or bad. Virtue lies in avoiding excess or deficiency:

“For example, one can be frightened or bold, feel desire or anger or pity, and experience pleasure and pain in general, either too much or too little, and in both cases wrongly; whereas to feel these feelings at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose and in the right manner, is to feel the best amount of them, which is the mean amount - and the best amount is of course the mark of virtue. And similarly, there can be excess, deficiency, and the due mean in actions. Now feelings and actions are the objects with which virtue is concerned; and in feelings and actions excess and deficiency are errors, while the mean amount is praised, and constitutes success; and to be praised and to be successful are both marks of virtue.” Nicomachean EthicsBook 2.

Aristotle acknowledged “happiness does seem to require the addition of external prosperity”, but he regarded notions that happiness can be identified with wealth, pleasure, health, honour or good fortune as superficial.

Aristotle’s view also differs from the modern view of happiness as a state of contentment, as satisfaction with life, or as the absence of symptoms of depression.

Many psychologists maintain that since Aristotle’s teachings on happiness were about ethics - how people should live their lives – they have little relevance to the question of what makes people happy. Subjective well-being research has been dominated by the view that happiness is about the balance between pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Even the use of life satisfaction, which has some cognitive content, has been grounded largely in utilitarian philosophy. More recently, some researchers have sought to introduce eudaimonic considerations by asking respondents about feelings of autonomy and competence, the quality of personal relationships and whether they feel that their lives are meaningful.

Aristotle would not have accepted a distinction between living a virtuous life and living a pleasant life. He maintained: “happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of all things”. Similar views have been expressed by some modern philosophers. For example, Neera Badhwar writes: “the integration of emotional dispositions with intellectual (especially deliberative dispositions), which is required by virtue, makes virtue highly conducive to happiness, since a common source of unhappiness is conflict between our emotions and our evaluations” (Well-being, Happiness in a worthwhile life, p 152).

Can Aristotle’s view about the desirability of minimising the excess or deficiency of emotions be tested empirically? Some conditions need to be met before empirical testing is possible. First, we need a measure of human flourishing. In the absence of anything better, we might need to be prepared to accept some standard measures of life satisfaction, for example, as an indicator of human flourishing. Second, we need to be able to accept that the individual is an appropriate judge of “right feelings”, so that any excess or deficiency of emotion can be measured as the difference between right feelings and actual feelings. I’m not sure whether Aristotle would have accepted the second condition, but I don’t have a problem with it.

Some such testing has been reported in a recent article entitled ‘The Secret to Happiness: Feeling Good or Feeling Right?’  by Maya Tamir, Shalom H. Schwartz, Shige Oishi, and Min Y. Kim. The study was based on a cross-cultural sample of 2,324 participants from 8 countries around the world. The researchers used statistical analysis to explain happiness in terms of the discrepancy between desired and actual emotion. Their analysis controlled for experienced emotion, desired emotion and some other variables. They measured happiness both as life satisfaction and the absence of depressive symptoms. The analysis focused on four categories of emotion: self-transcending emotions (love, affection, trust, empathy, compassion); negative self-enhancing emotions (anger, contempt, hostility, hatred); opening emotions (interest, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, passion); and conserving emotions (calmness, relaxation, relief, contentment).

As expected, the researchers found that people were happier the more they experienced pleasant emotions and the less they experienced unpleasant emotions. However, they also found that people were happier when they experienced smaller discrepancies between the emotions they experienced and the emotions they desired.

In accordance with the Aristotelian prediction people were happier when they felt the emotion they desired, even when that emotion was unpleasant.

The authors concluded:

“The secret to happiness, then, may involve not only feeling good but also feeling right.”

The authors note that their findings are consistent with two different interpretations: happiness is related to experiencing the emotions one desires, or happiness is related to desiring the emotions one experiences. In either case it may be reasonable to speculate that awareness of a discrepancy between desired and experienced emotion leads people to engage in struggles that make them unhappy – whether they are struggling to change their cognitions or their emotions.

What advice would Aristotle offer to a person who felt unhappy as a result of a discrepancy between desired and experienced emotion? Would he tell that person to obtain cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help bring their emotions under the control of reason? He certainly emphasized the importance of practical reason, so he might have seen merit in CBT.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the context in which Aristotle advocated “right” emotions was more about the nature of virtue than about the emotional benefits of self-control, even though he recognised the latter aspect. In modern terms, it seemed to me that Aristotle’s discussion of the virtue of emotional moderation translates to a discussion about values. The message I take is that to have lives worth living we need to look our values and to behave like the persons we want to become.

How can we measure human flourishing?

This graph suggests that, at a national level, three quite different indicators of human flourishing tell a similar story about human flourishing. The opportunity measure, shown on the horizontal axis, encompasses economic freedom, income, education, health and environmental performance. The thriving measure, shown on the vertical axis, shows the percentage of the populations who are positive about their present life situation and optimistic about the next five years. The measure of psychological flourishing, shown by the size of the bubbles, reflects the percentage of the populations whose responses to questionnaires indicate competence, emotional stability, engagement, meaning, optimism, positive emotion, positive relationships, resilience, self-esteem, and vitality. 

The focus on European countries was dictated by the data source on psychological flourishing:  an article by Felicia Huppert and Timothy, ‘Flourishing Across Europe’ (published in Soc.Indic.Res. in 2013). The thriving data is from Gallup World Polls using the Cantril scale which asks people to evaluate their lives relative to the best possible and worst possible life. The opportunity measure was created using methodology described in Chapter 6 of my book, Free to Flourish.

The graph raises such questions as whether Scandinavian countries will be able to sustain high rates of thriving and psychological flourishing in future without further expanding individual opportunities.

However, I want to focus in this post on how we came to measure human flourishing in three different ways and what the different measures tell us.

First, consider measures of opportunity. GDP per head of population has been used by economists as a rough measure of well-being for many decades, even though its potential shortcomings for this purpose have been well known since the concept was developed in the 1930s. Recognition of such problems led to efforts to take account of longevity and education, in the UNDP’s Human Development Index, and of a wider range of indicators of the quality of life in the OECD’s Better Life Index and similar indexes - including the opportunity index used in the graph. All those indexes can be viewed as measures of opportunity; they are not direct measures of well-being or human flourishing. It is possible to be wealthy, highly educated and have good physical health and yet to be deeply unhappy.

Second, there are attempts to measure well-being directly using surveys asking individuals to give a simple numerical rating to their happiness or their satisfaction with their lives.  The data on thriving shown in the graph are based on subjective well-being assessments of that kind.

The meaning that should be given to life satisfaction ratings is less obvious than the meaning of happiness ratings. The happiness question clearly elicits responses about feelings. Available evidence suggests that life satisfaction ratings reflect evaluations of lives rather than momentary feelings. Research by John Helliwell et al for The World Happiness Report shows that a large part of variation in life satisfaction ratings among countries can be explained by differences in income levels, social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.

Analysis of data from long-running national panel surveys for Australia, Germany and Britain provides evidence that adaptation and resilience tend to restore life satisfaction to previous levels following positive and negative changes in circumstances. Nevertheless, recent research by Bruce Headey and Ruud Muffels suggests that most people go through periods of their lives when they have relatively high and relatively low life satisfaction. Positive feedback loops between life satisfaction and variables such as health, social support, frequency of social activities, and satisfaction with work and relationships partly account for extended periods of high or low life satisfaction.

As I have discussed in a previous post, evaluations of life satisfaction can also be interpreted as frames of mind, which influence the extent to which people experience positive emotions. Monty Python (and many philosophers and psychologists) tell us that people who have a disposition to look on the bright side of life are better able to maintain relatively high life satisfaction. The evidence that life satisfaction is influenced by dispositions that are attributable to genetics also supports a frame of mind interpretation. People in Denmark are apparently particularly favoured by genes that promote high life satisfaction.

The main reservation I have about the tendency to use of life satisfaction as the gold standard in measuring human flourishing stems from evidence (for example, findings of research by Daniel Benjamin, OriHeffetz, Miles Kimball and Nichole Szembrot)  that when faced with relevant choices people rank life satisfaction less highly than other criteria such as the overall well-being of their family, being a moral person, having a meaningful life, and having many options and possibilities in life and freedom to choose among them. Some of the findings of this research are not easy to understand, but those noted above are, at least, consistent with the choices people could be expected to make when they exercise their practical wisdom.

That leads me to the third approach to measurement of human flourishing: the eudaimonic approach, which draws some inspiration from ancient Greek philosophers.  In their research, referred to above, Felicia Huppert and Timothy So viewed flourishing as lying at the opposite end of a spectrum to depression and anxiety. The authors identified 10 features of positive well-being: competence, emotional stability, engagement, meaning, optimism, positive emotion, positive relationships, resilience, self-esteem, and vitality.  As noted in my previous discussionof this study, an important finding was that was that the individuals identified as flourishing did not correspond very closely to those identified as having high life satisfaction. For Europe as a whole, the percentage who were both flourishing and had high life satisfaction was 7.3%. Among people who met the criterion for flourishing, 46.0% had high life satisfaction, and among people who had high life satisfaction, 38.7% were flourishing. (The correlation between life satisfaction and flourishing was only 0.34.)

As the philosopher Daniel Haybron has observed recently, there is no consensus among eudaimonic psychologists about what their measures of well-being should look like. Dan Haybron has provided what seems to me to be a good account of the “philosophical basis of eudaimonic psychology” in a chapter of that name in J Vitterso (ed.) Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-being.  I don’t agree with him on the question of whether it is possible for the wicked to flourish, but I don’t think that impinges greatly on the measurement issues. Haybron argues cogently that the main factors that should be targeted in eudaimonic measures of psychological well-being are:

• Agency - personal development, competence and autonomy
• Relationships - close personal relationships, social enjoyments, community trust etc.
• Meaning - engaging in activities that are meaningful or worthwhile
• Emotional well-being - endorsement (or positive emotion) engagement and attunement (tranquillity or peace of mind).

He also acknowledges the importance of some other factors that researchers may wish to measure: authenticity, knowledge and virtue.

In my view Haybron’s contribution should provide a useful basis for further consideration of these matters by psychological researchers, but any consensus they reach will inevitably be somewhat arbitrary and tenuously related to the perceptions of individual survey respondents about the factors that are important to their own flourishing.

I end by raising a couple of questions:

First, how should researchers determine what weights should be given in combining ratings of factors targeted in their surveys? My answer, very briefly, is that this should be left to the practical wisdom of survey respondents. I considered the question here.

Second, would it be enlightening to attempt to combine measures of economic opportunity with measures of psychological flourishing? My initial thought is that before considering that question we should have a clear view of the purpose(s) for which such a combined measure might be more useful than separate indicators of economic opportunity and psychological flourishing. I can’t think of any right now.

Postscript: 

Dan  Haybron has provided the following comments:

Very nice post! It might be useful to see your opportunities index related to the capabilities framework, which in my view is really just a kind of opportunity approach--and possibly better framed as a matter of opportunities (though maybe the connotations of the latter aren't always helpful). 

I suspect policy should consider well-being/outcome and opportunity metrics, and also don't see any clear rationale for combining them, except perhaps in some still broader index including lots of other stuff as well. In my work on capabilities, I suggest that the latter better captures something like parents' concern that their kids have good opportunities (so push them in school), which is distinct from a wish that they be happy/do well, which can sometimes be in tension with giving them the best opportunities. (If your kid goes to Harvard, great opportunities, probably not so happy.) Though in line with your graph, I assume they generally tend to be positively correlated.

On life satisfaction (LS)  measures: you point to one of the odd features of the Benjamin et al work, which generally seems to undervalue emotional goods as well. I suspect the setup skews answers misleadingly on things like that (though I think their work is really cool). But also, partisans of LS should not be bothered by that result: the smart position is to allow that LS itself isn't very important (hence the responses), but is very useful as an indicator of success in the things people do care about. So if LS is a valid measure, it should reflect all those other things, in proportion to how much people care about them. i suspect the Benjamin et al framework might be used to help test LS measures: are they sensitive enough to what people actually care about? Or do they lean too heavily on information that is chronically salient, like day-to-day material concerns? 

Will the Ems flourish?

You should be interested in this question because some of your descendants might become Ems during the next century or so. 

Ems are the human-like robots that will be created by emulation of human brains. The emulation process will involve scanning an individual’s brain to record its particular cell features and connections and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections. Ems will think, feel and behave like the humans from whom they are created. They will assume they have consciousness and free will, just as humans do.

That view of Ems is presented by Robin Hanson in his recently published book, The Age of Em.

The Age of Em is not the most difficult book I have ever tried to read, but of all the books I can claim to have actually finished reading, I have possibly had greatest difficulty finishing this one. It wasn’t the technical material in the book that put me off. Robin has explained enough of it well enough for non-technical readers like me to get the gist of the scenario being portrayed. I just became bored reading about the Ems. I persisted only because I feel that more of us (humans) should be taking an interest in the future of human-like entities.

Others also seem to have become bored reading about the Ems. In the Finale of his book Robin indicates that a “who cares” attitude was common among people who read early drafts of the book, and among those who declined to read. It would certainly have been easier for me to adopt that attitude than to finish reading the book.

In writing about the Ems, Robin Hanson has attempted to predict what is likely to happen, rather than to present a vision of what he would like to happen. He suggests that the Ems will mostly live in a few tall, hot, densely packed cities, which will seem harshly functional when viewed in physical reality, but will look spectacular and stunningly beautiful in virtual reality. Humans will live far from the Em cities, mostly enjoying a comfortable life on their Em-economy investments.

A distinguishing characteristic of the Em economy will be the ability of Ems to replicate themselves at relatively low cost. Robin suggests that there will be enough Ems willing to make copies of themselves to greatly lower wages to a level near the full cost of computer hardware needed to run Em brains. Under that Malthusian scenario, wages of most Ems will be so low that they will barely be able to afford to exist, even though they will be working hard half or more of their waking hours.

Most Ems will have office jobs, and work and play in spectacular virtual realities. Many of them will enjoy high status during their working lives because they will have mental capacities many times those of human brains. They will be slowed down after retirement, but will have the opportunity to live for as long as Em civilization persists.

Robin suggests that the Em future, as he portrays it, might look pretty good in terms of utilitarian evaluation criteria. Even with wages close to subsistence levels, Ems would have great opportunities for entertainment via virtual reality, and they would live long lives. If there are many billions or perhaps even trillions of them, as Robin suggests, utilitarian calculus would conclude that the Age of the Ems would see a big increase in total happiness relative to our world today.

That view seems to me to highlight the deficiencies of crude utilitarianism. The quality of life of the typical Em, as portrayed by Robin, strikes me as being lamentable. I predict that most humans faced with the choice of whether to live such a life, or the life of an average human, would choose to live the life of a human. Since Ems would inherit our values, I predict that most of them would also reject the life offered by their hot houses of virtual reality in favour of a more authentic life closer to nature. The choices involved are similar to those posed by Robert Nozick in his famous experience machine thought experiment (discussed previously on this blog in a post that has recently been re-published on Common Sense Ethics).

That brings me to what seems to me to be a major flaw in the scenario that Robin Hanson posits. I think he misjudges human values and preferences when he suggests that large numbers of humans and Ems would be willing to make copies of themselves under circumstances where Em wages were low and falling. As advances in technology have made it easier for humans to exert greater control over their own reproduction they have used that power to ensure their offspring have good prospects to have lives they will value. Ems might view their replication decisions differently, but I don’t see why they would choose to bring into the world large numbers of twins earning subsistence wages.

The other problem I have with Robin’s scenario is that I think he may be too pessimistic about the potential for Ems to increase their productivity by expanding their use of non-Em robots, as an alternative to replicating themselves. As Ems obtain more advanced capital to work with (including non-Em robots) their marginal productivity could be expected to rise, thus tending to raise wage rates.

This book is based on the assumption that brain emulation is likely to happen before artificial machine intelligence develops to the point where machines will achieve broad human level abilities. I don’t have the technical competence to comment on whether that is likely. Some issues relating to the latter possibility were discussed in my review of Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence. The idea that human-like robots may be created through brain emulation at some time during the next century does not fill me with joy, but life might be better for humans (and Ems) if the Ems are created before the intelligent machines, so they can prevent them from running amok.

Despite my reservations about this book, I recommend that readers should buy it in order to give Robin Hanson appropriate encouragement for his efforts in attempting to foresee the future of human-like creatures. An even better reason to buy the book is to try assess for yourself whether Robin’s base-line scenario is plausible.

How should researchers combine different aspects of happiness into a single measure?

A recent paper by Gus O’Donnell and Andrew Oswald considers the question of how to combine measures of different aspects of subjective well-being into a single overall measure.

The authors focused specifically on the four aspects of well-being measured in annual surveys by the UK Office of National Statistics. These are:

• how satisfied you are with your life nowadays;
• to what extent you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile;
• how happy you felt yesterday; and
• how anxious you felt yesterday.

All aspects are measured on an 11 point scale from 0 to 10.

The approach taken by O’Donnell and Oswald in their exploratory study implies that all aspects of happiness should be weighted according to their “social importance” as determined by the average weight given to them by citizens in opinion surveys. The specific method they employ involves asking people to allocate 100 points across the four measures. For example, if all four measures were considered to be equally important, 25% would be allocated to each measure.

This method of developing weights seems to me to be much better suited to combining well-being indicators such as those included in the OECD’s Better Life index (e.g. income, education, health, environment) than to combining survey data relating to different aspects of subjective well-being.

I feel uneasy about the method adopted because I don’t think individual citizens are equipped to make judgments about the “social importance” of the feelings of others. For example, the majority view about the “social importance” of feelings of anxiety might understate the impact of anxiety on the well-being of people who suffer from anxiety.

The authors have reported results from the use of their method of obtaining weights from four different samples: economics students, MBA students, professional economists, and a wider group of citizens chosen using web-based methods. All groups gave anxiety the lowest average weight, but apart from that there is not much common ground in the views of the different groups. The wider group of citizens gave happiness the greatest weight, but the other groups all gave life satisfaction the greatest weight. The economics and MBA students gave “doing worthwhile things” a much higher weight than happiness, but professional economists gave it about the same weight as happiness.

It seems to me that a better way to proceed would be to attempt to estimate the well-being of individuals by using weighting systems that individuals consider to be relevant to their own lives. There are potentially several ways to do that.

First, there is the approach adopted by Daniel Benjamin et al in their paper, “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction”, discussed on this blog, in which people were asked to choose between hypothetical situations using different measures of happiness and a range of different ratings.

Another possible approach would to ask survey respondents questions along the following lines: “If you were offered an opportunity that would add a 1 point improvement in your feeling that the things you do in life are worthwhile, how much life satisfaction would you be willing to forgo in order to obtain that benefit?” When I ask myself that question the answer I obtained seemed to make sense, but my mind went blank when I ask myself how much life satisfaction I would be willing to forgo in order to obtain a 1 point increase in happiness. The same happened when I asked myself how much happiness I would be willing to forgo in order to obtain a 1 point increase in life satisfaction. So I can hardly recommend that approach!

The third approach is to simply ask survey respondents to allocate 100 points across the four measures according to the weight that they consider should give to the different measures in assessing changes over time in their own personal well-being. That approach has the virtue of being simple and directly related to estimation of relevant weights.

In order to obtain an accurate overall impression of subjective well-being at a national level it is important to know to what extent the weights that individuals consider to be relevant to assessment of their own personal well-being vary according to the circumstances of their lives.

Are the Scandinavian countries almost nearly perfect?

This question is prompted by Michael Booth’s book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People. The author is English; he is married to a Dane and lives in Denmark. The subtitle (of the version I read) suggests that the author has exposed “the truth about the Nordic miracle”. The book is indeed informative, but the author’s main aim seems to be to entertain readers with his observations on the different character traits of the people in the five Nordic countries – Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - and what they think of each other.

The book could be viewed as essential reading for people thinking of spending time in Scandinavian countries. Visitors might need to be warned, for example, that Swedes tend not to be as well-mannered as observers of the on-court behaviour of Swedish tennis players might expect. Booth describes their behaviour when boarding public transport as “breathtaking rudeness” (but he comes from a country in which people do tend to apologize excessively).

The book also has much to offer people, like myself, with an interest in explanations for the high average happiness levels of these countries (as recorded in numerous international surveys) and those attempting to understand why Scandinavian welfare states have not yet collapsed.

The book was recommended to me by Jim Belshaw, an old friend and fellow blogger, because of my interest in happiness research. Jim has recently visited Denmark and has written on his blog about hygge – which translates as cosiness and has some similarity to the Australian concept of mateship – as well as about ethnocentricity and migration.

Michael Booth is bemused that the Danes tend to be consistently close to the top the world happiness rankings: even by comparison with the British they seem to be “a frosty bunch”. He suggests that the Danes are among “the least demonstrably joyful people on earth, along with the Swedes, the Finns and the Norwegians”. The author suggests that many Danes are themselves similarly bemused: “they tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is”.

It is often difficult to know when Booth is being serious, but he offers several more or less plausible explanations for the apparent contentedness of the Danes. These include low expectations resulting from their turbulent history, and a facility for denial of the costs of being Danish - including the high taxes and the loss of freedom of expression and individualism associated with hygge and Jante Law (the social norms of a small town). Such speculation is fun, but it may not be necessary to an understanding of why the Danes tend to be relatively satisfied with their lives. The relatively high average happiness levels of the Danes and other Scandinavians can be largely explained (statistically at least) in terms of such variables as average income, social support (having someone to count on in times of trouble), healthy life expectancy, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and relative absence of corruption. There is a good discussion in World Happiness Report 2015 (pages 21-26).

There is another possible explanation for Scandinavian happiness that I was hoping Michael Booth might have had some fun with. Last year Eugenio Proto and Andrew Oswald published exploratory research findings suggesting that cross-country differences in happiness are associated with “genetic distance from Denmark”. Apparently, the closer a country is to the genetic makeup of Denmark, the happier are the people in that country, other things equal. The study seeks to control for a fairly wide range of other variables. One part of the study is based on information on the incidence of people with short alleles (those who draw the short straw in terms of the serotonin-transporter gene) who have a genetic predisposition to overreact to stressful events. I was hoping that Michael Booth might have speculated about whether there might be something in the cultural heritage of the Scandinavians that could explain their genetic makeup. Unfortunately, the research paper was probably not published before his book was finished. When Booth did comment he cast doubts on the validity of the research findings, citing “the Dane’s record high consumption of antidepressants, which would appear to contradict the report’s assertions regarding clinical depression”. Well, who knows? More research might be required.

The thought of Scandinavians as being “almost nearly perfect” raises the question of how well these countries rate in terms of the “good society” characteristics, which I have previously proposed on this blog (in my most popular post) and in Free to Flourish as criteria that nearly everyone would consider to be important. For convenience, relevant information is summarised in the table below. The table shows data for the top 20 countries, according to their average ranking on the three criteria: peacefulness, individual opportunity and economic security. The shading - from green, through yellow to red - denotes levels of performance on each criterion from relatively strong to less strong for these top performers. (The indexes combine 15 indicators, using methodology described in Free to Flourish.)

It is obvious from the table that the Scandinavian countries are relatively good societies - according to the criteria I espouse. They rank very highly in terms of peacefulness and economic security - although, apart from Norway, they do not rank so highly in terms of individual opportunity. Equal weighting of the criteria might not be appropriate. If I had to choose whether it would be better for my grandchildren to live in a country offering greater individual opportunity or greater economic security, I would choose individual opportunity. However, my personal priorities are probably not widely shared in the Nordic countries. I wonder to what extent those priorities are shared among the large numbers of people who have migrated to Sweden in recent years.

The more contentious issue is whether these societies will remain “good” in the future. Michael Booth provides some hints in his discussion of productivity in Denmark:

“I have read numerous articles in Danish newspapers of which the gist has been ‘Well, things are going well for the other Scandinavian countries so they will probably go well for us too,’ in which no mention is ever made of Norway’s colossal oil wealth or Sweden’s manufacturing supremacy and major public sector reforms. Denmark’s economy is far, far weaker than its neighbours’, and the country is facing far more serious problems, but the Danes are oddly reluctant to address their private debt levels or their gigantic welfare state”.

So, what about Finland and Iceland? There is apparently more to the Finns than taciturnity, modesty, trustworthiness and binge drinking. As well as Santa and forestry, they have a substantial electronics industry (think Nokia). Research and development spending is relatively high as a percentage of GDP and relatively little of this is public money. The Finnish education system seems to be relatively good by OECD standards (average PISA scores are very high) for reasons which seem to be related to the high regard for teaching as a profession and the simplicity of the Finnish language. The future economic growth prospects of Finland have been rated highly by the World Economic Forum, among others.

Iceland’s economy was almost wiped out by the GFC, but it now seems to be recovering. That is an interesting story, but it doesn’t deserve space in this post because the population of Iceland is tiny (about 330,000). That is less than the population of Canberra (which is admittedly somewhat bloated).

Since I have mentioned population I should note in passing that world-wide interest in the Nordic countries seems to be disproportionate to the size of their populations. The total population of the Nordic countries is only about 25 million – not much larger than Australia's. Sweden is largest, with 9.6 million people; the populations of Denmark, Finland and Norway (5.6, 5.4 and 5.1 million respectively) are all smaller than that for Victoria (5.8 million).

Coming back now to the question of whether the Nordic countries will remain good societies, it looks as though Norway will continue to be helped along for a few more decades by the rents from oil resources, while the Swedes and Finns will probably get by without too much trouble on the rents from their past investment in intellectual capital. All the Nordic countries will be helped by their high levels of social capital (trust) which seems to make changes in policy direction relatively easy to achieve as they endeavour to make their welfare systems more affordable. At this point I should mention the impact of immigration.  (So, I have mentioned it.)

Before I end this long post I want to give you a better indication of the flavour of the book by referring to some of the author’s comments on what the people in the different Scandinavian countries think of each other. According to Michael Booth, their Danish neighbours regard the Swedes as stiff, humourless, rule-obsessed and dull, and the Finns see them as “slightly foppish”. These days the Norwegians have enough money to rise above ancient resentments – they pay Swedes to wait on their tables and peel their bananas (to make a sandwich spread). The Swedes, who are wealthier than their other neighbours, tend to remain aloof from regional resentments, but they are inclined to make sanctimonious comments about anti-immigrant policies adopted by the Danes.

The overall impression I am left with, however, is that the lingering resentments among the Nordic countries are fairly tame by comparison with those among the different national and regional groups in the British Isles.

Is human well-being subjective or objective?

I usually try to begin the discussion of topics on my blog by explaining why the question and my answer might be of interest to potential readers. That is difficult this time because I am attempting to answer the question in the hope that doing so will help me to become less confused about the topic. However, confusion about subjectivity and objectivity seems fairly common - particularly so among economists - so hopefully what I am about to write will have a potential audience of more than one person.

In Free to Flourish I wrote:

“Observers can clearly make judgements about the extent that individual humans are flourishing or languishing in much the same way as they can make such judgements about plants and animals. In the case of humans, however, the subjects are capable of telling an observer how they feel about their own lives and their opinions usually deserve more respect than those observing. For example, it may appear obvious that people with poor physical health or very low income have a low quality of life, but if the individuals concerned feel content, what right has any observer to imply that they do not know how they feel?

As noted previously, individual flourishing involves a variety of factors including emotional wellbeing and life satisfaction, as well as more objective factors such as physical health, education and wealth. The relative weights any individual gives to these factors reflect personal preferences. …

If we were to substitute community values for personal preferences we would be at risk of attempting to measure the extent that an adult is flourishing according to values that he or she does not agree with. That would certainly be inappropriate.” (Chapter 5).

I stand by what I wrote. (At least I did earlier in the day when I wrote the preceding sentence.) 

Does that mean that I believe human well-being is objective or subjective? The first sentence in the quote implies that well-being is objective. Are the sentiments in the final paragraph of the quote consistent with those in the first sentence?

Before reading the first part of Well-Being: Happiness in a worthwhile life, by Neera Badhwar, a philosopher, I believed that well-being is subjective. Now I am fairly sure that there are objective standards of well-being.  (Many of the relevant issues are also discussed by Neera Badhwar in an article published last year.)

The problem is conceptual. My previous view that well-being is subjective was based on the view that it must be because it contains important subjective elements. That seems to have been the view of the welfare economists who declared interpersonal comparisons of utility to be impossible. It is also the view of the philosopher, Wayne Sumner, who suggested that the term ‘objective’ be reserved for the view that well-being is simply a matter of meeting certain objective standards, regardless of the individual’s emotional condition and her evaluation of her life.

At this point I recall a discussion a long time ago with an economist who pointed out to me that people often make interpersonal comparisons of utility - so we can hardly claim that such comparisons are impossible. In our everyday lives we often make judgements about whether other people are happy or sad, satisfied or unsatisfied with their lives, whether they feel that they are achieving anything worthwhile and so forth. Those judgements are based on what people say and do. They are often ill-informed, but that does not necessarily mean they are not objective. 

I suspect that it is only in their professional lives that economists have ever refrained from making interpersonal comparisons of utility. These days, many economists (self included) view the subjective ratings that individuals place on their happiness, satisfaction with life etc. as objective evidence pertaining to important aspects of their well-being relative to other people.

Neera Badhwar suggests that we should view theories of well-being as objective if they make objective worth essential to well-being. She argues that for individuals to be flourishing their lives must be supremely desirable and worthwhile, and therefore eminently worth living. They must not only meet the individual’s own standards of worth but be able to pass muster according to objective standards of worth.

The author argues that objective well-being requires self-direction:

“the idea of objective well-being is perfectly compatible with the idea that objectively worthy lives can take many different shapes depending on the interests, opportunities and abilities of the individual and, in fact, must take a shape that both suits the individual’s own psychological nature and meets her standards to count as a life of well-being”. (p 8)

Neera Badhwar answers those who argue that objective theories of well-being are paternalistic by pointing out that theories of well-being in themselves do not tell us to promote other people’s well-being, let alone to promote our conception of their well-being.

That is consistent with the position that I have previously taken that “the case for individuals to be responsible for their own lives does not necessarily rest on each individual being the best judge of what is good for himself or herself”. In my view it rests on the proposition that adult humans cannot fully flourish unless they accept responsibility for their own lives. (Free to Flourish, Chapter 3.)

Coming back now to the last paragraph of the quote at the beginning of this post, if I now accept that a flourishing life must pass muster in terms of objective standards of worth, can I still maintain that it is inappropriate to measure the extent that an adult is flourishing according to values that he or she does not agree with? 

I don’t think so. I can acknowledge that objective standards of worth are relevant, whilst also urging researchers to accept the implications of the fact that “community standards” can be controversial. But that does not mean that it is never appropriate "to measure the extent that an adult is flourishing according to values that he or she does not agree with". For example, it is appropriate to assert that it is not possible for slaves to flourish, even though it is possible that an individual slave might claim that freedom has no value to her.

Is work-life balance a big problem in Australia?

There was a time, not long ago, that I avoided using the term “work-life balance” on the grounds that work is a normal part of life. Writing about work-life balance makes about as much sense as writing about sleep-life balance. But here I am now, writing about work-life balance! Never mind, everyone knows that what I am actually writing about is the balance between work and other aspects of life, including leisure, spending time with family members, and sleeping.

According to the OECD’s Better Life index, work-life balance in Australia is among the worst in the OECD. Australia’s ranking on this criterion is even below that of the United States. The indicators used by the OECD to assess work-life balance are the percentage of employees working very long hours, and time devoted to leisure and personal care. Australia’s ranking is 30/36 on both those indicators.

Do those indicators accurately reflect the impact of hours of work on the well-being of individuals? In order to answer that question it makes sense to look at the way hours of work impact on life satisfaction and other measures of emotional health. The fact that people are working long hours does not necessarily mean that they are irrational, or even that they are choosing to sacrifice some life satisfaction in order to achieve other objectives that are more important to them. They might just like working.

A few years ago, in an update of one of my more popular posts - entitled “How much does over-work affect happiness?” -  I ended up suggesting (not surprisingly) that life satisfaction data might help to answer that question. Since then I have wondered from time to time why I had not seen any studies using Australian survey data to shed light on the issue. I obviously hadn’t looked!

An article by Mark Wooden, Diana Warren and Robert Drago entitled “Working time mismatch and subjective well-being”, published in 2009, uses HILDA panel survey data to examine the relationship between working hours and levels of work and job satisfaction in Australia. The authors found that neither job satisfaction nor life satisfaction varied much with number of hours worked when the number of hours worked was consistent with the preferences of individual workers. That suggests the OECDs work-life balance indicators are not particularly relevant to the well-being of Australian workers.

Wooden et. al. found that the mismatch between the preferred working hours of individuals and their actual working hours has a significant impact on job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Both underemployment and overemployment have similar negative impacts on job satisfaction, but overemployment has larger negative impacts on life satisfaction than does underemployment. The authors suggest that although the absolute impacts on subjective well-being appear small, “the measured impact of overemployment should be viewed as important”, relative to “quite serious events, such as the onset of severe illness or injury”.

More recent research by Natalie Skinner and Barbara Pocock published in the latest Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI 2014) makes use of a flourishing index (the Huppert and So index discussed in my last post) encompassing characteristics of positive mental health such as optimism, resilience and competence. The survey results suggest that the rate of flourishing among Australian workers is higher than that for European workers. The difference is particularly marked for women workers, with 41% estimated to be flourishing in Australia, compared with only 33% in EU countries. I wonder how that can be explained.

The authors also found that rates of flourishing do not vary with length of work hours, but do vary according to whether working hours fit with the preferences of individual workers. The results are depicted in the chart below.

The rates of flourishing are much lower among women who would prefer more work than among the other categories. (The authors also found that working unsocial hours (weekends, evenings/nights) was associated with lower rates of flourishing for men.)

In order to show that mismatch between actual and preferred hours of work is a big problem in Australia it would be necessary to show that working hour mismatches tend to persist over time. In fact, research by Robert Breunig, Xiaodong Gong and Gordon Leslie using the HILDA data base suggests that most working hour mismatch problems are resolved within one year. Full-time workers who prefer to work less are the only group for which this is not true – the persistence of mismatches is just over 50 percent for this group, but declines in a predictable way over longer time periods. The evidence suggests that workers often resolve mismatches when they change employers.

My conclusion is that people who argue that work-life balance is a big problem for the well-being of Australians have been talking through their hats.

How good is life satisfaction as a measure of psychological flourishing?

In recent years psychologists have adopted a number of somewhat different approaches to measuring psychological flourishing. This is not an area in which I can claim much expertise, but that will not stop me from writing about it. The question of what it means for a human to flourish is one that everyone should be encouraged to consider for themselves.

The definition of flourishing adopted by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So in their article ‘Flourishing Across Europe’ (published in Soc.Indic.Res. in 2013) viewed it as lying at the opposite end of a spectrum to depression and anxiety. The authors identified 10 features of positive well-being by examining internationally agreed criteria for depression and anxiety (DSM and ICD) and defining the opposite of each symptom. The 10 symptoms of flourishing identified were: competence, emotional stability, engagement, meaning, optimism, positive emotion, positive relationships, resilience, self-esteem, and vitality.

A measure of flourishing was developed from responses to questions included in the European Social Survey. Indicators used were as follows:

• Competence: Most days I feel a sense of accomplishment from what I do;
• Emotional stability: (In the past week) I felt calm and peaceful;
• Engagement: I love learning new things;
• Meaning: I generally feel that what I do in my life is valuable and worthwhile;
• Optimism: I am always optimistic about my future;
• Positive emotion: Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?
• Positive relationships: There are people in my life who really care about me;
• Resilience: When things go wrong in my life it generally takes me a long time to get back to normal (reverse score);
• Self-esteem: In general, I feel very positive about myself;
• Vitality: (In the past week) I had a lot of energy.

I would have liked to see autonomy included in this list. Adult humans can hardly be said to be flourishing if they do not exercise their potential to organize their own lives. The authors argue against including autonomy on the grounds that its opposite is not specified in the DSM and ICD. It is difficult to accept that mental health professionals do not view failure to become or remain an autonomous individual as a mental disorder. Various problems in self-direction seem to be recognized as associated with personality disorders in DSM-5.

Leaving as aside my views about their failure to incorporate autonomy in their measure of flourishing, one of the attractive features of the approach adopted by Huppert and So is that it does not pretend to provide a comprehensive measure of human flourishing. It relates specifically to the psychological aspects of individual human flourishing and doesn’t pretend to encompass physical health, wealth, practical wisdom etc.

One interesting feature of the results of the study using data from a sample of 43,000 Europeans was that the individuals identified as flourishing did not correspond very closely to those identified as having high life satisfaction. For Europe as a whole, the percentage who were both flourishing and had high life satisfaction was 7.3%. Among people who met the criterion for flourishing, 46.0% had high life satisfaction, and among people who had high life satisfaction, 38.7% were flourishing. (The correlation between life satisfaction and flourishing was only 0.34.) The authors conclude:

“Clearly, flourishing and life satisfaction are overlapping but distinct concepts, and a great deal would be lost by measuring life satisfaction alone, although there is frequently pressure in large scale surveys to do so.”

However, the ranking of European countries according to the estimated percentage of the population who are flourishing seems fairly consistent with the rankings obtained using life satisfaction. In in order to compare the ratings with a similar measure based on life satisfaction, I have used the Gallup organisation's data on “thriving” covering a similar time period. Gallup uses the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale to measure life satisfaction by asking respondents to place the status of their lives on a "ladder" scale with steps numbered from 0 to 10, where 0 indicates the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life. Individuals are classified as thriving if they rate their current lives a "7" or higher and their future lives at "8" or higher. The relationship between the estimated percentages “flourishing” and “thriving” is shown in the graph below.

It seems clear from the graph that it doesn’t matter a great deal whether you use indicators of psychological health or life satisfaction to compare the psychological well-being of people in different countries. (At a national level the correlation between flourishing and thriving is 0.87.) The errors in using life satisfaction as an indicator of flourishing that are evident at an individual level tend to cancel out in aggregating to a national level.

What this means, I think, is that if you want to know about an individual’s psychological well-being, measures of life satisfaction are a poor indicator. However, if you are looking for a summary indicator of psychological well-being at a national or regional level, life satisfaction might be good enough.