The Practices of Happiness

Political Economy, Religion and Wellbeing

Ian Steedman, John R Atherton, Elaine Graham, Ian Steedman, John R Atherton, Elaine Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136937545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via www.tandfebooks.com as well as the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project.

There is growing evidence that rising levels of prosperity in Western economies since 1945 have not been matched by greater incidences of reported well-being and happiness. Indeed, material affluence is often accompanied instead by greater social and individual distress. A growing literature within the humanities and social sciences is increasingly concerned to chart not only the underlying trends in recorded levels of happiness, but to consider what factors, if any, contribute to positive and sustainable experiences of well-being and quality of life. Increasingly, such research is focusing on the importance of values and beliefs in human satisfaction or quality of life; but the specific contribution of religion to these trends is relatively under-examined. This unique collection of essays seeks to rectify that omission, by identifying the nature and role of the religious contribution to wellbeing.

A unique collection of nineteen leading scholars from the field of economics, psychology, public theology and social policy have been brought together in this volume to explore the religious contribution to the debate about happiness and well-being. These essays explore the religious dimensions to a number of key features of well-being, including marriage, crime and rehabilitation, work, inequality, mental health, environment, participation, institutional theory, business and trade. They engage particularly closely with current trends in economics in identifying alternative models of economic growth which focus on its qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions.

This unique volume brings to public notice the nature and role of religion's contribution to wellbeing, including new ways of measurement and evaluation. As such, it represents a valuable and unprecedented resource for the development of a broad-based religious contribution to the field. It will be of particular relevance for those who are concerned about the continuing debate about personal and societal well-being, as well as those who are interested in the continuing significance of religion for the future of public policy.

Part I Political economy

1 Economic theory and happiness

Ian Steedman

DOI: 10.4324/9780203846902-3

The general diffusion of any interesting idea is liable to generate a penumbra of popular misunderstandings and false assumptions, no matter how careful are those who promulgate that idea. The claim that increases in national income per head, beyond a certain minimum level, will give rise to no increase in human happiness is no less subject to this risk than any other challenging claim. In particular, it may come to be associated in popular thought with the notion that economists are bound to be surprised by such a claim, or even to regard it as a direct refutation of their most fundamental ideas. Any such notion is, of course, nonsense and ought to be exposed as such, both because truth is better than falsehood and because intelligent policy discussion about wellbeing can only be hindered by misperceptions of what economic theory does and does not have to say on this issue. The modest purpose of this chapter is thus, first, to recall what has been said about wellbeing and income by a number of major economists. Specifically, we shall consider some of the writings of Marshall, of Wicksteed, of Pigou, of Hicks and of de Van Graaff. Second, we shall turn to a brief consideration of some recent contributions to the literature on ‘the economics of happiness’.

Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)

Since Marshall’s Principles of Economics, which went through eight editions from 1890 to 1920, is unquestionably one of the founding works of modern mainstream economics, we begin by considering what Marshall had to say there about economics and wellbeing; for our purposes it will suffice to restrict our attention to the eighth edition (1920), without mentioning differences among the various editions.

Marshall’s Principles, naturally enough, is not a treatise on the ethics of the good life but that does not inhibit Marshall from giving many indications of what he took to be components of such a life and of how he took them to be related to economic matters. On the very first page of the text we read that the Principles is:

on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man. For man’s character has been moulded by his every-day work, and the material resources which he thereby procures, more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals; and the two great forming agencies of the world’s history have been the religious and the economic.

(1920: 1)

Character is not only shaped, Marshall claims, by the nature of one’s work: ‘very often the influence exerted on a person’s character by the amount of his income is hardly less, if it is less, than that exerted by the way in which it is earned’ (2). Nevertheless, it ‘is true that in religion, in the family affections and in friendship, even the poor may find scope for many of those faculties which are the source of the highest happiness’, even if the conditions of ‘extreme poverty … tend to deaden the higher faculties’ (2). We learn at once, then, that for Marshall ‘character’ is of central importance (being related to both occupation and income) and that ‘the highest happiness’ relates to religion, family affections and friendship. It is thus unlikely that the remaining 850 pages of the Principles will teach any simple doctrine that happiness increases if and only if real income per head increases. Leaving the question of character aside for the moment, we may dwell briefly on some of Marshall’s further hints as to the constituents of happiness. In the course of denying that economists are necessarily ‘adherents of the philosophical system of Hedonism or of Utilitarianism’ (17, n.1), Marshall hints (indirectly) that ‘true happiness is not to be had without self-respect, and that self-respect is to be had only on the condition of endeavouring so to live as to promote the progress of the human race’ (ibid.). Somewhat less grandly, he speaks of ‘the pursuit of science, literature and art for their own sake’ and of ‘the desire for excellence for its own sake’ (88–89; this in connection with ‘wants and activities’ – see below). Moreover, ‘a person’s happiness often depend[s] more on his own physical, mental and moral health than on his external conditions’ (133–134). Marshall can thus refer to ‘those habits of body, mind, and spirit in which alone there is true happiness’ (136, emphasis added). The constituents of happiness are to be found in a person’s dispositions, not in their possessions.

What motivates people to act as they do? Marshall does not imagine that they always and everywhere pursue their true happiness! Yet their motivations are taken to be complex, even when they engage in economic activity. Thus:

What makes one course answer better than another, will not necessarily be a selfish gain, nor any material gain; and it will often have been argued that ‘though this or that plan saved a little trouble or a little money, yet it was not fair to others,’ and ‘it made one look mean,’ or ‘it made one feel mean’.

(21)

Considerations of trouble, money, fairness, reputation and self-respect can thus all function as motives. With respect to the earning of money, as a motive, it must be remembered that

Money is a means towards ends, and if the ends are noble, the desire for the means is not ignoble. [Money] is sought as a means to all kinds of ends, high as well as low, spiritual as well as material.

(22)

And if economics says much about earning money, ‘this is so, not because money … is regarded as the main aim of human effort [but because] it is the one convenient means of measuring human motive on a large scale’, pace Carlyle and Ruskin (ibid.). Earnings are, in any case, only one of various motives influencing a choice of occupation, others being the pleasure of the work itself, the delight in striving for achievement, social standing and class solidarity (23).

If the economist cannot always give full weight to the powerful motives of family affection, charity, duty and love of one’s neighbour, this is ‘not because they are not based on self-interest’ but because their action is not law-like. Were they governed by discernible laws, economists could and would take fuller account of them (24). Economics is by no means restricted to the consideration of self-regarding motives, ‘in fact the variety of motives [is] among the chief subjects with which we shall be occupied in this treatise’, Marshall writes (25). It is thus no surprise that he will have no truck with the idea of ‘economic man’. For Marshall, economists:

deal with man as he is: not with an abstract or ‘economic’ man; but a man of flesh and blood. They deal with a man who is largely influenced by egoistic motives in his business life … but who is also neither above vanity and recklessness, nor below delight in doing his work well for its own sake, or in sacrificing himself for the good of his family, his neighbours, or his country; a man who is not below the love of a virtuous life for its own sake.

(26–27)

Marshall’s ‘man as he is’, we learn, ‘desires not merely larger quantities of the things he has been accustomed to consume, but better qualities of those things; he desires a greater choice of things, and things that will satisfy new wants growing up within him’. He comes to ‘desire change for the sake of change’ (86) and this leads Marshall ‘to remark with Senior that, “Strong as is the desire for variety, it is weak compared with the desire for distinction”’ (87). While Marshall tends to see such changing wants in a positive light (see below on ‘Wants and activities’), he is far from blind to their downside. He notes ‘the Buddhist doctrine that … real riches consist not in the abundance of goods but in the paucity of wants’ (136) and remarks on his own account that ‘the only direct effect of an increase in wants is to make people more miserable than before’ (690). He observes too that

after a time new riches often lose a great part of their charms. Partly this is the result of familiarity, which makes people cease to derive much pleasure from accustomed comforts and luxuries, though they suffer greater pain from their loss.

(135)

(Even in a much earlier work of 1879, Pure Theory of Foreign Trade and Domestic Value, Marshall had stressed that custom and habit can introduce irreversibilities into consumption behaviour.) How, then, could Marshall have been shocked by the claim that time-series income growth need not be correlated with happiness?

If Marshall was well aware that life is far from being exhausted by ‘economic’ considerations, he did not, of course, belittle them. He saw them as being of great importance, in that they influence the things that do ultimately matter. The ‘question [whether all can have a fair chance of a cultured life] cannot be fully answered by economic science. For the answer depends partly on the moral and political capabilities of human nature’ (4); but economics is nevertheless of great relevance to any answer. Any reader who has been unduly influenced by uncritical versions of the ‘economics and happiness’ thesis may then be surprised to find that Marshall goes straight on to assert that ‘the bearing of economics on the higher wellbeing of man has been overlooked’ (ibid.); that is perhaps not a statement that Marshall would retain in a hypothetical 2010 edition of his Principles!

As Marshall draws closer to detailed, specific questions about the relation between measured economic magnitudes and wellbeing he seems to vacillate somewhat (the same is true of both Wicksteed and Pigou). On the one hand, he can write that ‘A shilling is the measure of less pleasure, or satisfaction of any kind, to a rich man than to a poor one’ (19) and, again, that ‘a pound’s worth of satisfaction to an ordinary poor man is a much greater thing than a pound’s worth of satisfaction to an ordinary rich man’ (130). And he can ask quite explicitly ‘how far the exchange value of any element of wealth, whether in collective or individual use, represents accurately the addition which it makes to happiness and wellbeing’ (85). Indeed he opens Book III, chapter VI with the words, ‘We may now turn to consider how far the price which is actually paid for a thing represents the benefit that arises from its possession’ (124). At the same time, however, he can suppose that ‘this is not important in comparing two [large] groups composed of rich and poor in like proportions’ (19, marginal summary and text) and that for large groups of people ‘there is even some primâ facie probability that equal additions to their material resources will make about equal additions to the fullness of life, and the true progress of the human race’ (20). This is no ill-considered chance remark on Marshall’s part, for he writes much later in the text (131):

On the whole however it happens that by far the greater number of the events with which economics deals, affect in about equal proportions all the different classes of society; so that if the money measures of the happiness caused by two events are equal, there is not in general any very great difference between the amounts of happiness in the two cases.

It will be clear here that Marshall is both recognizing the theoretical problem of principle and hoping that in practice it will not matter too much.

Even if two alternative ways of increasing income by the same amount will indeed change happiness by the same amount, questions remain as to the extent and permanence of that amount. We have already seen that Marshall was aware that familiarity can wear away an initial increase in happiness; he notes too that an increase in income can be misused, for example, through

that unwholesome desire for wealth as a means of display which has been the chief bane of the well-to-do classes in every civilized country … it would be a gain if the moral sentiment of the community could induce people to avoid all sorts of display of individual wealth.

(136–137)

And he later refers to ‘a mere increase of artificial wants, among which perhaps the grosser wants may predominate’ (690). For Marshall, it would seem, there are bad as well as good ways of deploying increased command over resources.

Such considerations bring us back to Marshall’s concern with character and his related emphasis on activities or pursuits (as opposed to wants). These are rather delicate matters in that they are simultaneously of great importance to Marshall and yet difficult to pin down and to render at all precise. Only a brief outline can be attempted here and the interested reader is referred to Whitaker (1987, section II) and to Raffaelli et al. (2006: entries by Bateman, Coats and Raffaelli) for further discussion.

We noted above that the very first page of the Principles takes ‘man’s character’ to be of central importance and for Marshall it is not something fixed; it evolves, and progress – real progress – is essentially concerned with the uplifting of character. Wants (sometimes thought to lie at the heart of economic theory) are, for Marshall, only of secondary, albeit genuine importance. Thus:

even for the narrower uses of economic studies, it is important to know whether the desires which prevail are such as will help to build up a strong and righteous character. And in the broader uses of those studies … the economist … must concern himself with the ultimate aims of man, and take account of differences in real value between gratifications that [have] equal economic measures.

(17)

Since ‘human nature can be modified [and has been] very much even in a few generations’ (752), one cannot assess economic events or policies while ignoring their effects on character. While earlier economists had ignored this, according to Marshall, ‘modern economists keep constantly in mind the fact that [man’s character] is a product of the circumstances under which he has lived’ (764; this should surely have been made a prescriptive rather than a descriptive statement? I.S.).

What did Marshall regard as an improvement in character? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he provides no neat, compact answer to this question but he certainly writes with approval of an increased willingness to postpone immediate gratification for the sake of future benefits, of prudence and self-control, of self-respect, of unselfishness and of willingness to act for the public good (680). He is similarly positive about:

an increase of intelligence and energy and self respect; leading to more care and judgement in expenditure, and to an avoidance of food and drink that gratify the appetite but afford no strength, and of ways of living that are unwholesome physically and morally.

(689)

Such qualities of character are linked not only to wants/desires but also to ways of acting, to activities and pursuits. While Marshall devotes Book III to ‘Wants and their satisfaction’ (and no Book to activities), he insists that ‘while wants are the rulers of life among the lower animals, it is to changes in the forms of efforts and activities that we must turn when in search for the keynotes of the history of mankind’ (85). And he soon repeats and develops the point:

Speaking broadly therefore, although it is man’s wants in the earliest stages of his development that give rise to his activities, yet afterwards each new step upwards is to be regarded as the development of new activities giving rise to new wants, rather than of new wants giving rise to new activities.

(89)

The agents studied by Marshall, then, were poles apart from the caricature ‘economic man’ who is of a fixed nature and selfishly concerned only with acquiring material means to satisfy his given wants. His difficulty – and let no one underestimate its genuine nature – was that it was (and is) easier to speak of outputs, purchases and consumption than of ultimate goals, evolving human character, and so on. Marshall took the former to be related to the latter and therefore worthy of discussion but he could never have suggested that measured national income per head is of ultimate significance, or is even guaranteed always to promote that which is.

Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844–1927)

Wicksteed would not normally be thought of as a ‘welfare economist’ and we shall therefore consider him more briefly than either Marshall or Pigou (see the following section). It is nevertheless highly relevant to refer to him here, since his Common Sense of Political Economy of 1910 provides a brilliant demonstration that economic theory has not the least need of any concept of the ‘economic man’, that the agents considered in economic theory are ‘whole persons’ with a wide range of motives – including the social, the altruistic, the cultural, the political –and that any idea that human flourishing could be reduced to having a high income is merely laughable. (The same could be said of Adam Smith, of course – and has been; see e.g. Rothschild 2001). As Lionel (later Lord) Robbins put it in his 1933 Introduction to the Common Sense, with reference to ‘the belief that the whole structure of Economics depends upon the assumption of a world of economic men, each actuated by egocentric or hedonistic motives’, Wicksteed ‘shattered this misconception once and for all’ (xxi).

Right from the beginning, Wicksteed rejects outright any ‘attempt to esta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introductory essay: developing an overview as context and future
• Part I Political economy
• Part II Contributions to other social sciences
• Part III Reflections on foundations
• Bibliography
• Index