Saturday 21 January 2023

Amartya Sen- between Bhutan and Disneyland

 What is happiness? How should we evaluate it? The answer depends on why we are concerned with happiness. Suppose our purpose is to make somebody we don't like feel bad about himself. Then we may say 'you think you are getting a lot of pleasure by fucking my wife. But doing so isn't making you happy at all. Indeed, it is causing you to forget how to be happy. I pity you.' This isn't something I myself necessarily do. It could be some guy I met at the pub who told me about it.

Similarly, we may assure a Mafia Godfather that we are very very happy to be able to share our profits with his goons. This great happiness can be easily verified and evaluated by the fact that we are grinning and whistling a merry tune. Indeed, sometimes we become so overcome with joy, that we piss ourselves.

From the economic point of view, the condition for happiness is the removal of sources of unhappiness. In the jargon of the profession, this is referred to as disutility. Disutility is linked directly to opportunity cost- viz. the next best alternative foregone. You cease to be happy when you find there is some better alternative which has become available. You minimize opportunity cost, or disutility, by switching to the best alternative and your happiness is restored. 

I am concerned with my own happiness because I like being happy. This may cause me to tell certain people to fuck off because they make me unhappy. I may also try to have sex with certain other people because that would make me very happy. However, being committed to remaining happy- as opposed to doing impulsive shit you - requires some 'evaluating' - this involves looking at opportunity cost- because telling your boss to fuck off may lead to your being a very unhappy homeless person. Similarly, it may be wiser not to try to have sex with his wife because she will beat the fuck out of me. Thus, though my boss makes me unhappy and having sex with his wife would make me happy, nevertheless my commitment to being as happy as possible involves being obsequious to my boss and not grabbing his wife's titties. Obviously when I say 'my boss' I don't necessarily mean my own employer. I could be talking about some guy I got talking to at the pub.

Similar 'evaluations' of opportunity cost- or disutility- must be made when you concern yourself with the happiness of your children or employees or family members or neighborhood. Impulsive actions may be gratifying in the moment but happiness is an equilibrium concept concerned with doing as well as you can under the circumstances. It is converges to 'regret minimization' not maximizing hedonic pleasure in the moment.

All this is commonsense. Disutility- that is opportunity cost- is what determines eudaimonia. But what doesn't happen isn't visible. It is easier to spot the impulsive hedonist who thinks he is having a great time than to identify the happy man. 

Equally, an economics which looks only at what is produced or consumed and not at what alternatives are foregone over time, is an economics which can tell us nothing about welfare or happiness or how Society can be put on a better trajectory.

Amartya Sen, whose Economics is worthless because he disregards disutility, wrote a book titled 'Commodities and Capabilities' in 1985 which took a different view.

He begins by distinguishing a person's 'well being'- what he is doing to make himself happy- from his 'advantage'- his potential to make himself happy. This is like distinguishing 'felicity' from utility. However, there is no way to separate them. I am happy because I know I have a delicious meal waiting for me even though I am not currently eating anything. Instead, I'm going for a jog so as to sharpen my appetite. Indeed, even as I am lifting up my spoon of delicious ice-cream, my well-being can't be differentiated from my 'advantage'. There is a pleasure in anticipation which shades into the pleasure of tasting and the pleasure of digestion and excretion. But they operate as a gestalt- which is why we very quickly give up eating foods which are tasty but which cause explosive diarrhea. 

'Advantage' being concerned with potential actions- what Buddhists call 'avakasha'-  must factor in what is required for a person to preserve 'conatus'- i.e. to remain as they are rather than suffer some material loss or deprivation. This in turn has to do with whether Society can defend itself and retain fiscal viability and social coherence. The crazy schemes of Ivory Tower eggheads may militate against the survival of the Society or the continued existence of its people. 

A more succinct way of making the same point is to say 'advantage' corresponds to nothing but increased disutility. I may think it an advantage that you get to go to a fancy School where you will pay through the nose to be bored shitless for four years. You may envy my 'well-being' as a party animal but, it may be you are happy precisely because you know you are working hard to better yourself and to give naches to your parents and a head start in life to your own children. Is there an objective truth here? The answer has to do with disutility. There is a disutility to being a party-animal if you can be something better. There is none if you would always be an unemployable Socioproctologist. 

Sen mentions Lancaster's 'characteristics model' of consumption. The problem is that 'characteristics' are themselves further decomposable into what does or doesn't improve adaptive fitness. But this depends on the fitness landscape which is unknowable till it occurs. In other words, there is no way to map commodities to capabilities save arbitrarily for some particular purpose. This means mathsy masturbation is useless. Psychology and ideographic knowledge are all that count- that too in a narrow, context specific, manner. There can be no general theory of 'capabilities' because they are unknowable even after the event. This is because some causal factor unknown to us may have been at work. I get into a fight with Mike Tyson and knock him out. Am I capable of being the next heavy weight champion? No. Mike Tyson had been paid to take a fall. Unfortunately, he mistook me for Margaret Thatcher- a not unnatural mistake- and thus didn't actually get a dime. 

Sen's own remark was more foolish. He pointed out that a guy with a tapeworm in his tummy wouldn't get as much nutrition from stuff with the Lancastarian 'characteristic' of food. But, there would be some anti-worming medication and nutrition pack which would have that Lancastarian characteristic for him. But even that characteristic must be further decomposed with a view to adaptive fitness which ultimately involves the Price equation and the extended phenotype or socio-biological considerations yet more arcane. Poor old Sen masturbating mathsily can contribute nothing. 

Sen then gives us a foolish notion of 'functioning' which involves a mathematical translation from commodity space to Lancaster type 'characteristic' space. However, the thing would be wholly arbitrary. There can be no mathematical function to or from  a set which is not well defined. First 'uniqueness' must be established. But everything we know about evolution suggests that 'multiple realizability' is the rule not the exception. Co-evolved processes, in particular, are robust iff they can very suddenly stop being anything of the sort. 

Sen got worried that some disabled people don't get much joy and thus devoted himself to mathsy masturbation so the able bodied would think he was the Mother Theresa of cretinism. Meanwhile, genuinely disabled people were showing the world that they were actually differently abled. Moreover, they could teach others how to make the most of their lives, and be happier, by explaining how they themselves took the obstacles facing them as opportunities for self-development. But Helen Keller had done this long ago. Sen was a sort or reverse Helen Keller. His long education in stupidity and longer pedagogy of imbecility made him blind and deaf to what was obvious. Still, nobody could say he was dumb or not one of the most prodigious mathsy masturbators of all time.

Sen thinks the 'binary relation of choice' can't reflect 'well being' because some choices- whether to drink tea or coffee and fundamentally different from other choices like whether to join a strike. Yet, the opposite is true. You may choose tea because you identify as a tea drinker and you join a strike because you are a Labor supporter. However, if tea suddenly becomes very expensive or joining a strike will cause you to become homeless, then you swallow your pride and switch to some other beverage or cross the picket line. You may suffer cognitive dissonance or a sense of resentment and this affects your well being. But this is 'dis-utility' pure and simple. It is sensible to dwell on choice because our choices really do affect our well-being. Sen considers this approach a 'non-starter'. He thinks 'happiness' and 'desire fulfilment' are more promising. But, some sort of cranial surgery might render us happy and fulfilled because our only desire would be to croon happily while playing with our own feces. The plain fact is, contra Sen, happiness is not necessary to well-being. One may be very happy that one is dying if by so doing you save your loved ones. Desire fulfillment is all that matters to you though one of your desires is that you cease to exist so those you care about may flourish. 

Sen makes a distinction between the mental state of the agent and the evaluations made by that agent. Yet there is no way to distinguish them. A mental state exists because of prior evaluation that it is more useful than another. Equally, evaluations are themselves mental states. Sen is scandalized that happy people have realistic expectations. He babbles about the landless laborer and the subjugated housewife. He doesn't mention the 99 year old billionaire who is no longer able to pleasure his harem of super-models and who can only expect to live for another ten or twenty years. 

Essentially, Sen is saying some people- for an arbitrary scruple of his own- should be deeply unhappy even if they aren't. They should 'rage against the dying of the light' or spend all their time burning buses and protesting that true Democracy hasn't been achieved because Death has not been abolished which is like totes discriminatory to elderly peeps. 

Sen raises the question of the poor but happy man. How can we say he is better off than a rich but frustrated fellow? The answer is that the former has attained his bliss point or satiation. This presents no great aporia or scandal. We would expect less economic activity from the happy chappy while the rich but unhappy fellow is likely to engage, perhaps in a frenzied manner, in transactions of various sorts. 

I suppose Sen is only recycling the old Colonialist argument that dusky folk shouldn't be happy because they don't own top hats and frock coats. We must enslave them and keep shooting them till they learn to be miserable because, even if they somehow buy a top hat and frock coat, they don't have a nice House of Parliament to prate in. 

Sen takes up this racist credo, equally attractive to Madison Avenue, to argue that wellbeing is 'an index of functionings'. You aren't really happy if you aren't doing all the expensive things advertisers want you to do.' Incidentally, you also aren't really happy unless you are valuing your happiness. And only Sen can tell you how to do evaluation coz he is real smart. The problem here is that we don't believe economists are smart. There are plenty of ratings Agencies and Auditing firms and guys with PhDs doing all sorts of 'evaluations' who are all totally useless if not mischievous. 

Sen wants to do a 'specification of functioning achievements' and an 'evaluation of functioning achievements'. The fool has spent his life as a pedagogue grading essays of a wholly worthless sort. The plain fact is nobody can specify their own possible functionings. On the other hand, an evaluation occurs whenever a functioning is implemented. There is no reason to believe some superior evaluation to that which occurs simultaneously with the action is accessible. Marketing folk and cult leaders and whackjobs of various descriptions may want everybody to perform all sorts of foolish 'functionings' and may pay for 'evaluations' to support their mischievous schemes. 

Consider a group of people with similar tastes and endowments. They trade with each other on the basis of 'value discrepancy'- you place a higher value on something I have than I do and so are willing to buy it from me- and for speculative or prudential reasons. Only if nobody regrets any transaction could we say that everybody had used the preference ordering that they themselves with hindsight would agree was optimal for themselves. But some will have been luckier or more cunning than others. There will be 'winners' and 'losers'. Nevertheless, everybody gains by having the potential to trade. Happiness may be said to arise from having this potential. Equally, it may be said to transcend it. Indeed, anything at all may be said about happiness by happy or unhappy people. Meanwhile, Bhutan, after it ethnically cleansed Nepali people, decided it was the happiest place in the world. But Disneyland made that claim first. That's a good place to leave the question of happiness- somewhere between Bhutan and Disneyland.

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