Post #115: Simon Says (Happiness)

6 June 2024

“MacArthur! I can’t even get a Macdonald’s!”

—Julian Simon*

     Julian Simon was nothing if not a character. Unlike the Simon (Magus or the Sorcerer) who gave us the word simony (Acts 8:9–24), Julian the apostate economist never argued, so far as I am aware, for the sale of spiritual powers and offices, though given his contrarian streak, he might have enjoyed making the case if challenged. When he first came up, in 1966, with a proposal for airlines to solve their chronic overbooking problems by the simple expedient of paying passengers to give up their seats, it was received with all the scathing derision that a trafficker in simony might meet with. A decade later, a little after he had published his suggestion as an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (“Wherein the Author Offers a Modest Proposal”), the scheme was adopted with great success. Simon never got a cent out of it, he says.

     Things went not much better when he insisted against the tide of fashionable 1970s opinion that additional human beings were an asset for their societies, not just a drain on resources, and that more minds and hands would, before long, help with meeting any shortages making themselves felt in rising prices, the decisive measure of scarcity from a human point of view. In the 1980s he became more widely known, though at the cost of some notoriety, when he translated his convictions into a challenge to eco-catastrophists Paul Ehrlich, offering a wager about the future prices of raw materials that seemed, at the time, to give all advantages to his adversary. Ehrlich, after losing the bet resoundingly, went on to receive a MacArthur “genius” award for his great environmental awareness. Simon reports not even being able to get his hands on a Macdonald’s, but he did win the consolation prize of a senior fellowship with the Cato Foundation.**

     What may come as a surprise to those who have caricatured Simon as no more than an incorrigible optimist, unable to conceive of the bleak seriousness of our planetary condition, is that he not only struggled for over a decade with very severe depression, but that he also wrote a book on how to pull through by recalibrating one’s thinking—an early variation on the cognitive therapy theme.*** (Speaking of being early to the game, he beat Starbucks to it with a mail-order business devoted to raising the quality of coffee and tea culture in early-1960s America, and the microbrewery fad with a catalog of materials for home brewing at about the same time—the law soon shut him down on the beer.)

     The central idea in his book may have suggested itself to Simon on a rough analogy with the consumer surplus, the traditional textbook way to explain our sense of satisfaction with a purchase. The further the price at which something is available falls below the most that someone is willing to pay for it (reservation price), the greater the surplus and the satisfaction will be. A consumer good whose price exceeds the reservation price will simply not be bought, so no deficit can arise. Our mood and sense of happiness is likewise connected to how much what we have exceeds what we ask from a given situation in life, or from life in general; but to our great detriment, this not only rises into occasional surplus, giving us joy and delight, it also plunges into deficit, making us gloomy or miserable, and can deepen into depression when it persists, especially when it is accompanied by a sense of helplessness. Thus Simon (Good Mood, pp. 6, 12):

I developed an analysis of the cause of depression centering on the depressed person’s negative self-comparisons. Whenever you think of yourself in a judgmental fashion, your thoughts take the form of a comparison between the state you think you are in, and some other hypothetical “benchmark” state of affairs. This comparison between actual and hypothetical states make you feel bad if the state you think you are in is less positive than the state you compare yourself to. And the bad mood will become sad (rather than angry or determined) if you also feel helpless to improve your actual state of affairs or lower your benchmark.

     Simon expressed the relationship not as a surplus or a deficit, but as a “mood ratio” with one’s self-perception the numerator, and the benchmark state the denominator. But the idea is similar: a high (“rosy”) ratio will put you in a good mood, a low (“rotten”) ratio will put you in a bad mood, and if the latter proves impervious to improvement, whether by dint of outlook or circumstance (though the former always predominates ultimately), depression may well ensue. In order to avert the danger, then, and bolster the good mood for which the book is named, we may either aim to raise the numerator (find ways to think more favorably of ourselves and our condition) or lower the denominator (standard of comparison)—or else change the dimensions along which comparisons are made, learn not to make such comparisons anymore (if possible), or use one or two particularly central and weighty values or commitments as leverage against your tendency to engage in crushing self-dismissals (in Simon’s own case, a deeply-felt need to be a cheerful father to his children, and the enjoinder in Judaism not to waste your life in misery and make it a burden to yourself and others (Good Mood, pp. 13, 21, 255)).

     Simon offers many useful and eminently practical suggestions on how to shift the balance in a more favorable direction, but the underlying idea could also be expressed more simply in terms of expectations. Just as you will get rich, it has been said, not so much by what you earn as by what you don’t spend, so the greatest boons and blessings in life have little power to you make you happy if you keep expecting even more. Thus it is notorious among humans, alas, that the unhappiest are often not the most deprived, but those whose many blessings and gifts of fortune leave them forever believing that still more should be possible—as it often is, just not always, and not only in the desired upward direction, but downwards just as easily.

     Alongside the obvious strategy of making ourselves better off by taking forward measures, as it were, there is therefore always the more defensive strategy of lowering our expectations (much recommended by Schopenhauer, to whom I shall return anon†). While the dangers of neglecting the former (by inactivity) are surely obvious to all, those inhering in runaway expectations seem to be less widely felt. Are we not goaded on all sides, after all, to deliver ever more, without respite, for ourselves and others? How often have you been cautioned that all your ceaseless striving may be to little avail if you do not manage to keep a check on the higher standards (i.e. expectations) that normally ensue when we improve our lot in life?

     Not that there is anything novel about being told to be grateful for what you have been given: the exhortation to count your blessings, not your coin, is such a staple of sermons, secular or spiritual, that the message goes in one ear and straight out the other, nine times out of ten. That we should redirect our energies from comparing ourselves to the Joneses towards learning not to care, is equally true, and equally lost on the world. If there is one piece of hardened worldly advice that might stand some chance of being adopted occasionally, it is to look whenever you can to those worse off than you, and to surround yourself with them as much as possible, not your betters, whose company will mostly serve to make you feel insignificant and inadequate.

     If you feel the need to buy a Porsche, you may soon wish you had a Ferrari; either way you will waste a lot of time in urban traffic, assuming that you would not acquire so mighty an engine with thoughts of plowing your corn fields. If you were to do the unthinkable and get on the subway instead—or heaven forbid, rub shoulders with the great unwashed in a bus—you might not only enjoy considerable savings, but also, along with the possible element of physical discomfort, the unexpected benefit of feeling rather more wealthy than you did when you were driving your prized vehicle to lunch with your billionaire buddy (who may have flown in by helicopter, if he did not have the good sense to take a taxi). A safe dwelling in a desirable location is a great gift of fortune—but one of the lesser McMansions at Sleepy Hollows may have the unintended effect of making you feel small, not just by comparison to the outsized buildings around you, but in relation to your neighbors. (I am talking physical dimensions here, not stature by any more worthy measure.)

     I am left wondering whether all this is not stopping well-short of the real question, the big question, namely by what right we form the mother of all expectations in the first place—that we should be happy in this life. Granted, I too would rather be happy than miserable, though I am not always sure what happiness really means when looked at more closely, or that we are talking about the same thing just because our human language forces us to use the same words. (Maybe not quite the same words either: the German, for example, does not actually have a full equivalent to happiness. There is Glück, but that is simply the word for luck doing double-duty; the adjective, glücklich, comes closer (quite like the English happy, which turns out to have a similar, though less evident etymology), but cannot so easily shake its association with good fortune, which is not quite what we moderns mean, I think, when we muse about happiness. There is no difficulty, in German any more than in English, with asking how someone is doing, or whether he is presently contented or satisfied with life (though one must be prepared for some blunt answers that few English speakers would be comfortable giving). To ask whether he is glücklich, however, risks sounding either melodramatic or ironic, jesting even, except perhaps when someone is acutely in love and lucky enough for his feelings to be requited. Nietzsche, for one, was convinced that “man does not strive for happiness, only the English do” (Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, 12)—patently false, of course, if one takes him too literally. What he was thinking of was utilitarians like Bentham and Mill.)

     The shadow of Schopenhauer looms large here, particularly the devastating 46th chapter of his World as Will and Representation (a shortened translation is available from my Academia.edu page), in which he denounces the optimist’s belief in the possibility of happiness in this world as not only false, but a most pernicious and vile imposition on the credulity of mankind:

For it presents life to us as a desirable condition, with the happiness of man as its end, which naturally leads everyone to imagine that we are entitled, as a matter of justice, to happiness and pleasure. Consequently, when such blessings and bounties do not fall to our lot, as is bound to happen, we imagine that we have been wronged, or even that we have missed the very point of our existence. Meanwhile it would be far more accurate to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering—crowned by death—as the true end of our existence, because it is thus that we are led towards the salutary negation of the will to live. It is in this light that Brahmanism, Buddhism, and authentic Christianity rightly present the matter, which is why the New Testament depicts the world as a valley of tears, and life as a process of purification and refinement at best, while an instrument of torture stands as the symbol of the Christian faith.

The more uplifting and cheering aspects of the Buddhist and Christian messages—especially that loving-kindness without which even the deepest insight into the nature of things is a bird with only one wing, not a creature that can soar into the very heavens—seem not to have impressed Schopenhauer as much as they should, but he is nonetheless right that the Buddhists (and the more traditional Christians too, though I will leave them for others to reflect on) present happiness in a crucially different light from how we are accustomed to seeing it.

     As I pointed out in what I meant to be a particularly programmatic post—#10 on “The Unhappy Buddhist”—the idea that followers of the Buddha are as it were meant to be happy ex officio looks pretty misguided to me. To be sure, one would hope for joyful and not just arduous travels on the Path (Majjhima Nikaya 19.26, see also #57), but I don’t take that to be a promise at all. The gateway to serious practice is an unflinching confrontation with Dukkha, the element of suffering (or more exactly, dissatisfaction) that is inextricably woven into the very texture of life (#14, #32, #45, #63). Not that the Four Noble Truths are meant to end with the First, of course; but the happiness that is supposed to come with Dhamma practice is one of unrelenting realism in facing things as they are, not as we would like them to be (yatha-bhuta), and of cultivating profound equanimity with the springs of our discontent and with all the ways that self is inseparable from suffering. In other words, while the Buddhist faithful are meant to move towards happiness and light rather than darkness and distress in their earthly pilgrimage, they are called to do so precisely by not recoiling from the countless facets of misery in the world, but by facing them bravely and learning to smile, not out of indifference to anyone’s suffering, but from an understanding of its inevitability. If one could accept that dissatisfaction is nothing more that the existential default, then should it not, indeed, become easier to laugh and enjoy the passing show than when laying claim to happiness as one’s inalienable birthright in life?

     Nietzsche had it quite wrong: it was not the English philosophers who introduced the modern preoccupation with happiness and made it respectable in a sense in which it had not been before, but more likely Thomas Jefferson—via a process of vulgarization whereby something that was meant to safeguard only the free pursuit of the good life by customary means (that is to say, protected property, as the Lockean original of the phrase had made explicit) became over time nearly synonymous with the promise of attainment and enjoyment. After all, if you take yourself to be a citizen of God’s favorite nation on earth, a shining city on the hill, and you become disinclined to believing (as the old Christians did) that you are a fallen creature who habitually disappoints the divine hopes vested in him, then unhappiness might become not just a practical, but a theological nuisance. For why would God wish to see his favored creatures unhappy?

     It is an incontestable Old Testament theme that God may reward his chosen in the currency of trials and tribulations, not worldly blessings; but to a modern meliorist sensitivity, such a faith will appear antique and remote. Hence sympathetic visitors to the U.S. have often marveled at how open expressions of unhappiness tend to be taken there not just as a regrettable fact of life, but rather as evidence for a bad attitude, a perverse unwillingness to be happy, and therefore a violation of social niceties, nay almost a breach of the social contract. When questioned how one is doing, there can be only one acceptable answer in America—in sharp contrast to many parts of Europe where permissible responses may include unapologetic lamentations (Vienna), possibly involving references to feces (Berlin), or little more than unintelligible grunts with a lackadaisical comme-ci comme-ça about the height of jollity (Paris)—one permissible American answer, I say, with minor and largely cosmetic variations: “I’m well,” pronounced with due emphasis and enthusiasm, or else its grossly ungrammatical but regrettably idiomatic cousins, “I’m good” or “I’m great” (the first being, strictly speaking, a claim of moral virtue or human excellence quite compatible with misery in other parts of the world (though less with modesty), the second a boast of stature that would be altogether out of the question in more mannered places).

     The new science of happiness, with its cousin “positive” psychology (as if the founding fathers of psychotherapy had been champions of negativity!), seems to proceed largely by taking old wine and putting it in new bottles,†† filtering and variously sterilizing it to the latest specifications, then watering it down to current tastes and slapping on a fancy label in the style of the day. The result is a pleasant grape juice that is guaranteed not to intoxicate and that may indeed have some of the healing properties claimed for it, FDA approval pending. Alas, beside the old wisdom teachings, on the one hand, and the traditions established by the venerable soul-doctors of Vienna, on the other, it is rather thin and unsatisfying, to the palate and the soul alike. Granted, it will not go to the head, as Freud’s dazzling intellect and soaring imagination or Jung’s mystical transports do almost as a matter of course (though Adler’s sturdy and profound common sense always provided more ballast and sobriety to the founding vision of modern psychology)…

     Thus the Dionysian has been pasteurized away, as too murky and potentially germ-ridden; what remains is a shiny but shallow psychological Apollonianism for the masses, quickly and easily digested, as befits an age in a hurry. In the bright-and-breezy intellectual mood it engenders, Buddhism with its founding genius and unimaginably seasoned lineages (they do decades-long retreats, some of them!) becomes simply an “overreaction” (Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, Basic Books 2006, p. 103) that is easily corrected on the case-study model. Thus the Buddhas, the Socrates and Epictetuses, the legions of saints and sages and scholars who have so exerted themselves on our behalf, are reduced to a few expanded bullet points, highlights on a tightly organized and optimized tour of the world in seven days, to be glossed over in a few tidy chapters and toyed with for a season or two before something shinier and more novel comes along and promises still greater bang for the buck.†††

     Meditation, approached in this carefree manner, still gets some credit as a wellness exercise, but might be all-too easily found inferior to the gym or the desk—something that “does work, but only while you’re meditating” (Rolf Dobelli, The Art of the Good Life, Sceptre 2017, p. 116). Apparently professional work beats such old-fashioned disciplines quite easily, if only on account of its ability to distract (p. 117)! One is relieved to hear that “one of Europe’s finest minds,” a declared modern Stoic no less, is gracious and generous enough, despite his taste for the breezy mode, to concede that those who have devoted their lives for centuries and millennia to these inner cultivations have not wasted their time altogether, even if they must apparently remain glued to the mat in order for their efforts to retain any value. Who needs sacred books when the executive summaries put before us by our sagacious contemporaries are so much more succinct, savvy, and scientific than the originals? Who needs laborious, inefficient inner work if the optimized professional mode, billed by the hour, Swiss francs preferred, bears so much brighter fruit?

     It is not that I would slight the real good that can be done by the finely-tuned speed boats that are so niftily cruising the seven seas of human happiness these days, picking up the shipwrecked and rescuing the drowning. Let it be admitted that one does not need to dive to the bottom of the dark waters if the point is to prevent deaths at sea. To save one soul is to save the world, and the rescuers shall have their reward. Alas, when these laudable surface operations are set, as they must be by those who take their traditions more seriously, beside the efforts of our predecessors who have plunged down all the way, plumbing the existential foundations of our human condition and reporting back from the very beds of the ocean in some cases, then our new-model seafaring pales a little by comparison and looks rather paltry. Not just in heaven and on earth, but also out on the high seas, and in their depths especially, there are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

     The mysteries of our moods and their intricate relations with each other, with our circumstances, and with our thinking—in its depressed depths even more than its happy heights—strikes me as so inordinately complex (despite predictable cries of simple, simple!) and so spread out over a vast spectrum of underlying issues, from the sheer difficulties of life, via temperamental aspects, to philosophical maladies and spiritual ailment, down into the bog of despond and the fiery pit of truly debilitating disorder and disease—that I certainly cannot hope to untangle the tangle, as the Buddhists say. (My attempt at a basic descriptive scheme in #32 is just that, designed for illustration, with nothing definitive about it, least of all anything that would downplay the devastating forms that depression can take.)

     It is not just how frequently even dreaded disasters end up looking like blessings in disguise, or how seemingly obvious boons turn stale, spoiled, or against us altogether; that alone would be confusing enough. But more than that, I am increasingly inclined to doubt whether happiness is the unified phenomenon at all that we take it to be when we assume that it can be reduced to a simple matter of yes or no (“Well, are you or aren’t you?”). Absent the kind of determinate self we vainly imagine, who is happy? It is true that moments of happiness or misery will keep arising from moment to moment, and those are not to be lightly dismissed; but even then their classification depends on the assumptions we make and the evaluative schemes we apply, which not only differ wildly from person to person, but which do not look stable enough to me even within one person, from day to day, to allow for the kind of sweeping diagnoses that we want to hear when we ask our rote question. “In what sense are you happy, exactly, in relation to what, and at what precise moment?” does not have quite the same ring as a quick howdy, followed by an equally ready good-bye.

     The ease with which we commonly answer, more or less unthinkingly, what is really a highly complex, perhaps even a fraught, question says almost nothing about our actual state, and everything about the social expectations we are facing and the habits we have formed for dealing with the casual query. If it weren’t for those established conventions, and we weren’t sure what kind of answer is expected of us, we would often be at quite a loss to say just “how we are doing.” Even if we were talking about roughly the same thing when we speak of “happiness” (dubious enough), there would be so many subtle angles to what we might mean by it, all so closely interwoven with our disparate views of ourselves and the world, that I doubt the very possibility of nailing down anything, whether by time-honored procedures or ostensibly scientific means and methods.

     “Life is hard,” someone supposedly said once to Voltaire. “Compared to what?” he answered.‡ Perhaps the next time someone asks you how you are doing, or whether you are happy, you will, upon a moment’s reflection, find the same counter-question coming to mind.

*As quoted in “The Doomslayer: Meet Julian Simon” by Ed Regis, Wired 2 Jan. 1997—a sketch in vivid color of the man, his ideas, and his numerous quirks.

**This is not the place for taking up Simon’s resource argument (the interested reader will find it summarized neatly in only a few pages in the conclusion to The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton 1996), pp. 578–89). Suffice it to say that it not only looks highly convincing to me on its own terms, it also has a great deal of corroborating evidence behind it—rather than flying straight in the face of the observable facts, as do the apocalyptic prophecies of Simon’s nemesis Paul Ehrlich, for example. If Simon was a premier-league oddball, as a data geek he was a true champion, and the frustration he felt, even as a kid around the dinner table in New Jersey, when his superior data was ignored by a grandstanding father in disputes over the price of milk and the like, seems to have stayed with him for life.

     How could a presumptive prophet like Ehrlich get things so fantastically wrong (hundreds of millions doomed to death by starvation, unavoidably, in the 1970s and 80s, etc.), yet escape all negative repercussions? How could he thunder away in such draconian tones—applauding China’s ruthless one-child policies as a model for the world and condemning added human populations as “a cancerous growth” that “must be cut out” (from the original prologue to The Population Bomb and the 1978 update)—and still be celebrated, in the free world not communist China, as a shining light of humanitarian sentiment, while Simon was derided throughout as an unfeeling crank? It makes for melancholy reflections, indeed, on our human condition.

     It puts one in mind too of Adler’s dictum that being right is the most thankless and indeed dangerous thing in the world if it is not assiduously sweetened with a silver tongue and streams of honeyed words—not something that Simon was ever accused of, to my knowledge. It would be a great mistake and misconception of human nature if you expected thanks, as the young habitually do, for being more right than others; ask instead to be forgiven, and ask very nicely. Remember that to be liked in the world, there is only one reliable way: you must be careful to make others feel important, above all else (#63). It can be done without sinking into abject flattery and servility, but only with much effort and grace. To call out your contemporaries on their rampant follies instead won’t do the trick, and be their faults ever so glaring and pernicious.

***The book in question, Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression, was first published in 1993, but Simon’s approach goes back to his experience, in early 1975, of “banishing within two miraculous weeks” a depression that had tormented him for the previous thirteen years with intolerable thoughts of worthlessness and terrible longings for death (pp. 5-6, Epilogue).

†It is deliciously ironic how Schopenhauer, whom no one could, with a straight face, call a “positive” psychologist, nonetheless anticipated, more than 150 years ago, some of the central ideas that are now presented to us as if they were spectacular new discoveries—such as the importance of limiting our expectations to enhance our prospects of whatever happiness life may permit (not much, according to Schopenhauer). At the outset of chapter 3 of his Aphorismen (Kröner 2007, p. 56), Schopenhauer proposes his own version of the happiness ratio, with one’s holdings in the numerator, and one’s demands of life in the denominator, complete with a discussion of how shifts in the balance affect us (pp. 56–57). The wider question of our claims to happiness in life is discussed (and largely dismissed) at more length in chapter 5 (sections A1-3, pp. 150–63) and centers on the most urgent advice to bring down our expectations to a “very moderate” level (p. 156). The attempt to establish one’s happiness in life upon a broader base (a more demanding denominator, as it were, whatever one’s specific expectations may be) is denounced as “the greatest and most common folly” of mankind (p. 160). In section 6, pp. 168–69, he proclaims and twice reaffirms that “all limitations are conducive to happiness.”

††A truly astounding development, after so much bellyaching about the role of genes in our lives these past fifty years, is the more recent turn (quite explicit in Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman, and not only there) towards assigning a preponderant part to heredity when it comes to our prospects for happiness in life (not strict determination, granted, but strong predisposition). I have no doubt that genes really do shape our lives in all kinds of ways, crude and subtle, and I see no reason to wish it away just because it sets unwelcome limits to the unbounded ambitions of our social engineers. Nonetheless it sounds rather odd to me that our happiness, of all things, should be said to turn on genetics. One might as well say next that enlightenment does, or that karma is in our genes, which would make nonsense of the very concept.

†††I do not mean to suggest that these books are not good in their way, or that the authors are not competent and accomplished individuals. Nor do I wish to say that my discomforts apply equally to both books, or equally to all their respective aspects and parts. In each of them there is much that I agree with; what bothers me is a certain breeziness, discernible in both to varying degrees, in relating to profound thinkers and traditions that are, to me, vital structures connected to integral ways of life, with deep roots and branches that reach far into the sky, not convenient storehouses from which to supply ourselves casually as the need arises. Epictetus was a sage not a performance optimizer, the Buddha not a wellness consultant or a happiness coach, but an awakened being who identified suffering as the defining problem of sentient existence, and who taught a Path that is meant to encompass the whole of one’s life, though any item is open to negotiation by the guidance personal experience (as per the Kalama Sutta, most notably). The authors in question start from somewhat different suppositions; they nevertheless arrive, by others paths than mine, at conclusions with which I often agree, or at least only partially disagree. Yet, to me, the course taken through such profound materials matters as much as the destination, and at that level I have my reservations.

‡Simon uses the anecdote as the epigraph of his book, and repeats it twice more (pp. 14, 149) but he does not say where he got it. Bjørn Lomborg also mentions it in The Sceptical Environmentalist (Cambridge 2001) but refers back to Simon. There are texts quoting the lines in French online, but likewise without tracing it properly to Voltaire’s oeuvre. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.