Wednesday, June 09, 2004

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. Nice summary of an interesting NY Times article a while back, which I meant to blog but didn't. Paul Kelly says it as well or better than I could, so here's his intro paragraph. The rest is highly worth reading. I'll see if I can get a link to the full NY Times article instead of the link to the pay-per-view archive. This might also be entitled "the endless pursuit of happiness." NYT Mag story by Jon Gertner about the work on "affective forecasting" by the psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson and the economists George Lowenstein and Daniel Kahneman. Can people accurately predict the outcomes of decisions which are supposed to make them happier? It turns out not. Things that are supposed to make us happy--dream job, dream house, dream car--don't as much as we hoped. Conversely, things we think of as disasters--death of a loved one, a disability--don't turn out to be as bad as we imagine. The implications for economics are obvious: how much does economic behaviour depend on this psychic "defect"? A lot, it turns out, and this has been known since the time of Adam Smith. Simply put, if you are comfortably off, the effort you expend trying to improve your situation is based on a delusion. It requires too much effort for too little payback. You are better off just as you are. 9:46:06 AM    comment []  trackback []