Matthew Henty

I was at the RSA this evening for and event (#rsasmile on twitter) with Barbara Ehrenreich talking about her book “Smile or Die – How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World” (Amazon link). Guardian review (because I am that type of guy…) here and an extract here.

Her thesis is pretty much what you would imagine from the title of the book, that overly positive thinking does nothing but distract and fool you – be a realist instead. See your real situation. Sounds a bit like rationality to me, as preached by all those over at Less Wrong. So I am all for it – I don’t think that George W. Bush or Sarah Palin can really be doing any good with a completely blinkered approach to life. Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true. And just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was for the best, or meant to be. Nonsense and piffle.

The point from the audience that struck me was a comment from someone who heads up the UK office of a US organisation. She said that the only reason that she can get away with her approach to work is because of the three-thousand miles of ocean between here and there. She claimed that she would not be employable at the US head office, would be seen as, “not a team player”, and believed that this had major implications for US / UK relations. And for the rest of the world.

I hope she is wrong, but those statements really struck a chord. And this is where it really starts to matter, and where we see leaders appealing to personal conviction to justify actions that have real world impacts. Conviction means almost nothing in the end – not when it runs straight into reality and causes death and destruction. But personal conviction seems to feature more and more in our political discourse, our international relations. That is scary.

As an aside, one thing that confused me is what the definition of positive psychology is. The wikipedia article looks a bit wishy washy from the first sentence, but I interpreted a lecture from Sonja Lyubomirsky I saw online (and posted about here) differently. I thought they were documenting correlations between behaviours and self-reported happiness, which is interesting and harmless, and can help think about what contentment, or happiness is. There must be something else built on top of this to attract the hostility I think Barbara Ehrenreich has for the field. More research needed… perhaps tomorrow.

Authors@Google: Sonja Lyubomirsky

Research shows that happy people:

• Nurture and enjoy their social relationships
• Are comfortable expressing gratitude
• Are often the first to help others
• Practice optimism about the future
• Savor pleasures and live in the present moment
• Make physical activity a habit
• Are often spiritual or religious
• Are deeply committed to lifelong goals

Kind of obvious – “hokey” even – but supposedly backed up by experimental research.

Happiness takes work.

Measuring happiness, subjective, ask questions:
- Are you a happy person?
- Life satisfaction – how do you feel about your life right now (terrible to delighted)

Experiments:

Counting one’s blessings
- A gratitude journal, weekly vs  three times a week vs control
- Increase in self-reported gratitude, but only in the once a week group.
- Increase in reported happiness – only in the once a week group.
(Why? – three times a week is too often, not fresh, a chore. Effort, hard to do every few days so makes you feel worse. Too hard to think of.)
- Works on average, but not for everyone. Diagnostic tool in book to help identify what is likely to work for you.

Committing acts of kindness
- Chinese proverb – if you want happiness for an hour, take a nap; for a day, go fishing; for a month, get married; for a year, inherit a fortune; for a lifetime, help somebody else.
- three or nine acts of kindness a week. High variety, low variety and control.
- Only high variety worked, otherwise boring?

Effort is important.

8th February 2008.

14:41 – Decided to keep a time log, after spending the preceding hour dossing on the internet.

14:43 – Gave up on the idea. Made me feel really tired.

There are many reasons that we need and have taxation and government.

The most obvious and necessary reason for taxation is the need to reduce the production and consumption of goods that have negative external effects. The most obvious and necessary reason for government expenditure is to provide the necessary underpinnings of the market – rule of law, property rights and so on – and to ensure the provision of necessary public goods.

Then there is taxation to enable the appropriation of national resources by corrupt rulers. And of course the taxation and government spending required to enable the redistribution of resources from the rich to the poor, which rather than being an economic necessity is a social or moral or ethical choice.

But what if you replace the words, “rich and poor” with the words, “lucky and unlucky”? Is that still a social or moral or ethical choice, or is it an economically efficient public provision of insurance for a risk averse population?