Suppose that what makes a person happy is when their fortunes exceed expectations by a discrete amount (and that falling short of expectations is what makes you unhappy.) Then simply because of convergence of expectations:
- People will have few really happy phases in their lives.
- Indeed even if you lived forever you would have only finitely many spells of happiness.
- Most of the happy moments will come when you are young.
- Happiness will be short-lived.
- The biggest cross-sectional variance in happiness will be among the young.
- When expectations adjust to the rate at which your fortunes improve, chasing further happiness requires improving your fortunes at an accelerating rate.
- If life expectancy is increasing and we simply extrapolate expectations into later stages of life we are likely to be increasingly depressed when we are old.
- There could easily be an inverse relationship between intelligence and happiness.
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November 11, 2012 at 11:05 pm
Lones Smith
I disagree. Your theory needs a surprise component, which I agree will make you happy. But that is a happiness spike. I contend that a rationally understood increment of future fortunes over past ones makes you happy. Eg. I am happy seeing my Xmas gifts under the tree, even though I rationally anticipate December 25, but would obviously be ecstatic on December 25 if one gift was especially awesome (like not a shirt, which is my norm).
In my “more Keynesian” theory of happiness, which I first thought of in grad school at Chicago but kept under wraps, 🙂 one can be happy all of one’s life. And if one wants to maintain a constant level of happiness, one’s fortunes should exponentially increase in life. Thus, one should violate the Permanent Income Hypothesis, and do what most of us do — aim for a planned increase in our opulence. .
November 11, 2012 at 11:24 pm
jeff
Dec 25 comes once a year. And the moment (you notice that) the holiday season begins has some randomness to it. On the other hand if presents were under the tree every day I think they would stop bringing happiness. So I think that the small amount of happiness that comes from Xmas is broadly consistent with the model.
(by the way Lones, you wrote “I disagree” but what you meant is that you don’t accept the premise. Not that you disagree that the conclusions follow from it. As you know one of the privileges of being a theorist is you get to write “Suppose that…” and as long as all of the conclusions follow from the premise nobody can disagree with you. )
November 11, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Lones Smith
Jeff, I agree with your disagreement with my disagreement. 🙂 We concur on the essence of correct theory.
I think that I have in mind a flow notion of happiness, and you are musing about happiness spikes. For how long does the happiness last? Once your surprise has evaporated, after 5 seconds, do you return to your glum state? It seems we need “stickiness” here — hence my Keynesian label.
November 12, 2012 at 12:31 am
Larry Blume
If you have a sufficiently rich view of life, the set of possible state distributions is too large to guarantee posterior convergence in the space of a lifetime. If I lived forever, that set would be infinite-dimensional, and since my parents did not endow me with a Dirichlet prior, no doubt I would not be in Freedman’s exceptional set. So, oh joy, happiness infinitely often.
November 12, 2012 at 6:18 am
A simple model of lifetime happiness
[…] From Jeff: […]
November 12, 2012 at 11:56 am
Ryan Smith
So….what do you mean by “happy”?
Do you mean that feeling that comes with a hit of dopamine?
Or do you mean the certainty that comes with safety and security of position in life (what some would term Contentment)?
Or is it something else?
November 12, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Jason Yip (@jchyip)
The evidence is that the oldest people are the least likely to be depressed http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/age-happiness-study/1120961.html
November 12, 2012 at 4:32 pm
jeff
Here’s a variant of the model. In this variant you cannot make yourself happy by lowering your expectations.
What makes you happy is when your expectations are revised upward and what makes you unhappy is when they are revised downward.
In this model if you try to manipulate your happiness by lowering your expectations the effect is you just make yourself immediately depressed.
November 12, 2012 at 10:50 pm
Dean
What if you just eliminated your expectations?
November 13, 2012 at 7:49 am
JW Mason
I understand why the “post-autistic economics” folks had to drop the label, but reading posts like this makes me think they were right the first time. I don’t know if you have children Jeff, but do you/would you care about them only insofar as they exceed your expectations? Speaking just for myself, my little guy is still making me pretty happy, and I’ve had him for almost a year. Shouldn’t I be getting bored by now? Am I stoopid?
Now you might be onto something if you specified that this applied only to happiness from goods and services (or from pleasure), as opposed to happiness from social relationships, from the development and exercise of one’s faculties, etc. And if you clarified that it’s only above some threshold that the expectations effect dominates. Pick up — just to pick up one of many possible examples — Primo Levi’s books about Auschitz, and I’m pretty sure you’ll find that chronic pain, overwork, malnutrition, etc. make people pretty miserable even when they have well-founded expectations that that’s what’s coming.
November 13, 2012 at 8:59 am
wellplacedadjective
and if that discrete amount is zero? or negative?
November 14, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Constance
Good grief, this is so true.
November 14, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Jerry J. Davis
I think you need to read this book: “The Science of Happiness.”
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Happiness-Brains-Happy-Happier/dp/156924328X
Happiness is a habit you need to consciously work on.
November 14, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Bryan
I’m only tempted to believe in a god when I consider that it would be difficult to design a better recipe for pain than “self aware being with aggressively finite existence.”
Happiness is indeed the obsession young people and other of small-minded narcissists.
November 14, 2012 at 10:25 pm
Wise Guy
Without having spent a great deal of time thinking about it, I would propose that happiness is inversely proportional to the probability of your expectation coming true. If you expect your Christmas gift to be the “usual” shirt then your happiness is relatively low when it is. If instead you received an unexpected (i.e. low probability) gift of an IPad then your happiness would be substantially higher. This model would fit the “spike” theory in that lower probability expectations would become fewer over a life time after you have experienced many events of expectations i.e. receiving another IPad would provide less happiness than it did the first time you got one.
November 15, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Anonymous
Hmmm, interesting perspective, but where is the analysis on meaning and how it affects happiness. Even if we don’t have spikes in happiness as you say, when we live our lives in a meaningful way – i.e. in service to others – it gives an entire new dimension to life and how we define happiness. If your entire life has been spent on the external – money, intelligence, looks, amount of friends, etc. – then yes, of course your going to be more depressed over time. If however you focus on a great connection to self, and on helping others, then there is no end to what you can experience in terms of satisfaction.
November 22, 2012 at 10:46 pm
teageegeepea
Some people just seemed to generally be happier than others, and this seems to be heritable.