New Economist

Forbes on happiness research

Forbes magazine has just published several short pieces on happiness research. Nothing especially rigorous, but a pleasant enough read:

* Money Doesn't Make People Happy by Tim Harford
But marriage, sex, socializing and even middle age do.

* Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Sausage? by Daniel Gilbert
Money can't make you happy, but making the right comparisons can.

* Money, Happiness and the Pursuit of Both, by Elizabeth MacDonald.
When it comes money and happiness, economists and psychologists have got it all wrong.

* The Happiness Business by Paul Maidment.
There is more academic research than you can shake a Havana cigar at saying there is no correlation between wealth and happiness.

* There are also two pop-up slide shows you can access here.

Maidment notes happiness surveys which show...

that the British are moderately happy, though less so than most of their former colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Ireland and the U.S. Sore losers, we suspect.

But I particularly liked Tim Harford's concluding advice:

Some results are predictable enough: Work is miserable, and commuting is worse. Others are not so obvious. For instance, praying is fun, but looking after the kids is not. Spending time with your friends is one of the most enjoyable things you can do, but spending time with your spouse is merely OK. In fact, parents or other relatives turn out to make more enjoyable company than the supposed love of your life.

What is perfectly clear, though, is that socializing with anyone except your boss makes you feel good. Sex is best of all. This is handy advice at last. But what if you are having sex with your boss? Whereof economists cannot speak, we must remain silent.

Hat tips: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, and Will Wilkinson at Happiness and Public Policy Blog.

UPDATE: If you read Tim Harford's piece then you also ought to have a look at Arnold Kling's post - he finds the Forbes pieces "repetitive, pompous, and boring". But read also the comments under this post, and the debate over happiness research in subsequent posts on the EconLog blog.

New book: Better Humans?

From smart pills to designer babies and extended life spans... A public debate is needed now about the potential for new technologies to make us ‘better than human’ according to a report published today by UK think tank Demos and the Wellcome Trust. Better Humans? The politics of human enhancement and life extension (0.6Mb PDF) is a new collection of essays by leading scientists and commentators, edited by Paul Miller and James Wilsdon:

We all share a desire for self-improvement.Whether through education, work, parenthood or adhering to religious or ethical codes, each of us seeks to become a ‘better human’ in a variety of ways. And for some people, more consumerist pursuits hold the key to self-improvement: working out in the gym, wearing makeup, buying new clothes, or indulging in a spot of cosmetic surgery.

But now a new set of possibilities is opening up. Advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, computing and nanotechnology mean that we are in the early stages of a period of huge technological potential. Within the next 30 years, it may become commonplace to alter the genetic make-up of our children, to insert artificial implants into our bodies, or to radically extend life expectancy.

This collection of essays explores the implications of human enhancement technologies and asks how citizens and policy-makers should respond.

You can also download individual essays:

Chapter 1 Stronger, leaner, faster - Paul Miller and James Wilsdon
Chapter 2 Is it wrong to try to improve human nature? - Arthur Caplan
Chapter 3 Welcome to a world of exponential change - Nick Bostrom
Chapter 4 The mand who wants to live forever - Paul Miller and James Wilsdon
Chapter 5 The transhumanists as tribe - Greg Klerkx
Chapter 6 Brain gain - Steven Rose
Chapter 7 The cognition-enhanced classroom - Danielle Turner and Barbara Sahakian
Chapter 8 Better by design - Sarah Franklin
Chapter 9 More life - Jon Turney
Chapter 10 Nip/Tuck nation - Decca Aitkenhead
Chapter 11 The perfect crime - Rachel Hurst
Chapter 12 The unenhanced underclass - Gregor Wolbring
Chapter 13 Does smarter mean happier? - Raj Persaud

These issues will also be debated at Forum 2006, a major international conference on human enhancement taking place at Oxford University from 14-17 March 2006. Organised by the James Martin Institute, the conference will bring together scientists, ethicists and policymakers to explore the implications of these developments.

UPDATE: Josie Appleton discusses the book on Sp!ked Online: Can technology make us more or less human? For Appleton, its not about the technology:

In all these questions, it's human values that are the key - not the particular technology being used, or even the provenance of the body part. It is possible to make a foreign organ into part of yourself - as seen in organ transplants, prosthetic limbs, or the recent face transplant of a French woman. Equally, it is possible to feel that your own body parts don't really belong to you - as seen in cases of sex-change operations, or voluntary amputation. The question hangs on whether we are self-possessed or alienated from ourselves.

It's because this area is really a debate about values that it is interesting. Do we want to live longer - if not, why not? How do we use technologies to extend ourselves rather than avoid ourselves? It is also why it should be a matter for public discussion, rather than just the concern of scientists and futurists.

Holiday in Cambodia? Why not

Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia? asks Matt Gross in Sunday's New York Times. Well, as one of the  690,987 people who visited Angkor Wat last year, the temples around Siem Reap are one very good reason. The other, as Matt notes, is that "Cambodians are, for the most part, some of the sweetest people you'll ever meet." The children have a great spirit, and most are eager to test out their English with you...

But new hotels are springing up everywhere, the package tour brigade are coming en masse, and soon I fear vandalism and sheer weight of traffic will result in large parts of Angkor Wat being fenced off to protect this World Heritage site. See it before that happens. If you visit the temple before dawn you can clamber around virtually alone, while the other tourists linger outside waiting for the requisite sunrise photo opp. 

The NYT article has some great panoramic photographs of the Bayon and Ta Prohm, as well as a pop-up slide show and voice over.

Is intelligence useful to politicians?

Stumbling and Mumbling thinks "it’s a positive handicap", and gives five reasons why. I particularly liked his third point:

3. Intelligent people don’t have the self-discipline to read through the tons of mind-numbing detail that crams ministers’ red boxes and distracts them from their proper job, of setting policy. This is one reason why lawyers – and second-rate ones at that - so often succeed in politics. Only they have the dull patience to slog through such minutiae.

Spot on. I have known many second-rate lawyer politicians. (Though quite a few teachers, social workers and local council hacks seem to get into politics too). But I cannot accept this claim:

Ruth Kelly is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.

Not on the recent evidence, Chris. It is not intelligent to instruct all Ministers to offer "no comment" to the press when a crisis like this hits the fan. It is not intelligent to try and hide which Minister it was that made the error. It is not intelligent to take several days before announcing a review - and then not make it an independent one. And so on... This government has some very able Secretaries of State, but I fear that Ms Kelly simply confirms that the Peter Principle is not dead.

Should we cure ageing?

João Pedro de Magalhães, a molecular biologist and geneticist at Harvard University, asks Should We Cure Aging? in a recent issue of Ego magazine. Economists will be particularly interested in Myth #6, over the fold: Economic disaster would result with the collapse of healthcare. (Hat tip: 3 Quarks Daily).

Myth #1: Aging is natural and so we shouldn't fight it

First of all, aging is not universal. A number of complex species such as lobsters, rockfishes, some tortoises, etc. do not appear to age. Therefore, aging is not a prerequisite to life. Aging is neither inevitable nor universal.

Secondly, humankind is, in a sense, a struggle against nature. We have antibiotics and vaccines because we don't want to be sick, which would be the natural outcome for many of us. If we were to follow Nature's will, many of us wouldn't be here and wouldn't be reading these lines, on a monitor, over the Internet.

Myth #2: What's the point of extending life if we are old

This is a common misconception about research on the biology of aging. The ultimate goal of my work and that of many biogerontologists is to preserve health and life. Yet we aim not just to make elderly people live longer but to diminish, not extend, age-related debilitation (also see de Grey et al., 2002). What we want is to find ways to extend healthy life span by postponing disease and eventually eradicate all forms of age-related involution. In other words, to find a cure for aging, an intervention that permits us to avoid aging and all pathologies associated with it. Instead of improving the quality of life of the elderly, I want to avoid having elderly patients in the first place. People would still die from accidents, infectious diseases, etc. After all, children and teenagers die too even though they are not yet aged.

My calculations for a cure for aging yield an average longevity of 1,200 years. This is assuming one would be forever young in body and mind.

More over the fold:

Happy new year

Almost ten months ago, when I started this weblog, I was unsure if it was a worthy venture or mere 'vanity publishing'. The growing readership and positive comments since then suggest I've managed to carve out a small but useful niche in the burgeoning blogosphere.

Thanks to all my readers and fellow bloggers for their encouragement and support. Special thanks to Mark Thoma and Edward Hugh for their guest blogging in autumn.

Though developments in the blogosphere have been positive, there are two things I'd like to see more of in 2006. One is more women econobloggers. Sure, Jane Galt and Virginia Postrel were blogging pioneers. But where are the rest?

The other main shortcoming is that we largely remain individual 'pamphleteers' . More dialogues and debates between econobloggers, and greater interconnections and aggregation, would help build a better sense of community. I will soon be posting suggestions on how we might do this.

The main thing I'd like to see less of in 2006 - and I concede it is not such a problem amongst econobloggers - is less vitriol, venom and venting. I realise that this reflects the fact that most bloggers (and readers) are Americans, where politics is very ideologically polarised. But surely most intelligent US readers don't really want 'talk radio' style rants that merely shore up their prejudices?

I look forward to more posts, more comments, and some constructive debates in the coming year.

Best wishes to all for a healthy, productive and happy 2006.

Markets and personal finance in Jane Austen's time

The bumber holiday edition of The Economist asks: What did early 19th-century literary characters live on? The piece, Percents and sensibility, reports that 

At the turn of the 19th century, wealth merited much discussion. Landed wealth, which dominated the 18th century, was being supplanted by monied wealth, which came to dominate the 19th. Between 1796, when Miss Austen began “Pride and Prejudice”, and 1817, when she died while writing “Sanditon”, land and money (or “funds” as Miss Austen's peers called their investments) stood in rough and uncomfortable equality. In this shifting balance lay the foundations both of the Anglo-Saxon world's commercial prosperity and much of the drama and humour of Miss Austen's books.

A fascinating piece, which is really about the emergence of robust financial markets in England dressed up as something more whimsical.

For those who want more on this era, I would heartily recommend What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England, by Daniel Pool, Touchstone Books, 1994.

A Chinese homecoming

I will be posting the occasional piece of light holiday reading over the next two weeks, starting with this piece. Robert Skidelsky comes from a Jewish-Russian family, and writes in the January 2006 issue of Prospect magazine about his Chinese homecoming.

A railway contract brought my Russian family to Manchuria 110 years ago. Now that China's European past is unfreezing, I am welcomed back like a long-lost son to my birthplace, Harbin. I had been plotting my return to China for about a year, and now an invitation from Lanxin Xiang, author of a book on the Boxer rebellion, to lecture in Shanghai in September 2005 made it possible.

I say "return," because the last time I had been on the mainland was in 1948, when I was nine years old. I was born in Harbin in Manchuria in 1939, came to England when I was three, and then went back to China with my parents in 1947, living for a little over a year in Tientsin (now Tianjin). We escaped to Hong Kong just before the communists took the city...

Milton at 93

Milton Friedman may have been excluded from the recent poll on the world's leading public intellectuals, but at 93 he is still going strong. A week ago he wrote about The Promise of Vouchers for the Wall Street Journal.

Nathan Gardels at New Perspectives Quarterly has an interview with him on Europe and the euro, China, inflation and the end of history (hat tip: Political theory daily review). Here's an excerpt on the Scandinavian/Nordic model; Friedman, like me, thinks that size and homogeneity matter:

Gardels: Perhaps the Scandinavian countries are a model to look at. They are high-tax but also high-employment societies. And they have freed up their labor markets much more than in Italy, France or Germany.

Friedman: Though it is not as true now as it used to be with the influx of immigration, the Scandinavian countries have a very small, homogeneous population. That enables them to get away with a good deal they couldn’t otherwise get away with.

What works for Sweden wouldn’t work for France of Germany or Italy. In a small state, you can reach outside for many of your activities. In a homogeneous culture, they are willing to pay higher taxes in order to achieve commonly held goals. But “common goals” are much harder to come by in larger, more heterogeneous populations.

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences.

The English: Mutually assured ditherers?

James Westcott, an Englishman in New York, prefers their bluntness to his polite and deferential countrymen. Prompted by Lynne Truss's new book Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, he writes Against Politeness in the latest Village Voice:

The English can't ask clearly and directly for what they want, and this is precisely a function of our obsession with Truss-style politeness, which does a lot more than keep people safely at arm's length. It makes us terrified of strangers and ashamed of our desires. Petulance, passive aggression, and a fear of strangers result. Give me the smoothness of New York interactions - especially with their bravado or bluntness - over the mutually assured dithering in English corner shops any day.

I can see both sides. I prefer directness, and at times English circumlocutions and lack of assertiveness do drive me crazy. But then, so does the arrogance and parochialism of New Yorkers. (No, your city is not the greatest place in the world - get over it).

I guess what really won me over to the English ways was how calm, polite, patient and good humoured people were on July 7 after the bombings; behaviour I cannot imagine Americans ever being able to muster. (Hat tip: Political Theory Daily Review)