Are you happy yet?
March 9, 2006
Articles about the pursuit of happiness keep popping up to confuse and amuse. I guess everyone wants to be happy (whatever that means), and all that is missing is the key to how to make it happen. There was an interesting sidebar in the March 13 issue of National Review (In Pursuit by Kevin A. Hassett, p. 6.) It begins:
Everyone wants to live a happy life, but nobody, it seems, knows quite how to do it. John Stuart Mill captured the elusiveness of happiness when he argued against its direct pursuit. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” he wrote, “and you cease to be so.”
Hassett displays a chart by a Dutch sociologist that purports to show the relationship between the “Life satisfaction rating” of nations and their GDP per capita in 2000. It’s a scatter plot with each datum point representing a country. A trend line through the data shows that happiness increases with national wealth. The U.S. is one happy country. There’s a slight problem, though. Five countries with very low GDP per capita are “happier” than the U.S. with its high GDP. They are Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and Mexico, all predominantly Catholic.
The author concludes,
The data suggest that religion helps individuals divorce their happiness from their worldly affairs. Money buys happiness, but you can get it for free if you shop wisely.
I think that John Stuart Mill has the right of it.
Dave, still shopping.
Sadie Hawkins Day
March 8, 2006
The English can have their Kissing Friday. We have Sadie Hawkins Day, as I was reminded by commenter Oblivious. Here is what Mr. Google has to say about the event:
Sadie Hawkins Day, an American folk event, made its debut in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip November 15, 1937. . . . When Al Capp created the event, it was not his intention to have the event occur annually on a specific date because it inhibited his freewheeling plotting. However, due to its enormous popularity and the numerous fan letters Capp received, the event became an annual event in the strip during the month of November, lasting four decades.
Dave, ready to be caught but never chased.
Kissing Friday
March 8, 2006
The Friday following Shrove Tuesday is kissing Friday. English schoolboys were once entitled to kiss any girls in their class without fear of punishment or rejection, and the custom lasted well into the 1940s. It was especially popular among English schoolboys, if not among English schoolgirls. This may have come from a common gesture mothers make to reduce their children’s discomfort, “Let me kiss it and make it well,” which may or may not have come from the primitive cure by sucking out evil. Or maybe not.
Where do I get these wierd ideas? Why, from my Forgotten English calendar, of course!
Dave, a little wierd hisself.
Measuring skill
March 7, 2006
Is education the measure of skill level? I’m not so sure that many take such a simplistic view of things. It seems sort of obvious to me that one can sell his time for more money if he has a needed skill to peddle. Higher skill equals more money, as a general rule. Education comes into it big time with some kinds of skills, but Bryan Caplan’s knee-jerk reaction may not be as universal as he implies in his article. His example of a $10,000 a year Ph.D. could well have more to do with supply and demand than with skill level.
EconLog, Measuring Skill, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty
How can you tell whether a worker is “low-skilled” or “high-skilled”? Most economists’ knee-jerk reaction is to see how many years of education the worker has. But a far better measure is simply labor income. If you’ve got a Ph.D. but you earn $10,000/year, you’re probably a low-skilled worker, whatever your diploma says. And if you’ve got an 8th-grade education but you pull in 500k/year, you’re probably a high-skilled worker, even if you don’t know how to diagram sentences.
It’s an interesting article, nevertheless, and drawing conclusions from statistical information has always been as much art as science. The same set of facts often provides the basis for differing conclusions and emphases.
Dave, never quite sure where his skills lie.
How long should a preacher preach?
March 6, 2006
This short article posted on reformation21 blog talks about 20, 30, and 45 minute preachers. I had never thought of classifying preachers by how long they could preach without kicking over the milk bucket.
Reformation 21 ยป The Lengths to Which a Preacher Should Go
I think that most preachers start to run out of gas after 15-20 minutes. On the other hand, the past week or so I have been listening to recordings by Joel Beeke, an Orthodox Presbyterian preacher from Springfield, Illinois. He talks for 40 minutes to an hour, and I find that I love listening to him. He is a truly gifted expositor and speaker.
Another of the rare ones is R.C. Sproul, founder of Ligonier Ministries in Florida. For me, anyway, he often starts out as dull as drying paint, but after about 15 minutes he develops a head of steam and I hang on every word as he puffs to a finish in 30-40 minutes.
I should add that there are outstanding preachers and there are outstanding pastors, and I’ll take a good pastor who is only an average preacher every time.
Dave, pondering on the preacher/pastors he has known over the years and thanking God for each one.
Ephesians 2:4-10
March 5, 2006
2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, 2:5 even though we were dead in transgressions, made us alive together with Christ–by grace you are saved!– 2:6 and he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 2:7 to demonstrate in the coming ages the surpassing wealth of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 2:8 For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 2:9 it is not of works, so that no one can boast. 2:10 For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand so we may do them.
Paul continues on about the new life in Christ. This new life is a gift from God, and God neither accepts our efforts to earn it nor tells us why he gives it to us. That makes it a hard reality to get used to, because our natural instincts tell us that the good life must be earned. There is enough meat in this short passage to keep us chewing for a long, long time. -sdg-
The Power is Yours
March 3, 2006
I’ve added Gruntled Center to my blogroll. Here we have a sociologist and Presbyterian elder who sees himself as a centrist in the church, whatever that is. His daughter wrote a series of articles on meliorism (I learned a new word today) that seems to reveal the man-centered religion that is so pervasive in the church today. To read all three of her well-written articles, go to the blogroll link for Gruntled Center, and scroll down.
Gruntled Center: The Power is Yours (1 of 3)
Meliorism rejects the idea that the world is either inevitably slipping down the drain or on a perpetual upswing. Instead, it offers up the idea that, through our action, we can make the world a better place. It is time for us to embrace a melioristic outlook on the world.
Quiz time: Does historic Christianity embrace meliorism? If not, what does it offer in its place?
Dave, Calvinist to the core.
Hedonic adaption
March 2, 2006
Everyone seems to have opinions about happiness research. Apparently a branch of such research goes under the hapless name of “hedonic adaption.”
EconLog, Happiness Research: Get Used to It, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty
I’m not so sure I want to get used to it, except perhaps for its entertainment value. In my not so humble opinion, any analysis of human happiness that ignores God’s dealing with his creatures is suspect, if for no other reason that God has so much to say about happiness.
One interesting thought in hedonic adaption is the tendency we have to blame others when we deem ourselves to be unhappy.
If and who you blame for bad events matters too. In one study, “[V]ictims of severe accidents who blamed themselves for the accident were coping more successfully eight to twelve months afterward than those who did not, and… victims who blamed other people (as opposed to some nonspecific external cause) displayed especially low coping scores.” This rings so true to me that my head is still spinning. Have I ever felt unhappy for long about something without blaming another person? I’m drawing a blank.
The bottom line is that I’m glad that smart, careful scholars like F&L are hard at work on this topic because I want the answers. Happiness is much too important to be left to the mush-heads in the New Age/Self-Help section.
If you get the answers you are looking for from happiness research, Bryan, what will you do with them? Is this just an intellectual exercise, or do you hope to find a magic pill for unhappiness for yourself or for others? (But I agree wholeheartedly with your last assertion!)
Dave, who is not sure whether it is very important for him to be happy.
