[Paleopsych] Technology Review: Technology and Happiness
Premise Checker
checker at panix.com
Wed Feb 2 22:15:32 UTC 2005
Technology and Happiness
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/surowiecki0105.asp?p=0
By James Surowiecki January 2005
In the 20th century, Americans, Europeans, and
East Asians enjoyed material and technological advances that were
unimaginable in previous eras. In the United States, for instance,
gross domestic product per capita tripled from 1950 to 2000. Life
expectancy soared. The benefits of capitalism spread more widely among
the population. The boom in productivity after World War II made goods
better and cheaper at the same time. Things that were once luxuries,
such as jet travel and long-distance phone calls, became necessities.
And even though Americans seemed to work extraordinarily hard (at
least compared to Europeans), their avid pursuit of entertainment
turned media and leisure into multibillion-dollar industries.
By most standards, then, youd have to say that Americans are better
off now than they were in the middle of the last century. Oddly,
though, if you ask Americans how happy they are, you find that theyre
no happier than they were in 1946 (which is when formal surveys of
happiness started). In fact, the percentage of people who say theyre
very happy has fallen slightly since the early 1970seven though the
income of people born in 1940 has increased, on average, 116 percent
over the course of their working lives. Nor is this a uniquely
American phenomenon: you can find similar data for most developed
countries. Perhaps the most striking example of progress having little
impact on what economists call peoples sense of subjective well-being
is Japan. Between 1960 and the late 1980s, Japans economy was utterly
transformed, as the nation went from a low-cost supplier of cheap
manufactured goods to what is perhaps the worlds most technologically
sophisticated society. Over that stretch, the countrys GDP quintupled.
And yet by the late 1980s, the Japanese said they were no happier than
they had been in 1960.
Even more strikingly, life seems worse for a significant minority of
citizens in the rich world. Since the 1950s, reports of major
depression have increased tenfold, and while much of that increase
undoubtedly represents a new willingness to diagnose mental illness,
theres a general consensus among mental-health experts that it also
reflects a real development. People are more anxious, trust government
and business less, and get divorced more often. In the 1960s Tom Wolfe
confounded those who fretted about the gloominess of American life by
insisting that Americans were in the midst of a happiness explosion.
Forty years later, plenty of people would disagree.
There is, though, one group of Americans that is imperturbably sunny:
the Amish. Their depression rates are negligibly low relative to the
rest of societys. Their happiness levels are consistently high. The
Pennsylvania Amish, when asked how much they agree with the statement
You are satisfied with your life (using a scale of 1 to 10), turn out
to be as happy as the members of the Forbes 400. The Amish, though, do
without most of what we think of as modern technology. They dont rely
on the automobile, dont need the Internet, and seem to prefer
stability and permanence to the heady growth that propels innovation
and the U.S. economy. The comparison is a little facile (the Amish
have a lot of other characteristics that make people cheerful,
including strong community ties, stable families, and religious
faith). But it suggests an interesting question: is it possible that
technology, instead of liberating us, is holding us back? Is
technological progress merely a treadmill, and if so, would we be
happier if we stepped off of it?
Can we trust people to know what makes them happy?
The relationship between happiness and technology has been a perennial
subject for social critics and philosophers since the advent of the
Industrial [surowiecki20105.jpg] Revolution. But its been left largely
unexamined by economists and social scientists. The attention that
they have paid to the subject of happiness has involved the more
capacious relationship between broad material prosperity and
well-being. Gregg Easterbrooks book The Progress Paradox grappled with
this question directly. The economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer
published an academic survey of the subject in Happiness and Economics
in 2001. But the truly groundbreaking work on the relationship between
prosperity and well-being was done by the economist Richard Easterlin,
who in 1974 wrote a famous paper entitled Does Economic Growth Improve
the Human Lot? Easterlin showed that when it came to developed
countries, there was no real correlation between a nations income
level and its citizens happiness. Money, Easterlin argued, could not
buy happinessat least not after a certain point. Easterlin showed that
though poverty was strongly correlated with misery, once a country was
solidly middle-class, getting wealthier didnt seem to make its
citizens any happier.
Easterlins work did not get much attention when it was first
published, but its implications were profound. By suggesting that
there was no direct link between wealth and well-being, Easterlin was
challenging some basic assumptions of mainstream economics. Most
economists begin with the idea that people act in their own
self-interest most of the time, and that they usually understand that
self-interest pretty well. The choices people make, therefore, must be
better than the alternatives (or else people would make other
choices). By this argument, wealth is a good thing because it
increases peoples options and gives them more freedom to pursue
whatever it is they want to pursue. For classical economists, it was
almost tautological to say that the wealthier people are, the happier
they are, too.
Easterlins relatively simple study suggested that if what people said
about themselves was to be believed, you could give people more
choices and more wealth and not have much of an impact on their sense
of well-being. Well-being is actually the central idea of economics,
says Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University. But weve
never really tried to measure it. Weve used proxies, and weve said, If
were richer, and we have more options, we must be better off. But we
havent tried to find out if thats really true.
One response to this, of course, is to say that you cant really trust
what people say about themselves in surveys, no matter how well
executed. Pay attention to what people do, and youll get a real sense
of what they want. On this view, worrying about whether people say
they are happy with the choices they make is nonsense. Of course they
are. If people spend a lot of money and time buying and using personal
computers and wireless phones and personal digital assistants, then
these gadgets must make them happy.
There is an inherent logic to this argument, and it has the great
virtue of not asking economists to decipher peoples motives. But in
the last decade or more, deciphering peoples motives (or at least
their behavior) is something more economists have become interested in
doing, and to great effect. Behavioral economists have moved away from
assumptions about individuals perfect rationality in order to develop
what they think of as a more realistic model of economic behavior.
Theyve explored the idea, hardly radical outside economics but pretty
radical inside it, that people might sometimes make mistakes, and that
their decisions (whether individual or collective) could actually make
them unhappy. For instance, behavioral economists have shown that
peoples preferences are what is sometimes called time-inconsistent. We
would like to save in the long term, but in the short term wed rather
spend. Just as strikingly, behavioral economists have shown that human
beings arent very good at anticipating their own desires. Daniel
Kahneman of Princeton University, who won the Nobel Prize in economics
in 2002, demonstrated that students, when asked to eat a bowl of their
favorite ice cream eight days in a row, had a poor sense of whether
they would or would not enjoy the experience.
Considering how many decisions about new technologies are based on
little or no concrete evidence and involve guessing about the future,
it seems plausible that people can get stuck with technologies that
dont make them happy but that are hard to get rid of. Plausible, but
not certain: as well see, when it comes to the vexed relationship
between technology and happiness, certainty is not an easy thing to
come by.
The question of technology: net loss or net gain?
In trying to decipher how technology affects well-being, then, its
worth paying attention to a few things. First, there have been few
rigorous studies of the specific relationship between technological
change and how people feel about their own lives. So the question Does
more (or better) technology make people happy? is irreducibly
speculative. Second, there is something inherently unstable about
peoples accounts of their own states of mind. Forget peoples
uncertainty about what will make them happy in the future; can we even
trust that people know what makes them happy now?
Most seriously, thinking about technology is hard because people adapt
so quickly to the technologies that are available to them. If you had
asked someone in 1870 whether she would be happier if she had a
personal vehicle that would give her the freedom to travel hundreds of
miles a day, in whatever direction she chose, at relatively little
cost; the opportunity to fly across the ocean in a few hours; and the
ability to speak to people who were thousands of miles away in real
time for a few cents a minute, chances are very good that she would
have said, yes, it would make her a lot happier. But today, its the
rare person who gets excited about cars, planes, and telephones. We
recognize their utility, but theyre also sources of frustration and
stress. On balance, most people would say theyd rather have cars and
telephones than not, butand this is what makes thinking about
happiness so hardits not clear they really make us happier.
This seems to be close to a universal phenomenon. In fact, one of
happiness scholars most important insights is that people adapt very
quickly to good news. Take lottery winners. One famous study showed
that although winners were very, very happy when they won, their
euphoria quickly evaporated, and after a while their moods and sense
of well-being were indistinguishable from what they had been before
the victory. Psychologists even have a word for the phenomenon:
hedonic adaptation.
So, too, with technology: no matter how dramatic a new innovation is,
no matter how much easier it makes our lives, it is very easy to take
it for granted. You can see this principle at work in the world of
technology every day, as things that once seemed miraculous soon
become mundane and, worse, frustrating when they dont work perfectly.
Its hard, it turns out, to keep in mind what things were like before
the new technology came along. Thats why broadband users should
occasionally use dial-up: it makes them appreciate just what a
difference a high-speed connection really does make.
Does our fast absorption of technological progress mean, then, that
technology makes no difference? No. It just makes the question of
technologys impact, for good and ill, more complicated. Lets start
with the downside. There are certain ways in which technology makes
life obviously worse. Telemarketing, traffic jams, and identity theft
all come to mind. These are all phenomena that make people consciously
unhappy. But for the most part, modern critiques of technology have
focused not so much on specific, bad technologies as on what Heidegger
called the question of technologythat is, the impact of technology on
our humanity.
Those critiques have staked out two apparently opposed positions,
which nonetheless share a common skepticism about peoples ability to
use technology to their own ends. The first position, which one can
see in the work of the French critic Jacques Ellul or, more oddly, in
the novels of Philip K. Dick, is that technological progress is
leading to an ever more rigid, controlled, soulless society, in which
its easier for people to be manipulated and monitored. The second
position, which has been well articulated in books like Neil Postmans
Amusing Ourselves to Death and Robert Putnams Bowling Alone, is that
technology is central to the increasing privatization of experience,
which in turn is creating a fragmented, chaotic society, in which
traditional relationships are harder to sustain, community is
increasingly an illusion, and peoples relationships to each other,
mediated as they often are by machines, grow increasingly tenuous.
Theres obviously something to both arguments. Privacy has become
increasingly fragile in a world of linked databases. In many
workplaces, technologies like keystroke monitoring and full recordings
of phone calls make it easier to watch workers. The notion that
technology disrupts relationships and fractures community gained
mainstream prominence as an attack on television, but in recent years
it has also become central to the critique of the Internet. In Bowling
Alone, Putnam suggests that TV is a chief culprit in the gradual
isolation of Americans from each other and the erosion of the social
capital that makes societies run smoothly. Similarly, the deleterious
effects of the Internet, which supposedly further isolates people from
what critics always call the real world, were pointed to early on in a
famous study of 169 Pittsburgh residents, Internet Paradox: A Social
Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological
Well-Being? According to the study, published in the September 1998
issue of American Psychologist, instead of allowing them to connect
with a much wider set of potential friends and exposing them to
information they might otherwise never have come across, the Internet
instead made people more depressed and lonely than they would
otherwise have been.
This broad criticism of technologys impact on relationships is an
interesting one and is especially relevant to the question of
happiness, because one of the few things we can say for certain is
that the more friends and close relationships people have, the happier
they tend to be. But the evidence that the Internet or even television
fundamentally erodes relationships as opposed to changing them is not
especially convincing. For instance, when the authors of that 1998
study revisited the question a few years later, using a slightly
different methodology, they arrived at the opposite conclusion,
finding that the Net had a slightly beneficial impact on peoples
sociability, connections with others, and sense of well-being.
Obviously, a technology as wide-ranging and ubiquitous as the Net will
have myriad, immeasurable effects. But the Internet is essentially a
communications technology, one that, like the telephone, allows people
to expand their affective and informational networks. The Net is
hardly the ideal public sphere, where all discussions are rational and
everyone agrees on a definition of the common good. But it is a public
sphere, and one that crucially functions without gatekeepers.
The dominant critiques of technology have, then, something exaggerated
about them. But one way in which technology, as a rule, does make
people less happy is in its relentless generation of newness. One of
the key insights of happiness studies is that people have a very hard
time being content with what they have, at least when they know that
others have more. Today, technological change is so rapid that when
you buy something, you do so knowing that in a few months theres going
to be a better, faster version of the product, and that youre going to
be stuck with the old one. Someone else, in other words, has it
better. Its as if disappointment were built into acquisition from the
very beginning (unless youre buying a 70-inch plasma screen, in which
case you should be fine for at least a couple of years). Theres no way
to circumvent this drooping of the spirit, which creates
dissatisfaction in the heart of the modern consumer.
Technology à la carte: bad food, but bigger portions
Daily stress, a nagging sense of disappointment, fear that the
government knows a lot more about you than you would like it to: if
these are some of the ways in which technology reduces peoples sense
of well-being, how (if at all) does it increase their happiness? This
is terrain that is ordinarily left to the cyberoptimists and trans-
humanists, who believe that technology should be celebrated for the
way it remakes and improves our bodies and minds. But setting flights
of fancy aside, there is some intriguingly suggestive work about how
certain new technologies make people not just objectively better off
but also happier.
In the marketplace, for instance, the Internet has made consumers
happier not so much by cutting prices as by expanding the enormous
array of choices available to them in a manageable way. In the
happiness stakes, expanding consumers options is really a double-edged
sword: consumers do have a preference for variety and novelty, and the
more choices you have, the better the chance that youll find the thing
you really want. But too much choice can actually paralyze people,
leaving them, paradoxically, worse off.
A well-known experiment conducted by Professors Mark Lepper and Sheena
Iyengar (at Stanford and Columbia, respectively) illustrates the
point: they set up two tables in a supermarket, one with 24 jars of
jam and the other with six, and offered discount coupons to anyone who
stopped to sample the jams. Of the people who stopped at the 24-jam
table, only 3 percent went on to buy jam, while 30 percent of the
people who stopped at the six-jam table did. More choices often make
people frustrated because they have no reasonable way to navigate
through them. What the Internet offers, at least in a nascent form, is
a host of mechanismscollaborative filtering, shopbots, consumer-rating
sitesthat give people the tools to make informed choices relatively
quickly and easily, reducing paralysis and making them happier. The
important point here is that among the infinite choices that the
Internet offers, one is the option of less choice.
Technology has also radically changed the nature of work, or at least
some peoples work. This matters because the workplace is central to
peoples sense of well-being and is more important to them than
anything, including family. Studies show that nothingnot even
divorcemakes people more unhappy than unemployment. For much of the
19th and 20th centuries, technologys impact on the workplace was
ambiguous at best. While the mechanization of agriculture allowed
people to escape the farm, it often propelled them straight into heavy
industrial labor, which was well paying but often miserable.
Technology increased the productivity of workers, but it also
diminished their autonomy: superiors controlled more of the details of
their working days. Even the office work of the postwar period
exemplified by the endless rows of desks in Billy Wilders The
Apartment was deeply bureaucratic and controlled. But recently, the
rise of the networked society, and the advent of knowledge-based
businesses, means that workplaces have become less formal and more
open, even while remaining efficient and productive. Already, as Arlie
Hochschild points out in The Time Bind, a significant percentage of
Americans find the atmosphere at work more congenial than the one at
home. As the number of knowledge workers grows, and as companies
strive to keep them happy, well-being should increase.
The most important impact of technology on peoples sense of
well-being, though, is in the field of health care. Before the
Industrial Revolution, two out of every three Europeans died before
the age of 30. Today, life expectancy for women in Western Europe is
almost 80 years, and it continues to increase. The point is obvious,
but important to note: the vast majority of people are happy to be
alive, and the more time they get on earth, the better off they feel
theyll be. (Remember, the point about prosperity and happiness is not
that prosperity makes people unhappy; its that it doesnt necessarily
make them happier.) Now, the picture is a little more complicated than
this. Living a few extra years as a geriatric may not be ideal. But
until very recently, life for the vast majority of people was (in
Hobbess formulation) nasty, brutish, and short. Technology has changed
that, at least for people in the rich world. As much as we should
worry about the rising cost of health care and the problem of the
uninsured, its also worth remembering how valuable for our spirits as
well as our bodies are the benefits that medical technology and
pharmaceuticals have brought us.
On a deeper level, what the technological improvement of our health
and our longevity underscores is a paradox of any discussion of
happiness on a national or a global level: even though people may not
be happier, even though they are wealthier and possess more
technology, theyre still as hungry as ever for more time. Its like
that old Woody Allen joke: the food may not be so great, but we want
the portions to be as big as possible.
Technology may only improve the taste of the meals slightly, but it
makes them a lot bigger, and for most of us, that has the promise of
something like happiness.
NOTEBOOK
[21]Thieves take brain remote control [Simson Garfinkel]
The BBC has an interesting story about a poor woman who had the
remote-control device for her brian implant stolen.The woman has a
brain implant that provides...
[22]Interview with Straton Sclavos [Simson Garfinkel]
C|Net has a nice interview with Straton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign,
examining whether or not terrorists could attack us with a combination
cyber attack and...
[23]Get Ready for Podcasting [Wade Roush]
You heard it here first: the technology word of the year for 2005 will
be "podcasting." Definitions vary (which is typical for a brand new
phenomenon) but the...
[24]Bloggers of the Year [Wade Roush]
PC Magazine recently announced its People of the Year, and they are
Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, and Paul Bausch, the co-creators of
Blogger, and Ben and Mena...
[25]The Tsunami and Global Warming [David Appell]
A meme is starting to develop, that environmentalists and others are
linking the recent tsunami to global warming. Chinese meteorologists,
Richard Dawkins and...
[26]> Read more posts
Related Stories:
References
21. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1700
22. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1699
23. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1698
24. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1697
25. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1696
26. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/index.asp
More information about the paleopsych
mailing list