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Measuring Success in Social Policy

This book is first about how people pursue happiness in their lives, and then about how government can help in that pursuit.

It is not a topic that is easy even to name, for “happiness” is an honorable word fallen on hard times. We have gotten used to happiness as a label for a momentary way of feeling, the state of mind that is the opposite of sad. Happiness is the promised reward of a dozen pop-psychology books on the airport book rack. It is a topic for bumper stickers and the comic strips—happiness as warm puppy. A book on public policy about “happiness”? Surely there is a sturdier contemporary term I might use instead. “Quality of life,” perhaps: “This book is about personal quality of life, and what government can do to improve it.” Or more respectable yet: “This book is about noneconomic indicators of perceived personal well-being, and their relationship to alternative policy options.” But there’s no getting around it. Happiness is in fact what we will be talking about.

What Is the Criterion of Success?

The first, natural question is why one might choose to discuss public affairs in terms of this most private and elusive of goals. The pragmatic reason is that policy analysts are increasingly forced in that direction by events. The experience of the last half-century and more specifically of the last two decades must arouse in any thoughtful observer this question: What constitutes “success” in social policy?

For most of America’s history, this was not a question that needed asking because there was no such thing as a “social policy” to succeed

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or fail. The government tried to be helpful to the economy in modest ways. It facilitated the settlement of the frontier. It adjudicated and arbitrated the competing interests of the several states. But, excepting slavery, the noneconomic institutions of American society remained largely outside federal purview until well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1930s, there was still no federal “policy” worthy of the label affecting the family, for example, or education, or religion, or voluntary associations. Some laws could be argued to have effects on such institutions (the child labor laws on the family, for example), but the notion that the federal government had a systematic relationship with the “success” of parents in raising their offspring, of schools in educating their students, or of poor people’s efforts to become no longer poor would have struck most observers as perhaps theoretically true, but rather an odd way of looking at things.

Over a period of time from the New Deal through the 1970s, the nation acquired what we have come to call “social policy,” with dozens of constituent elements—welfare programs, educational programs, health programs, job programs, criminal justice programs, and laws, regulations, and Supreme Court decisions involving everything from housing to transportation to employment to child care to abortion. Pick a topic of social concern or even of social interest, and by now a complex body of federal activity constitutes policy, intended to be an active force for good.

This brings us to the question of measuring success. For if the federal government seeks to do good in these arenas, there must be as well a measure of what “good” means. Whether you are a citizen or a policymaker, the same question arises with regard to any particular aspect of social policy: Are you for or against? Let’s build more prisons. Yes or no? Let’s dispense more food stamps. Yes or no?

For many years—certainly during my own training during the sixties and early seventies—social science faculties in our universities assumed a substratum of truths about why certain policies were good or bad things, and policy analysts did not have to think very hard about why the outcomes we analyzed were good or bad. We knew. Fighting poverty had to be good. Fighting racism had to be good. Fighting inequality had to be good. What other way of looking at good and bad might there be? And what other way of measuring progress might there be except to measure poverty, crime rates, school enrollment, unemployment?

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By such measures, however, the policies didn’t work out so well. In fact, by most such measures things got worse rather than better, and a fierce debate has raged about whether the policies themselves were at fault (a view that I share) or whether things would have been still worse without them. But even as the debate has continued, it has been increasingly difficult for policy analysts of any persuasion to avoid wondering whether we have been asking the right questions. Are we thinking about “progress” in the right way? What constitutes “success” in social policy?

Fighting poverty is good, yes. But if the poverty rate goes down while the proportion of children born to single women goes up, how are those two vectors to be combined so that we know whether, in the aggregate, we are headed up or down, forward or backward? Fighting racial discrimination is good, yes. But if the laws against discrimination in housing are made ever more stringent and actual segregation in housing increases, what are we to make of it? How are we to decide what course to navigate in the future?

Underlying these questions are others that ask not just how we are to add up conflicting indicators but rather the more far-reaching question, What’s the point? What is the point of food stamps, anyway? What are they for? Suppose that we passed out food stamps so freely that no young man ever had to worry about whether a child that he caused to be conceived would be fed. Would that really be a better world for children to be born into? Or let us take food stamps writ large: Suppose that we made all material goods so freely available that parents could not ever again take satisfaction from the accomplishment of feeding, sheltering, and clothing their children. Would that really be a better world in which to be a parent? The immediate “point” of food stamps is simple—trying to help people have enough food to eat. But food stamps serve (and perhaps impede) other ends as well. What’s the point? Ultimately, happiness is the point.

“The Pursuit of Happiness”

To make the case for happiness as something that a policy analyst can reasonably think about, there is no better place to start than with

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the stately and confident words of the Declaration of Independence. It is worth trying to read them as if for the first time: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men . . .”

“Happiness” was not Thomas Jefferson’s idiosyncratic choice of words, nor was “pursuit of happiness” a rhetorical flourish to round out the clause. For the Founders, “happiness” was the obvious word to use because it was obvious to them that the pursuit of happiness is at the center of man’s existence, and that to permit man to pursue happiness is the central justification of government—the “object of government,” as James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 62.¹ James Wilson, who was later to become one of the chief architects of the Constitution, was voicing the general understanding of his contemporaries when he wrote in 1769 that the only reason men consent to have government is “. . . with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed, above what they could enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature,” and then went on to assert that “the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.”² John Adams calmly asserted that “Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of Government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.”³ Washington took happiness for his theme repeatedly, returning to it for the last time in his Farewell Address.⁴ The concept of happiness and the word itself appear again and again in Revolutionary sermons, pamphlets, and tracts.⁵

What may annoy the modern reader approaching these texts is that these eighteenth-century writers never stipulated what they meant by happiness. The word appears in a sentence and then the writer or the speaker moves on. It is as if they were addressing people who would of course know what was meant by “happiness”—not only know, but agree. And so they did. They did not necessarily agree on the details. Some took their understanding from Aristotle and Aquinas, others from Locke, others from Burlamaqui or Hutcheson. But educated men were in broad agreement that happiness was a label for

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a ubiquitous concept, the concept of the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. The logic behind this concept is simple and highly intuitive, going roughly as follows.

Anything we enjoy—anything that is a “good” in some sense—we enjoy for itself, but we also enjoy it because of other goods to which it leads. I enjoy getting a new car, let us say. Perhaps I enjoy it for the thing-in-itself known as a New Car, but I also obviously value it for other things such as driving places. Or: I value friendship as a good-in-itself. But I also use friendship for other ends besides friendship. Friends may educate me, which is also a good; they may make me laugh, which is also a good; or they may loan me money when I need it, still a third good.

The same applies to political goods. An egalitarian may value equality as a good-in-itself, but he also values it for the other good things that equality facilitates. Ethical goods are subject to the same dualism (justice is a good-in-itself, but it also serves many other purposes).

What the men and women of the eighteenth century took for granted—and I will take for granted in this book—is that the mind must conceive a stopping point to the chain of questions about “What other ends does it serve?”: an end at which there is no answer possible, an end that is reached when one is talking about the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. At this stage of the discussion, there is no need for us to try to decide what this ultimate good-in-itself consists of. We need only to agree that the concept of such a self-sufficient end-in-itself exists. To be discussed, it needs a label. That label is happiness.

Happiness and Higher Goals

The use of happiness in this, its ancient and honored meaning, nonetheless continues to sound strange to contemporary ears. “Happiness” has become identified with self-absorption, the goal you seek if you are a young urban professional who doesn’t give a damn about anything except your own pleasure. When “happiness” is proposed as the proper goal of life, the nearly reflexive response is that a major problem with contemporary America is that too many people are

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preoccupied with their own happiness and that too few understand that life has higher and more worthy purposes.

The most obvious response to this is semantic: You can have no higher aspiration than happiness. By definition (the traditional one), happiness is the only thing that is self-sufficiently good in itself and does not facilitate or lead to any other better thing. A “higher” goal would be another good. That other good, being good as you define good, would contribute to your happiness. (If you say that perhaps not—that it is possible for something to be good that nonetheless does not contribute to your happiness—then you find yourself entangled in self-contradictions. Somewhere along the line, you are shifting the definition either of “good” or of “happiness.”)

But such semantic responses are not sufficient, for they seem to imply that a Mother Teresa’s understanding of the highest good cannot be distinguished from an understanding of the highest good as a new BMW. Let me add therefore another common understanding from the eighteenth-century tradition. It was taken for granted that any thoughtful person thinks about what “the good” means, and especially about what the highest good means. It was also taken for granted that thoughtful people strive to live their lives (albeit with the frailties and inconstancies of humans) according to that understanding. The pursuit of happiness is not just something that human beings “do,” it is the duty of a human being functioning as a human being, on a par with the duty to preserve one’s integrity.

Let me take this thought further. To imagine a human being not pursuing happiness is a kind of contradiction in terms. To be fully human is to seek the best ends one knows, and to be fully human is also to apply one’s human intelligence as best one can to the question, What is the good? I will be returning to this densely packed thought in the next chapter, but as starting points: Happiness is something that a Mother Teresa is striving to achieve. And anyone whose highest good really is a new BMW is not thinking in recognizably human ways. (If that seems harsh, note the italics.) For those who put their signatures to the Declaration, a society in which people were able to pursue happiness was no more and no less than a society in which people were able to go about the business of being human beings as wisely and

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fully as they could. The job of government was to enable them to do so.⁶ People can have no higher calling, nor can governments.

My assertion, and the linchpin of this book, is that what was true then is true now. The longer one thinks about why one is in favor of or opposed to any particular measure to help people, the more one is driven to employ that most un-twentieth-century concept, happiness. The purpose of government is to facilitate the pursuit of happiness of its citizens.

Understandings

As I set out to explore this strange but useful concept called “the pursuit of happiness,” two understandings:

NO EQUATIONS

First, I will not be suggesting that we try to assess the “happiness yield” of a given policy. If catalytic converters are proposed as a way of reducing air pollution then air pollution remains the immediate problem at which they are directed and we had better do a hard-headed job of deciding whether catalytic converters are a good way to achieve that immediate goal. Nor shall I be trying to quantify a “happiness index” by which we may measure progress or retrogression. My goal is to make use of the idea of happiness, not trivialize it.

Rather, as I will be arguing in the chapters that follow, the concept of happiness gives us a new place to stand in assessing social policy. New places to stand offer new perspectives and can give better leverage on old problems. I will be arguing that the pursuit-of-happiness criterion gives us a valuable way of thinking about solutions, even when that way of thinking does not necessarily point us toward “the” solution.

NO ROSE GARDENS

I will be discussing the pursuit of happiness as it relates to social policy rather than the achievement of happiness. Only the former can be a “right.” The latter is not within the gift of any government.

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It is equally obvious, however, that the concept of “ability to pursue happiness” is not met simply by dubbing someone free to do so. You cannot pursue happiness effectively if you are starving or suffering other severe deprivations. You may meet misfortune with fortitude; you may extract from your situation what contentment is possible; but you may not reasonably be said to be “free to pursue happiness” under such conditions. “Pursuit” requires that certain conditions prevail, and part 2 explores the conditions that are most immediately relevant to government policies.

But neither does “enabled to pursue happiness” translate into a high probability of achieving whatever you set out to achieve. “Not that I would not, if I could,” writes William James, “be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible.”⁷ Similarly, you cannot reasonably ask that you be enabled to achieve any particular sort of happiness you might prefer. “Ability to pursue happiness” will be treated as meaning that no one and no external objective condition controlled by government will prevent you from living a life that provides you with happiness. It may not be the most satisfying life you can imagine in its detail. Others with no greater merit than you (as you see it) may lead lives that you would prefer to live. But you will have the wherewithal for realizing deep and meaningful satisfactions in life. If you reach the end of your life unhappy, it will be your fault, or the fault of natural tragedies beyond the power of society to prevent.

And with that, we have cleared away enough underbrush to begin. Just as war is too important to be left to generals, so is happiness too important to be left to philosophers. It is a word with content that bridges widely varying political views. It lends itself to thinking about, puzzling over, playing with. Doing so can profoundly affect how we conceive of good laws, social justice, and some very practical improvements in the quality of American life.