Rational Philosophy

On biobigotry, regular bigotry, and the apparent contradiction of free-will.

Natalie Angier writes about our tendency to project human characteristics onto, and make human judgments of, animals. We take a dislike to certain species and favor others. And we justify our preferences on the basis of an animal’s behavior, its choice of habitats, its degree of invasiveness, its plumage… in short, on anything that inspires our appreciation or dislike. Angier calls this biobigotry.

Angier rightly implies that an animal is what it is and does what is in its nature to do; any judgment we put on it has relevance only as an artifact of our mind. By using the word biobigotry Angier connects the concept to the human-human bigotry of judgments based on race, gender, age, weight, etc.

Here we come to the paradox: If we say that animals do what it is their nature to do and shouldn’t be judged for it, then carry this idea forward and apply it to people, who likewise do what it is their nature to do, we end up concluding that people, too, can’t be judged as inherently despicable or adorable.

Is this a supportable premise?

It is wrong for Angier to condemn cowbirds for leaving their eggs in other birds’ nests; that’s what cowbirds do. But is it likewise wrong to condemn a person who steals, for instance? Isn’t the act of theft a result of a certain set of circumstances — genetic, environmental, and circumstantial.

If we follow this approach to its rigorous conclusion we can end up deciding that no one can be blamed for anything. For most of us this doesn’t sit well. So how can we resolve this paradox.

The resolution lies in the concept of free-will. The cowbird does not reflect on a set of choices available to it and decide it would prefer to leave its eggs in another bird’s nest. But the person who steals has a range of options from which to choose. Stealing is a choice.

Immediately, though, we see a problem with this approach. One could argue that for someone who is going to steal the range of possible options is illusory. The options exist in theory, but in practice he or she is preconditioned to reject the other options.

In this new paradox we have reached the limits of the applicability of human judgment. When we judge someone we judge them against a range of possible responses and actions, regardless of whether the person could have actually chosen differently given his or her psychological makeup and the situation at hand. We judge and condemn, in effect, not the person, but the person’s inability to make a better choice.

On the separate worlds of science and religion.

For what reads like a fluff piece, Cornelia Dean’s portrait of evolutionary biologist and author Francisco J. Ayala manages to press some pertinent buttons. Specifically:

1. The title “Roving Defender of Evolution, And Room for God” might mislead. It seems to imply that Ayala speaks not just as a scientist but as a believer. But the piece closes as follows: “Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer. ‘I don’t want to be tagged,’ he said. ‘By one side or the other.’”

2. Ayala makes some curious statements about evolution and evil. As Dean reports “If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, [Ayala] said, ‘then he is a sadist…’” And quoted Ayala from his book: “Evolution ‘provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world.’”

3. And, in passing, Dean inserts this dramatic and non-trivial opinion: “‘Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,’ [Ayala] writes in the new book. ‘It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.’”

The NY Times exhibits poor editorial judgment in publishing the piece under the chosen title. I don’t know whether the Times is diluting its editorial expertise in the move to become an up-to-date on-line news resource. And I don’t have an assiduous record of the editorial quality of the paper. But it’s my passing impression that the mismatch between titles and content is happening somewhat frequently on-line. I don’t ever recall it happening in the printed paper. The piece itself is less focused and on-point than one would expect from a top notch news source. In an Internet world overflowing with dubious content, these things matter enormously.

I’m fascinated by Ayala’s equating of evolution with an explanation for evil. Given the sketchy coverage of Ayala’s views and opinions, I’m guessing that he has much more to say on the subject. But from the little we have to work with Ayala seems to be saying that evolution lets God off the hook for being the source of evil.

This brings us to the third point. If science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge then on what basis can we cross-reference evolution and evil?

Here are my specific responses:

a. Religion is not a realm of knowledge, it is a realm of belief. In furthering human understanding and combating intolerance, we must resist the confusion of scientific and rational knowledge (which is grounded in a common and reproducible perception of the world we live in) from religious belief (which is not).

b. Evil is a human construct related to belief and doesn’t “exist” other than as a concept. To casually conjoin the concept of evolution with the concept of evil overlaps science and religion in exactly the way that Ayala seems to decry.

c. I agree that denouncing religion in the name of science isn’t particularly helpful. But neither is it helpful for a renowned scientist to use his scientific credentials to explicitly “make room” for religion while being coy about his own beliefs.

As a side note, moral concepts arise out of our experience of the world around us. Morality is our way of making sense of the way that life seems to operate. If we explore the origin of the concept of morality we find that it has its fundamental grounds in the principles of space and time. Working rationally we can define a moral framework that relies only on logic and promotes ideas about goodness that reflect life as it is not life as we’ve been told it should be. — I describe this approach in detail in my book - LIFE!

Related posts from around the web…

Evolution and the Problem of Evil - It does add force to the atheist’s argument from evil, but it’s just one point in a larger picture, and the problem as a whole would remain even if evolution were to fall. A person who accepts evolution and still believes in God can do …

Science Vs Religion: Intellectual Sloth As The Main Problem - Likewise, atheism is not about “over dogmatism” (a cheap characterization in my opinion), but about the rule of rationality and abandonement of superstition (ie leaving the primitive mind behind and embracing the enlightened, …

Good, Evil, Morality, and Ethics - I don’t claim to understand all the forces that govern the evolution of ethics, but it is plain to see that our ethical systems have evolved. Slavery was once accepted and considered ethical by many; now it is not accepted. …

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the Supreme Court’s upholding of ID needs for voters, Barack Obama’s tussle with Wright’s preaching, and a couple of proposed field trips.

Upholding the Indiana state requirement for voters to show a picture ID, the Supreme Court majority concluded that this requirement wasn’t unduly burdensome on any class of voters. Indiana provides picture IDs at no cost for the poor and allows someone to vote without an ID if they subsequently show one within 10 days. (Souter, in his dissent, said the requirement could pose a non-trivial burden on many.)

After reading today that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years, I felt prompted to give some more thought to the controversy stirred up by Wright’s divisive and outspoken views. His critics would have Obama explain why he cannot be associated with Wright’s views when he sat through his sermons for twenty years.

Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration have criticized President Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas and the Syrian leadership. Carter writes an elegant response to these criticisms in an op-ed today. What he says, effectively, is that avoiding discourse works far less well than engaging in discourse.

I don’t know whether Obama ever engaged Wright directly on his views. But just sitting through those sermons must have forced Obama into having to engage with the ideas being expressed, not to agree with them necessarily, but to acknowledge their presence in the world. If he’d got up and walked out and never come back he might have made a statement, but he would have missed out on years of study of Wright’s perspective — and Wright’s perspective is not unique. If the country’s leaders don’t engage with it, we won’t made progress against racism.

But while the furore continues the burden remains with Obama to define his identity. Much better for him to do this by being what he is (as he did in his eloquent speech on racism) rather than defend what he’s not.

(Ironically, sitting through endless speeches one disagrees with figures prominently in the job description for a law maker. Obama seems to have that qualification in spades.)

How does a Supreme Court judge begin to determine whether the acquisition of a picture ID constitutes a reasonable burden for a poor would-be voter in Indiana?

The ID may be free, but where are the administrative offices from where the IDs would be attained? How far from where people live? How convenient for public transportation? How long is the wait once they get there? What fears may large numbers of poor people have about applying for a picture ID?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they seem to be the kinds of questions one would need to answer before deciding whether the burden would be reasonable.

I suggest a field trip: Take the Supreme Court justices to Indiana. Let them go along with a couple of poor people to get their IDs, then decide.

I’d suggest the same for Obama’s critics. Have them attend a sermon at his church. Then ask them when they come out whether they’ve been swayed by Wright’s opinions.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On abstraction and the real world.

It’s been nearly 150 years since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. The NY Times reports on a new exhibition that provides insight into Darwin’s scientific life and work. We learn that Darwin, inspired by musings on the natural world around him, tested out his ideas on the plants in his garden. He cross-pollinated plants with complementary anatomical parts, for instance, and found that the hybrids were more robust than their parents.

Through his inspiration from life, experimentation with life, and abstraction from life, Darwin derived the theory of evolution, forever changing our understanding of the world we live in, and bringing scientific understanding forward in one huge leap.

My teenage daughter has the most difficulty with science and math when she’s required to apply newly learned abstract concepts to “real world” problems. I expect she’s not alone. A new study indicates that people learn abstract concepts more successfully if taught the abstract theory first rather than expecting them to learn by deduction from “real world” examples. The conclusion: “Real world” examples aren’t as effective as a thorough briefing on the equations and theories concerned.

What surprised me about this article was not the conclusion (since it seems to make common sense — Darwin spent many painstaking years deriving his theories from real world examples, and the results are only obvious because he abstracted them!) but the realization that anyone ever thought that real world examples could effectively impart complex abstract knowledge. It’s useful to tie abstract concepts back to real world examples, of course, but this step is tough and challenging because it requires the additional skills of distilling the pertinent information and understanding how to apply the appropriate theory.

Studies of language and reasoning underscore this lesson: Children who have no language for numbers can count up to three instinctively. Primates have the same skill. But with larger numbers our ability to count without language diminishes rapidly. As the article points out, language can help enormously in processing problems.

Mathematics and scientific concepts provide a rich, inclusive language that abstracts the concepts of space, time and causality: This language helps us process the abstracted workings of the real world. Without it we would be fumbling around anew with each new problem. As with anything in the real world, though, discerning and holding on to sound ideas and methods provides its own challenge. At each turn there are those who want to forge on on new paths, or turn back down old ones.

Footnote: When I wrote the back cover blurb for my book a couple of years ago I made the apparently extravagant claim that in its contribution to human understanding it was the most important book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This offended some people. For a while I was embarrassed to have ever claimed such a thing. But today as I read about Darwin’s methods and saw how he’d sketched out his evolutionary ideas, I felt a renewed sense of conviction that when we can understand how evolution relates to the fundamental principles of space and time we will have taken another big step forward. And I am still convinced that Life! achieves this feat.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On work and self: Wesley Snipes, Tom Daley, Anna Quindlen, Rene Descartes

I’ve spent the past eleven years and ten months — more than half my working life — at the same firm. Today was my last day. I’m going to be writing more, and making more music, and probably a whole lot of things that I have no clue about just yet.

As I said goodbye to my colleagues this afternoon I was aware of how much the experience of working with them and doing what I’d been doing had changed me, how much I’d learned, how much I’d unlearned, and how much I’d grown and shifted. I was moving on, but not without taking the experience with me.

Actor Wesley Snipes, convicted on tax charges, has been sentenced to the maximum of three years in jail. As I read the story I was fascinated by the extent to which a movie star’s life must be affected by his or her sense of self as reflected by public opinion. Denzel Washington had written a letter of character reference to the court. I found myself sad for Snipes; excerpts from the letter seemed to describe the image of a man rather than the man himself.

Thirteen year old Tom Daley, a British diver who will compete in the Beijing Olympics, explained his approach to maintaining a balanced perspective like this: “I try and keep it all separate because when I’m not diving and doing media stuff I’m just a normal kid.”

And as I rode on the elevator in the office today, I saw this quote from Anna Quindlen:

“Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.”

It read like a personal message.

The philosophy of self is as old as the phenomenon of consciousness. It took several million years for this idea to be neatly framed and attributed to Descartes who coined the famous phrase: “Cogito ergo sum” trans. “I think therefore I am.”

To twist this idea into a framing of the concept of self we can say: “I am what I think.”

Some would immediately argue that we do many things without reflection, without thinking them through. Which is true. But the concept of “self” requires reflection. Once I have acted, my acts affect my sense of self according to the way that I process them.

I could have walked away from my job thinking that I was unchanged by it. Had I done so, my sense of self would have been quite different.

Actor Wesley Snipes (and others in the public eye) must process his immediate thoughts about himself as well as processing the opinions expressed by the world at large. Public opinion must place a tremendous strain on one’s ability to maintain a consistent and accurate sense of self.

Young diver Tom Daley demonstrates an admirable compartmentalization of private and public space. (It seems perhaps that children often have a greater aptitude for this than adults.) Daley prefigures Quindlen’s advice in years if not in time.

We can achieve great things. We can inspire great respect or admiration. We can, likewise, achieve little, or inspire no one. But we captain our sense of self over these waters as if it were the QE2, or a tug boat, or a kayak. We might never know or care that the QE2 is really a kayak, or vice versa.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the rise in America’s prison population, execution, and administrative wrongdoing.

The United States has a prison population far higher than anywhere else in the world. This is a recent phenomenon. About thirty years ago the US prison population started to climb and now other countries regard the US’s penal system as shocking.

The Supreme Court just upheld the use of a lethal cocktail injection for the administration of the death penalty, citing case law supporting the idea that the mere possibility of cruel and painful death isn’t a reason to put a stop to lethal injection. The constitutionality of capital punishment distracts us from whether it is a punishment worthy of an enlightened society.

And slowly but surely details of the Bush administration’s disregard for human rights and US law continue to emerge. Bush and his senior team spent a good deal of time and energy devising mechanisms that would allow them to torture detainees. (Of course, the administration’s blatant disregard for appropriate justification wasn’t limited to the abuse of prisoners. It has been a consistent pattern.)

These three examples seem to indicate a disturbing trend. Most disturbing, the Bush administration’s conviction that it is above the law, simply because it believes it is right. While Europe (much scoffed at by the likes of Bush) has moved inexorably and bumpily toward cooperation and enlightenment, the US has veered off on its own, deluded by the idea of itself as a nation that can remain fixed, or fixate, on the idea of itself as infallible.

As we’ve seen with the Catholic church in recent years, the infallible have a lot to learn. Errors of national ego punctuate the history of civilization like buckshot. The only thing that can save us from even worse transgressions and further isolation is a healthy dose of humility.

Who do you trust, Jimmy Carter or Condoleezza Rice?

And which of them is happier?

Condoleezza Rice complains that Jimmy Carter has confused the middle east peace process by meeting with Hamas and Syria. Carter claims that without talking to Hamas there won’t be a peace process, and that Syria is willing to move toward the west if given sufficient incentive.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter but he is a man of integrity and courage. I have no doubt that he has confused the Bush administration’s concept of the peace process. The key question seems to be whether he has done more harm than good. To answer this question we need to understand whether the Bush concept of the peace process ever was or is going anywhere.

I find myself asking the question: Why does Bush want peace?

And I find myself coming immediately to the answer: Because it would be an accomplishment that would make him feel good about himself.

Bush’s presidency has always been about impressing people. He’s wanted to impress Cheney and Cheney’s powerful friends in the business world. He’s wanted to impress his dad by ousting Saddam Hussein. He’s wanted to impress historians by establishing some sort of legacy. What could be better than some success in the middle east peace process?

And then to Carter. Carter, it seems to me, had no ulterior motive for remaining involved in world affairs. Just as his desire to lead the country hinged and slumped on his desire wrest a better world out of what we had, so, too, his desire to work tirelessly for the cause of good has been, so it seems, prompted by the will to do good.
I realize that opinion isn’t philosophy. But the point I’m making is that to reach conclusions on questions of better or worse one does need to explore motive.

In a process as delicate, painstaking, complex and treacherous as middle east peace it is reasonable to predict that any effort founded on the ego of the presumptive peacemaker will fail. Whereas, an effort founded on an ego-less attempt to do good, while it may also fail, at least has a chance of making progress.

What does any of this have to do with happiness?

Just look at the picture of Condoleezza Rice. Doesn’t she look miserable?

Now what about Jimmy Carter?

Daniel Gilbert has been researching happiness. When asked what makes people happy, he says this: “We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.”

Carter is right to meet with Hamas. He is right to meet with Assad. Talking to someone doesn’t mean you agree with them. It means that you are willing to hear what they have to say, and that you want to convey something to them. By shunning them you give them no choice but to maintain their position of antagonism.

Rice may be happier if she had more people to talk to.

On the negative swing in the Democratic primary campaign, global warming, and deconstruction.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania today, Barack Obama had this to say about the increasingly negative tone of the push for votes: “if you get elbowed enough, eventually you start elbowing back.” He labels the cause — “elbowing” — and the effect — “elbowing back.” I like Barack Obama, from what I know of him, and his analysis of the cause and effect of retaliation has some emotionally appealing weight to it — generally we don’t like to be pushed around — but it makes me wonder about the psychology of retaliation in a presidential candidate.

As fears rise of dire consequences from global warming, so does the noise of debate about what each of us can and should do to respond. Michael Pollan argues that although personal choices to, for instance, walk instead of drive, eat less meat, plant our back yard, may seem to be ineffective ways to generate the desired effect, they form a critical part of the only response that can help save our ecology in the long term — a change in attitude.

And Stanley Fish, in a typically dogmatic piece, insists that deconstruction didn’t change anything. After outlining the tumult in academia and the careers of academics post-deconstruction, Fish blithely dismisses the effect as something disconnected from its cause: “these effects, good and bad, happy and unhappy, did not flow from deconstruction as a matter of right and property; they were effects of which deconstruction just happened to be the occasion.”

(Tangentially I wonder whether Fish’s pattern of defending a hypothesis rather than challenging and investigating it has an overall beneficial result — because his topics and positions provoke thought and response — or not — since by lending the air of authority to his unswerving style, the Times does an implicit injustice to the practice of sound thinking… Unfortunately, I think, the latter.)

Nothing ‘just happens’ to be the occasion for an effect. Or, to put it another way, every cause is inevitably the occasion for its effect.

Obama speaks emotively but not convincingly when he says that Clinton’s elbowing caused his elbowing. We all know that the response to an an elbow in the ribs can be for us to present our other ribs for more elbowing. To unpack Obama’s words, what he meant was: “wouldn’t you eventually do the same thing if someone was needling you?” And he’s counting on most people saying, “well, yes, I believe I would.”

It’s a clever and appealing piece of rhetoric, but not an honest one. Obama knows that it would have been possible to keep the higher ground, but he’s been advised that he needs to strike back, and perhaps he also feels that it’s right to strike back. I, for one, would dearly like to know whether Obama believes this or not. How deep and strong is his belief in doing the right thing? That’s the reason to want to vote for him.

Michael Pollan presents at a subtle and important insight into the cause and effect of global warming — if we don’t change our attitudes, we won’t change the outcome. In itself, his journalism acts as a cause of changing attitude, informing and swaying opinion. He arrived at his opinion through reading and reflection. His reading and reflection wouldn’t and couldn’t have happened without the work and reflection of scientists and educators who went before him… This chain of cause and effect leads us back to the evolution of human consciousness, which also leads us back to the cause of global warming. This is, all at once, ironic, comforting, and somewhat alarming. Ironic: Global warming and the hope for averting disaster have been caused by the evolution of human consciousness. Comforting: If we broke it, we can fix it. Alarming: If this can happen, what’s in store for us next?

Philosophically speaking, the phenomenon of cause and effect is central to our cohesive experience of existence. Given the same conditions, we expect the same outcomes. Manifestations of existence (physical objects, energy fields, etc.) in time and space operate predictably to the extent that we have sufficient information to make those predictions. Even quantum mechanics results in predictable behaviors that reflect the probability of different outcomes.

We take cause and effect for granted. We’re so accustomed to its operation that we find it hard to imagine the world working in any other way. Because of this, perhaps, I think that we devalue the all pervasive workings of causality. We allow ourselves to believe that a stand-in for a reasonable cause (elbowing) is good enough. And that a well defended opinion (a la those of Stanley Fish) is as good as a rigorous and skeptical exploration. But, fortunately, we also recognize the real thing when we see it.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Well, I’d written a good part of a post about seasons, gas prices, and global warming before I pressed the wrong button combination and lost it.

It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I’m not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn’t we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?

I then lamented the defeat of mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan. I then got into the ineffectiveness of government in dealing with problems like global warming. President Bush is an extreme example. After eight years the best he could do was to make some feel good statements encouraging a voluntary reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. But governments in general seem to be ill-matched to the situation.

Part of the problem seems to be that we’re not really very good at dealing with long term threats. Evolution has wired us to focus on the here and now in a very vivid and immediate way. We can conceptualize and prepare for what may happen today or tomorrow, but the further out the problems get, the less able we are to act in ways that recognize them and respond to them effectively.

I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely, on which a track begins with the words “Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…”). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.

But now I feel engaged by the idea of ‘the lost blog,’ or, more generally, the lost anything.

The idea of ‘no longer being’ can be juxtaposed with the idea of constant renewal. The changing cycle of the seasons reinforces our concept of the world as a place where things come around again. In the Fall the trees shed their leaves as we enter the long dead winter, but in Spring the natural world appears to be reborn. We integrate this and similar ideas of regeneration into our conceptual view of the world. (The cycle of day and night, of waking and sleeping reinforces this concept.)

It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.

But things do get lost. My original post is gone. Even if I were able to recall it word for word and write it out again, it would be something subtly different from the original post.

In reality, existence never repeats itself. The present moment is unique and new. The earth never quite rotates about the same sun, which is ever so slowly burning away and cooling. The child born today is born into a world different from the world his or her parents were born into.

This is not true of the conceptual world, in which concepts remain firm and fast and reproducible over and over, where the concept of a square remains always the concept of a square, where a logical analysis remains always logical.

As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the world, more aware of our effect on the environment, more cognizant of the way we can improve the long term lot of humankind and a whole host of other species, we face the challenge of shedding our concept of reality and existence as something that forever renews, of life as a short term that will be repeated in the long term.

We have both the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this new conceptual world-view and the capabilities to act on it for the good of the world and for the good of humanity.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Does wealth tend to make us happy, and if so, why?

Last year I explored some philosophical theories of happiness and concluded that happiness may be what we feel when we sate our desires. More recently it occurred to me that we find some things intrinsically satisfying (sex, exercise, conviviality) and that we can also find accidental or consequential satisfaction (in games, reading, work). For thirty years or so the prevailing wisdom of economic theorists has been that money doesn’t make people happy — the Easterlin paradox says that once people meet their basic needs, increasing wealth doesn’t bring greater happiness. But new research questions Easterlin’s work and presents evidence that people with more money do tend to report higher levels of happiness.

Before getting to the central question at hand (what makes people happy) it’s worth pausing to note firstly that Easterlin’s conclusion is internally inconsistent, and secondly that we should regard statistics with great skepticism (about the most charitable thing one can say of statistics is that large numbers make interesting patterns).

Here’s the internal inconsistency: Let’s say that Easterlin correctly detected a relationship between satisfaction and wealth up to the point at which people’s basic needs are met. This result would tell us that wealth does affect happiness if only as a means to satisfy our basic needs. But basic needs have a way of changing. Health care, for instance, becomes more expensive as more expensive remedies, therapies and cures become available. Just today, for instance, we read about a fabulous new hearing aid that costs a few thousand dollars per year and isn’t covered by health care. It’s making people happier. Applying Easterlin’s theory then, as people’s expectations and perceptions of basic needs shifted they would need more money to pay for them, but Easterlin’s results indicate that this doesn’t happen.

Back to the question at hand: What makes people happy and how does wealth factor into that, if at all?

It still seems sensible to say that anything that intrinsically satisfies a need of the human organism will tend to make us happy (sex, food, exercise). Wealth can purchase or indirectly leverage access to some of these intrinsic satisfactions.

It also still seems sensible to say that we can derive incidental satisfaction from other activities (games, sport, creative outlets, work). Wealth can provide more time for or greater access to these things too.

But, and this is a big but, does this tell us anything about the priority we should give to the pursuit of wealth?

If we focus on making money at the expense of some of our intrinsic or incidental opportunities for satisfaction, we may well end up less happy. And if we have an unhealthy relationship with money, or if having money leads to negative consequences (if we don’t feel productive because we don’t work, for instance) then wealth may make us less happy.

This is the true paradox: Money can make us happier, but it comes at a price. Whether greater wealth will make us happier on balance varies enormously depending on the individual and his or her circumstances.