Progressive Turmoil

Thanks to Eric Crampton for pointing to Bruce Charlton’s hypothesis that very clever people are social morons because they are very clever. If you get accustomed to independent analysis, you become fascinated by new ideas and under-estimate the value of received wisdom or common sense. I love Charlton’s footnote

I myself am a prime example of a ‘clever silly’; having spent much of adolescence and early adult life passively absorbing high-IQ-elite-approved, ingenious-but-daft ideas that later needed, painfully, to be dismantled. I have eventually been forced to acknowledge that when it comes to the psycho-social domain, the commonsense verdict of the majority of ordinary people throughout history is much more likely to be accurate than the latest fashionably-brilliant insight of the ruling elite. So, this article has been written on the assumption, eminently-challengeable, that although I have nearly-always been wrong in the past – I now am right….

And the whole thing reminded me of Sheldon Cooper’s friend acquisition algorithm:

Last year, French president Nicolas (tippy-toes) Sarkozy hired Nobel-winning economists Armatya Sen and Joe Stiglitz to work on a happiness indicator for France. The Economist sneered:

Suppose you’re a country’s leader, and your economy is doing pretty lousy. How can you distract attention from the politically dangerous ongoing failure? Measure happiness instead!

Now the report(pdf) is out (HT: NZ Herald) and it sounds fairly sensible to me. Here are the first few recommendations:

1. Shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being

2. When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production

3. Emphasise the household perspective

4. Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth

5. Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth

6. Broaden income measures to non-market activities

Not much to disagree with there IMO, and there seems to be lots more good stuff in the report. Well worth a read, and some potentially very useful lessons for NZ inside I suspect.