In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray

in which policy consists of deliberately refraining from action, are as critically important to enabling the pursuit of happiness as the things that policy actively tries to do. Or to return to the original analogy, I will be asking you to consider a world in which the fire department leaves certain types of fires unattended, not because it has too little equipment but because it would be a bad idea to put out the fire.

      It is not such a radical thought—I am surrounded at this moment by hundreds of fires in my neighborhood that the fire department is ignoring and that everyone agrees the fire department should ignore. There’s one a few feet away from me, keeping my coffee warm. In the case of fires, of course, we all know that fire departments are for putting out uncontrolled fires and there is no need to specify that fires in stoves and furnaces don’t count. But the example calls attention to the peculiar problem facing this particular book on policy: In deciding what constitutes a good “policy for putting out fires,” one first has to decide what fires one wants put out. In the case of fire departments, the decision rules are obvious; that’s why we don’t have to think about them. In the case of pursuing happiness, the decision rules are not so obvious. The purpose of the four chapters that follow is to think about decision rules before thinking about policy. This still leaves room for saying that governments should “do a lot” or “do a little”—but only once we have decided what needs to be done.

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4

       Material Resources

      “Poverty” has in recent years been to policy analysts what damnation is to a Baptist preacher. For more than two decades, progress or retrogression in social policy has been measured against this benchmark. Few goals have been more highly valued than to “bring people above the poverty line.” To be below the poverty line has constituted proof that government help is needed.

      There are three reasons for this preoccupation. One is that deficits in material resources are visible. We can see, paint, photograph, film, televise, and videotape sunken cheeks and tattered clothes. Deficits in the other enabling conditions are not so visible. Compounding this imbalance, deficits in any of the other enabling conditions may manifest themselves as poverty. Self-esteem again provides a good example. Large numbers of the homeless are dispirited in ways that are traceable to deficits in esteem (and in other enabling conditions besides poverty). It is often such deficits that created the homelessness. But the symptom is poverty—living in the streets, dressed in rags, begging for food—and the symptom can be alleviated by material resources.

      This points to the second reason why money has taken on such a central place in social policy calculations: Material resources, alone among the enabling conditions, are fungible. I can use money to buy you a meal or a place to stay. I cannot use money to buy you esteem. Deficits in material resources are in this sense susceptible to “solutions” in ways that the other enabling conditions are not.

      The third reason is that deficits in material resources suggest threats to survival. Without food, people starve to death. Without shelter, they perish of exposure. The state of being “in poverty” is loosely identified with a state of being at risk of life and health. The plight of the street people again provides an apt illustration. The street people are in the

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      streets and do appear to be in danger of starving—and they are also “in poverty.” The observer may point out that the street people constitute a small fraction of the people labeled “homeless,” and that the homeless constitute a small fraction of the people under the poverty line. He may analyze the data on why people live in the streets, and point out that the reason why people live in the streets in Calcutta or Cairo (no way to make a decent living) applies to only a small fraction of street people in the United States. He may then conclude, with logic and evidence on his side, that the problem of street people and the poverty problem are separate, that the means for solving one are all but unrelated to solving the other. But for most of us the visceral link will remain. Poverty taken to its ultimate extreme means death.

      These are some of the reasons why poverty has so preoccupied us. It is the generic stand-in for the social problems of our age. Solve the riddle of poverty, we have often seemed to hope, and the rest of our problems will solve themselves. As long as poverty exists, we have often seemed to despair, nothing else can compensate the poor for their condition. “Whatever progress has been charted on the graph of ‘progress and poverty,’” Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in her history of the idea of poverty, “it is poverty that still strikes the eye and strikes at the heart. It is as if the modern sensibility can only register failure, not success, as if modernity has bequeathed to us a social conscience that is unappeasable and inconsolable.”¹

      A continuing theme of this book will be that in fact most of the pains and damages that we associate with contemporary poverty in Western societies have little to do with a lack of material resources (beyond a certain point): that money in itself, by itself does not inspirit the dispirited homeless, make loving mothers of neglectful mothers, make a cheerful home of a dump. A few days later, even if the money continues to be provided, the dispiritedness and neglectfulness will be back and the home will be a dump with different furniture. The crucial qualifier, of course, is that phrase “beyond a certain point,” for below that point money can make all the difference in the world. So the topic for now is material resources and an exploration of that “certain point.” When the enabling condition is material resources, how much is enough?

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      I will present two talking points. The first is that, for purposes of opening up a wide range of ways to pursue happiness, “enough money” lies close to subsistence—not precisely at subsistence, but close. The second is that the first proposition can hold true, to a far greater degree than we commonly realize, for inhabitants of sophisticated Western societies.

      What Is “Enough” Money?

      The proposition that “enough money to pursue happiness” lies close to subsistence is a minor revision of the notion that money does not buy happiness. Combine this unoriginal proposition with the truth that you can’t pursue happiness if you’re starving, and the implication for the quantitative relationship of income to happiness is fully defined: If we have an accurate measure of happiness and an accurate measure of income, then the relationship of happiness to income should look something like figure 1.

      Happiness is very low until subsistence is reached, rises very steeply immediately thereafter, but quickly levels off as subsistence is left behind. Or, as Maslow would argue, once the physiological needs are met, the next level of needs arises and determines the organism’s state of satisfaction. How does this expectation compare with what is known about the relationship of wealth to happiness?

      FIGURE 1. On Money Buying Happiness, Theoretically . . .

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      HAPPINESS AND NATIONAL WEALTH

      The answer depends on whether you look at the relationship of happiness to income across countries or within countries. If the question is “Are people in rich countries happier than people in poor countries?” the answer seems to be quite close to the expectation. Very poor countries in which much of the population is barely surviving—countries such as India, Bangladesh, and some parts of sub-Saharan Africa—show very low levels of avowed happiness. But this holds true only at the extremes (and even then with exceptions). Avowed happiness rises quickly with national wealth in the early stages, then much more slowly among the wealthier countries. Figure 2 gives a rough idea of the relationship, using happiness data from the Cantril and Gallup international surveys, both of which used a self-anchored scale

      FIGURE 2. On Money Buying Happiness,