Towards a quantitative hedonics

It is possible to support the general theme of a body of work without thinking any particular part of it is interesting or successful. Susannah Clapp captures the phenomenon nicely in a Guardian review of the play Contains Violence at the Riverside studios. Here the audience sit on the roof of the theatre and observe the action in adjacent buildings through binoculars.

In Contains Violence the spectators aren't in the same building as the actors. You make up your own long-shots and close-ups, using their binoculars to zoom in and out at will; the headphones, which are designed to lock you into the action (you hear not just conversation but the slosh of water, the ring of a phone, the crackle of paper, the clink of a keyboard), also protect you from the sound of other audience members and from street noise. You are, weirdly, much further away from the actors than usual but aurally much closer up. Beneath the imaginary acts of violence, as in a dreamlike backdrop, buses pass by silently, pedestrians bustle, and ambulances speed to real emergencies. Occasionally, a non-actor - a cleaner or late worker - gets snarled up accidentally in the action.

So far, so illuminating: this inside-outsideness sets you up to look quite differently at your surroundings - which is not something The Importance of Being Earnest will usually help you do. But the exciting stuff has actually all happened before the show begins: this is a concept, an occasion, not a drama. Contains Violence has contrived the most thrilling of settings, but it doesn't manage to convey a real story or any richness of expression.

In other words, great idea, poor use of it. I feel the same way about quantitative hedonics. The idea of trying to use rigourous (OK, quasi-rigourous) economics to argue about happiness without all the usual moral biases or imposition of arbitrary utility functions is a good one. Most of the work in the area, however, disappoints. A good example is given by Jeremy Waldon in his review of Sunstein's Worse Case Scenarios in the LRB:

[Sunstein] is reluctant to abandon a method of measuring losses by how much people would pay to avoid them, even though it is hopelessly flawed by the fact that poor people would pay less simply because they have less. (We measure the value of a life by asking how much people would pay to avoid its loss, under various scenarios. Now, as a matter of fact, a poor person will not pay $100,000 to avoid a 10 per cent chance of death from cancer, because the poor person has no access to $100,000; so a poor person’s life must be worth less than a million dollars; and so it is not clear how the government can justify imposing taxes for a scheme that spends many millions of dollars to avoid this sort of hazard. That’s the sort of argument this book is inclined to defend.)

On this basis preventing jeering at polo matches is a much more important aim than giving clean water to sub-Saharan Africa since polo players are wealthy and will certainly pay a lot to increase their comfort slightly, whereas the citizens of sub-Saharan Africa are mostly (in dollars a day terms) very poor. So Waldon has a point: cash only works as a measure if we are comparing the happiness of people with roughly the same amount of disposable income. Even percentage of disposable income does not mean much to people who don't have any. So how can we compare two regulations or two pieces of charity or whatever rigourously in terms of their outcomes? That, it seems to me, is an important question for quantitative hedonics.