Review: Happy Ever After, by Paul Dolan

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sat Nov 9 20:59:47 PST 2019


Happy Ever After
by Paul Dolan

Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2019
ISBN:      0-241-28445-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     186

Paul Dolan is a professor of behavioral science at the London School of
Economics, but grew up a working-class kid in a council estate (UK
public housing; the US equivalent is the projects) in London. This
intentionally provocative book looks at a list of nine things that we
have been taught to believe will make us happy and presents evidence
against that assumption. Dolan's goal is to question social narratives
of success and to advocate for a different philosophical basis for life
decisions: minimizing misery (negative utilitarianism), rather than
trying to maximize happiness.

Happy Ever After is an argument against rules and, specifically,
against judging people by rules rather than outcomes:

  There is nothing inherently good or bad in a social narrative in
  itself; it can only ever be judged according to the costs and
  benefits of adhering to it in a given context. I therefore adopt a
  consequentialist position in contrast to a deontological one. A
  consequentialist's view on theft would be that it is only ever wrong
  when it causes more misery than it promotes happiness, whereas a
  deontologist would be duty bound to argue that theft is always wrong
  because moral value lies in certain rules of conduct. A
  deontological perspective typically does not allow for the
  importance of context. And yet I would contend that it is morally
  right to steal to feed your hungry child.

This is obviously a drastically simplified explanation of a complex
philosophical debate, but those of you who know my political beliefs
probably see why I picked up this book.

Before I dive into the details, though, one note about accuracy. One of
Dolan's most provocative claims is that marriage does not, on average,
make women happy, a claim repeated in an article in The Guardian (now
amended to remove the claim). This claim is not supported by the data
he references in this book. It was based on a misunderstanding of the
coding of results in the American Time Use Survey and has been
subsequently retracted by Dolan.

This is a good caution to have in the back of your mind. Dolan, as is
typical for a book of this sort, cites a lot of surveys and statistics.
At least some of those citations are wrong. Many more are probably
unreproducible. This is not a problem unique to Dolan; as the Vox
article points out, most books are fact-checked only by the author, and
even academic papers have fallen prey to the replication crisis. Hard
factual data, particularly about psychology, is hard to come by.

How fatal this is for Dolan's book is a judgment for the reader.
Personally, I'm dubious of most psychological studies and read books
like this primarily for opportunities of insight into my own life and
my own decision-making processes. Whether or not statistics say that
marriage makes women happier on average, Dolan's actual point stands:
there is no reason to believe that marriage will necessarily make any
specific woman happier, and thus pursuit of marriage as a universal
life goal is on dubious ground. The key contention of Happy Ever After,
in my reading of it, is that we measure ourselves and others against
universal social narratives and mete out punishment for falling short,
even if there is no reason to believe that social narrative should be
universal. That in turn is a cause of unnecessary misery in the world
that we could avoid.

Dolan divides his material into three meta-narratives, each with three
sub-narratives: reaching (composed of wealthy, successful, and
educated), related (married, monogamous, and children), and responsible
(altruistic, healthy, and volitional). For each, he provides some data
questioning whether following that narrative truly makes us happy, and
looks at ways where the narrative itself may be making us unhappy. Each
chapter starts with a simple quiz that asks the reader to choose
between a life (first for oneself and then for one's friend) that
fulfills that narrative but makes them feel miserable frequently and a
life that does not fulfill that narrative but in which they rarely feel
miserable. At the end of each section, Dolan shows the results of that
survey, all of which show at least some support (surprising to me) for
choosing the narrative despite the cost of being miserable.

Some of these chapters I found unsurprising. I'm unmarried and don't
intend to have children, so the chapters on marriage and children
struck me as relatively obvious. Similarly, the lack of positive
happiness benefit of wealth beyond a rather modest level is well-known,
although I thought Dolan failed to engage sufficiently with the risk of
misery from being poor. A significant motivation for pursuing modest
wealth for many people is to acquire a form of self-insurance against
financial disasters, particularly in the US with our appalling lack of
a safety net.

I had the most mental arguments with Dolan over education. Apparently
(and not very surprisingly) this is the social narrative that I buy
into the most strongly. But Dolan makes good points about how pushing a
working-class kid to go to a middle-class or upper-class university can
sever them from their friendship ties and emotional support network and
force a really miserable adjustment, and it's not clear that the
concrete benefits of education in their life are worth that. This would
be even clearer if we hadn't started using college degree attainment as
a credentialing system for many jobs that are not reliant on
specialized education only attainable in college. (I'm looking at
nearly the entire field of computing, for example.) Dolan goes farther
than I would in arguing that no college education should be
state-subsidized because it's inherently unfair for working-class
people to be taxed to pay for middle-class educational structures.
Still, I keep thinking back to this chapter during US political
discussions about how important it is that we create some economic path
for every US child to attend college. Is that really the correct public
education policy? (See also Hofstadter's point in Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life that some of the US obsession with college education
is because, by comparison to Germany, our high-school and middle-school
education is slow, relaxed, unchallenging, and insufficient.)

Altruistic and volitional may require a bit of additional explanation.
Dolan's point with altruism is that we value a social narrative of
giving for its own sake, without ego or reward. (I personally would
trace this to Christianity; this was the interpretation of Matthew 6:6
that I was taught.) He argues that letting people show off their good
deeds encourages more good deeds and helps others increases personal
happiness. People who are more self-oriented in their motivations for
volunteering stick with volunteer projects for longer. I thought of
free software here, where self-interested reasons for volunteering are
commonplace and accepted (scratching your own itch) rather than
socially shunned, and considered part of the healthy texture of the
community.

The chapter on volition recaps some of the evidence (which I've also
seen in other books) that less of our life and our decisions stem from
individual choice than we would like to think, and that some of our
perception of free will is probably a cognitive illusion. Dolan isn't
too interested in trying to undermine the reader's own sense of free
will, but does want to undermine our belief in the free will of other
people. His target here is the abiding political belief that other
people get the life outcomes they deserve, and that poor people are
poor because they're lazy or make bad choices. If we let go of the
social narrative of volition and instead judge interventions solely by
their results, we have fewer excuses to not collectively tackle
problems and fewer justifications for negatively judging other people
for their own misery.

I'm not sure I recommend this whole book. It's delightfully contrarian,
but somewhat slim on new ideas (particularly if you've read broadly
about happiness and life satisfaction) and heavy on studies that you
should be somewhat dubious about. I'm still thinking about the chapter
on education, though. How much you get out of it may depend on how many
of Dolan's narratives you agree with going into the book.

Also, although I didn't discuss it in detail, mad props to Dolan for
taking on the assumption that striving to be healthy is a life goal
that should override happiness. We need a lot more questioning of that
specific narrative.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-11-09

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-241-28445-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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