Do you feel happy? – Ecolib

• My appointment at Washington University was in the sociology department. In the fall of my fourth year, I ran into a friend of mine in the social work faculty in the hallway of my building… she casually mentioned that the social work school had an opening that I might be interested in… in a On impulse I decided to apply… I was offered the job and accepted it in March of that year. Two weeks later, the university announced that they were closing the sociology department and terminating all junior faculty… If I hadn’t bumped into my friend in the hallway, if she hadn’t mentioned the vacancy as an afterthought, I definitely would have would have found himself without a job and looked for a comparable position somewhere…

• —Mark Robert Rank, The random factor, P.133

Mark Rank has put significant effort into studying household incomes, delving into a large panel survey that follows households over time and conducting interviews to hear people tell their own stories. These experiences convinced him that we should pay more attention to the role happiness plays in people’s lives.

Coincidentally, two authors with much better name recognition, Cass Sunstein and Nate Silver, also recently released new books related to the topic of happiness and its effects. Their presence probably reduces the chance of this happening The random factor (TRF) will reach a wide audience.

It is rare for a book to sell more than a few hundred copies. Neither authors nor publishers have much control over what makes the bestseller list. There’s a lot of luck involved.

Rank points out that history has been changed by attempts to assassinate leaders, whether the attempts fail or succeed. The classic example of the latter is the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in 1914, which lit the fuse that ignited the First World War. Coincidentally, after the appearance of TRF, we had another example of the murder phenomenon. A young man tried to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally. Because Mr. Trump turned his head at just the right moment, he only suffered a wound to his ear.

In my opinion, it is very difficult to come up with a completely satisfactory definition of happiness. Rank writes,

• …a coincidental event is random with respect to the affected individual. In other words, the person who experienced the event could just as easily have been someone else. P.18

This is already problematic. It describes the person who was hit by a bullet during the campaign rally and was killed. But it does not describe Mr. Trump himself, in the sense that you cannot say that the assassination attempt might as well have been aimed at someone else.

In probability theory, there is the Law of Large Numbers, which states that if events are repeated a sufficient number of times, the average outcome becomes more predictable. Although Rank does not cite this law, he makes the point. He illustrates it using important professional sports:

• The more often a team can score, the less important the role of luck is. In the NBA, an individual team can score 40 or 50 times during a match, while in professional football or hockey a team only scores once or twice. P.71

Rank pays special attention to preventing poverty.

• My life course research has found that 75 percent of Americans will live in poverty or near poverty for at least one year during adulthood. The reason this rate is so high is that many unexpected and unfortunate events can happen to people over the course of 40 to 50 years. P.137-138

It is worth emphasizing that annual income varies greatly compared to lifetime income. This is easily and often overlooked. For example, we regularly read that home ownership in America fluctuates around 60 percent. However, people move back and forth between renting and owning. It was Rank and his co-authors who showed in an earlier book that nearly 90 percent of Americans will have purchased a home by the time they reach age 55.

In terms of annual income, I lived in poverty when I was in graduate school, but in terms of lifetime income, I was never poor. I believe that anyone interested in public policy, including Rank, should focus more on that lifespan income and less annual income.

When it comes to public policy, Rank points out that liberals are more likely than conservatives to view happiness as a factor that determines people’s income and social status. I agree with that, and I’ve even made the point that people would disagree less about politics if everyone had the same view of the relative roles of effort and luck in different outcomes.

In his chapter on public policy, Rank focuses on annual income rather than lifetime income.

• Perhaps the simplest way to provide an effective safety net is through a so-called guaranteed minimum income (GMI).

• …for an individual or family earning below a certain income level, the government would provide the necessary amount to bring them up to a minimum threshold. P.193

Although he quotes Milton Friedman, Rank misrepresents Friedman’s idea of ​​negative income tax. As Rank describes it, there would be no incentive to work if you could only approach the guaranteed minimum income. Instead, Friedman proposes that a household below a minimum income level would enjoy a negative income tax rate, no full subsidy to reach a threshold.

Rank claims that the US safety net is inadequate, but in my view this matter needs further clarification. We already have unemployment insurance, which addresses some of the risks people face. We have Medicare, which addresses another source of potential financial stress.

Above all, Rank does not take seriously the implications of looking at lifetime income. If people’s income varies throughout their lives, it means that they have the opportunity to insure themselves by saving in good times, in order to maintain their standard of living in bad times. It strikes me that one implication of his research results is that for most people, self-insurance would be enough to get by if they have a bad year.

We must direct our compassion to people with very low incomes lifespan income potential. For the many people who face variation in annual incomes, we should encourage self-insurance. Government assistance could be converted into mandatory savings programs instead of programs where eligibility is based on annual income.

Rank’s policy preferences point toward a more generous welfare state. But I think his research findings on the variability of income from year to year point in a different direction.