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In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government
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In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government
Charles Murray
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This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
This 2013 Liberty Fund edition is reproduced from the edition published by Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1988.
© 1988 by Cox and Murray, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Charles Murray.
This eBook edition published in 2013.
eBook ISBNs:
Kindle 978-1-61487-632-8
E-PUB 978-1-61487-259-7
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To Catherine This book especially
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Contents
PART ONE: “THE HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE”
1 Measuring Success in Social Policy
2 Coming to Terms with Happiness
3 Enabling Conditions and Thresholds
6 Dignity, Self-Esteem, and Self-Respect
7 Enjoyment, Self-Actualization, and Intrinsic Rewards
PART THREE: TOWARD THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS
8 Policy and an Idea of Man
9 Asking a New Question, Getting New Answers: Evaluating Results
10 Asking a New Question, Getting New Answers: Designing Solutions
11 Searching for Solutions That Work: Changing the Metaphor
12 Little Platoons
13 “To Close the Circle of Our Felicities”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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The roots of this book go down twenty years. It was the spring of 1968 in Thailand, an insurgency was in progress in the northeastern part of the country, and the Thai and American governments were pouring resources into rural development—the Thai version of winning the hearts and minds of the people. Fresh out of the Peace Corps, I was leading the fieldwork for a case study of four villages. We wanted to interview villagers about the development projects in their communities and, more generally, about what they thought of the Thai officials in their district. We wouldn’t try to force the villagers’ responses into multiple-choice boxes; rather, we would just let them talk and then we would write down what they said, however they chose to say it.
After a few weeks in our first set of two villages, I was convinced the research was going to be a failure. The interviews were turning up only the most casual mentions of either the development projects or government officials. We weren’t going to have enough data to analyze. So the Thai interviewers and I tried a variety of fixes. None worked. We were confident that the villagers were being candid with us, but probe as we might, the conversation kept veering away from the topics that were important to us. Instead, the villagers talked at length about the affairs of the village. Sometimes it was about the family next door, the price of kenaf, or the new bus service into the market town. Often it was about governance—not the governance of the nation or of the district, however, but governance of the village.
The accounts that unfolded were far different from the ones I had expected. For while my two years in the Peace Corps had taken me to many villages, I had always approached them as a “change agent,” as that role was called in those days. We change agents had been enjoined to “consider the needs of the people” and “encourage local participation,” much as change agents back in the States were calling for “maximum feasible participation” in community development
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projects. But my experience had been that villagers seemed never to get anything done. Give a project to the village, and it would bog down. Now, with the chance to sit back and just listen, I was hearing about all the things that village headmen and committees (their committees, home-grown) did when the change agents weren’t around. They ranged from major projects like building a reservoir to day-to-day functions like reconciling marital disputes. Sometimes the mechanisms were sophisticated: progressive taxation to finance repairs to a village hall, renting a grader to make a road, designating one villager to go away to learn brickmaking so he could teach the others. Sometimes the mechanisms were simple. Not everything was always done well. In one of the two villages, the main topic of conversation was how to remove an incompetent headman. But good or bad, the governance of the village’s affairs was at the center of interest.
As the interviews accumulated, I had to face the fact that the villagers’ concerns were anchored in things that we weren’t asking questions
