No thinking person believes that more money means more happiness after a point. This assertion is no more controversial than saying that no thinking person believes that a person with five million dollars is likely to be happier than a person with four million dollars. The problem is to find the point after which increases in money no longer facilitate the pursuit of happiness.
We may cut down the range by asking questions of this sort: Suppose that at some time in the future the United States becomes so wealthy that the poorest families have the purchasing power of the current median (more than $30,000 in 1987), while the average income has tripled in the meantime. In that state of affluence, would you be prepared to argue that poor people are prevented from pursuing happiness because they have too little money? Or to put it another way, if all families in the United States had at least that much
[print edition page 47]
purchasing power, could we then forget about poverty as an issue for social policy and worry about other matters instead (even if the median had by that time increased to $100,000)?
In such a society, “poor” people—that is, people with only $30,000 in purchasing powers—will doubtless still envy the rich people, that being human nature. And it will also be true that people with only $30,000 will be unable to purchase some desirable goods, and will feel that if only they made $40,000, or $50,000, or $100,000, then they would have what they need, and would be satisfied. But granting that these reactions will prevail, the question remains: In designing public policy, will changes in economics be the answer anymore, if our goal is to enable people to pursue happiness?
In answering the question, remember that we have defined out of existence all issues of safety nets and minimum income and the meaning of the poverty line. We are saying that the poorest people in the country are making the equivalent of $30,000 a year. So if we are to say that, yes, people are still prevented from pursuing happiness for economic reasons, the policy prescription that follows is (as far as I can tell) necessarily the egalitarian solution, whereby everyone makes roughly the same amount of money. That would succeed in changing the terms of the envy (people then could concentrate on envying other people their power, talent, beauty, and other unequally distributed gifts). Would it enhance the pursuit of happiness among the previously poor people?
In the egalitarian literature, there is a presumption that income leveling would have some such utilitarian effect, but these arguments have historically been put in terms of societies in which wealth exists side by side with abject poverty. It is an interesting question to put to the egalitarians, and one that is increasingly pertinent in a world of expanding wealth: Why, in pursuing happiness, is one person with enough money impeded by someone else’s having more? As far as I can tell (the reader is invited to work through his own answers), the logic behind an answer ultimately has to hinge on some strange understandings of happiness—roughly on the order of, “my happiness is augmented by knowing that other people do not have more than I do.” Presumably this logic is most attractive to those who see unequal incomes as ipso facto proof of social injustice, an argument that I will not try to contest here.
[print edition page 48]
But if one is not attracted by the logic of the egalitarian solution, as I am not, then one is left without economic solutions for getting people off the hedonic treadmill. When we reach a state of prosperity in which poverty is defined as an income equivalent to $30,000 a year, the hedonic treadmill will remain, but policy solutions to the unequal happiness of the poorer members of society cannot be based on raising their income (I am arguing). Everything we know about how people have reacted in the past tells us that they are not going to be any happier when they are making $40,000, or $50,000, or $100,000, if the rest of society has continued to get still richer.
It may be objected that by assuming $30,000 as the floor I have fundamentally changed the terms of the issue. Currently, poor people in American society are genuinely in need of more material resources, whereas in my imaginary society the “poor” people who make $30,000 would not have such an objective deficit. This raises the fascinating question of where poverty begins, however. Macaulay, writing of Victorian England, chided his contemporaries for sentimentalizing about a Golden Age in the past when “noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman.”9 A century later, we think of Victorian England as a swamp of Dickensian poverty. Would a $30,000 floor really be “enough material resources,” whereas the current poverty line represents “not enough material resources”? Or has our current poverty line in fact already passed the threshold of enough?
Suppose, for example, that you put yourself in the position of a person in 1900. The same question is put to you, only slightly amended to fit the different moment in history: “Suppose that at some time in the future the United States becomes so wealthy that the poorest families have an income of the current (1900) average, while the average income has tripled in the meantime?” I suggest that no poor person in 1900 would have imagined that his material needs would not be met by the income of the average American at that time—which is to say, an average that made America at the turn of the century the promised land for poor people around the world.
The point is, of course, that we have already surpassed that millennial state of affairs from the vantage point of a poor person in 1900. The real purchasing power of families at the poverty line in the late
[print edition page 49]
1980s (in 1987, $11,612 for a family of four) is much greater than the purchasing power of the average family in 1900.* Does this mean that people at the contemporary poverty line are living lives in which they can pursue happiness? Not necessarily. Rather, I am arguing that the reason why they cannot does not necessarily lie in money.
All this is far from demonstrating that people with near-subsistence incomes have “enough” material resources to pursue happiness. In fact, two points should be conceded. One is that providing more money to poor people probably will increase the felt-happiness of the people who get the money in the short term (for the same reasons discussed under the explanations for the hedonic treadmill). The second is that if nothing else is done, poor people who stay at the same near-subsistence income while the rest of the society gets richer will probably become more unhappy than they were before. But our topic is the pursuit of happiness. Once subsistence has been passed, what are the relative priorities to be attached to further augmenting income versus other steps (which may preclude augmenting income)? To explore this question, I ask you to join in a series of thought experiments.
Thought Experiments about Being Poor
One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor. The diminishing supply of the formerly-poor in policy-making and policy-influencing positions is a side effect of progress. The number of poor households dropped dramatically from the beginning of World War II through the end of the 1960s. Despite this happy cause, however, it is a troubling phenomenon. From the beginning of American history through at least the 1950s, the new
[print edition page 50]
generation moving into positions of influence in politics, business, journalism, and academia was bound to include a large admixture of people who had grown up dirt-poor. People who had grown up in more privileged surroundings did not have to speculate about what being poor was like; someone sitting beside them, or at the head of the table, was likely to be able to tell them. It was easy to acknowledge then, as it is not now, that there is nothing so terrible about poverty per se. Poverty is not equivalent to destitution. Being poor does not necessarily mean being malnourished or ill-clothed. It does not automatically mean joylessness or despair. To be poor is not necessarily to be without dignity, it is not necessarily to be unhappy. When large numbers of people who were running the country had once been poor themselves, poverty could be kept in perspective.
