must arouse in any thoughtful observer this question: What constitutes “success” in social policy?
For most of America’s history, this was not a question that needed asking because there was no such thing as a “social policy” to succeed
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or fail. The government tried to be helpful to the economy in modest ways. It facilitated the settlement of the frontier. It adjudicated and arbitrated the competing interests of the several states. But, excepting slavery, the noneconomic institutions of American society remained largely outside federal purview until well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1930s, there was still no federal “policy” worthy of the label affecting the family, for example, or education, or religion, or voluntary associations. Some laws could be argued to have effects on such institutions (the child labor laws on the family, for example), but the notion that the federal government had a systematic relationship with the “success” of parents in raising their offspring, of schools in educating their students, or of poor people’s efforts to become no longer poor would have struck most observers as perhaps theoretically true, but rather an odd way of looking at things.
Over a period of time from the New Deal through the 1970s, the nation acquired what we have come to call “social policy,” with dozens of constituent elements—welfare programs, educational programs, health programs, job programs, criminal justice programs, and laws, regulations, and Supreme Court decisions involving everything from housing to transportation to employment to child care to abortion. Pick a topic of social concern or even of social interest, and by now a complex body of federal activity constitutes policy, intended to be an active force for good.
This brings us to the question of measuring success. For if the federal government seeks to do good in these arenas, there must be as well a measure of what “good” means. Whether you are a citizen or a policymaker, the same question arises with regard to any particular aspect of social policy: Are you for or against? Let’s build more prisons. Yes or no? Let’s dispense more food stamps. Yes or no?
For many years—certainly during my own training during the sixties and early seventies—social science faculties in our universities assumed a substratum of truths about why certain policies were good or bad things, and policy analysts did not have to think very hard about why the outcomes we analyzed were good or bad. We knew. Fighting poverty had to be good. Fighting racism had to be good. Fighting inequality had to be good. What other way of looking at good and bad might there be? And what other way of measuring progress might there be except to measure poverty, crime rates, school enrollment, unemployment?
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By such measures, however, the policies didn’t work out so well. In fact, by most such measures things got worse rather than better, and a fierce debate has raged about whether the policies themselves were at fault (a view that I share) or whether things would have been still worse without them. But even as the debate has continued, it has been increasingly difficult for policy analysts of any persuasion to avoid wondering whether we have been asking the right questions. Are we thinking about “progress” in the right way? What constitutes “success” in social policy?
Fighting poverty is good, yes. But if the poverty rate goes down while the proportion of children born to single women goes up, how are those two vectors to be combined so that we know whether, in the aggregate, we are headed up or down, forward or backward? Fighting racial discrimination is good, yes. But if the laws against discrimination in housing are made ever more stringent and actual segregation in housing increases, what are we to make of it? How are we to decide what course to navigate in the future?
Underlying these questions are others that ask not just how we are to add up conflicting indicators but rather the more far-reaching question, What’s the point? What is the point of food stamps, anyway? What are they for? Suppose that we passed out food stamps so freely that no young man ever had to worry about whether a child that he caused to be conceived would be fed. Would that really be a better world for children to be born into? Or let us take food stamps writ large: Suppose that we made all material goods so freely available that parents could not ever again take satisfaction from the accomplishment of feeding, sheltering, and clothing their children. Would that really be a better world in which to be a parent? The immediate “point” of food stamps is simple—trying to help people have enough food to eat. But food stamps serve (and perhaps impede) other ends as well. What’s the point? Ultimately, happiness is the point.
“The Pursuit of Happiness”
To make the case for happiness as something that a policy analyst can reasonably think about, there is no better place to start than with
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the stately and confident words of the Declaration of Independence. It is worth trying to read them as if for the first time: “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men . . .”
“Happiness” was not Thomas Jefferson’s idiosyncratic choice of words, nor was “pursuit of happiness” a rhetorical flourish to round out the clause. For the Founders, “happiness” was the obvious word to use because it was obvious to them that the pursuit of happiness is at the center of man’s existence, and that to permit man to pursue happiness is the central justification of government—the “object of government,” as James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 62.1 James Wilson, who was later to become one of the chief architects of the Constitution, was voicing the general understanding of his contemporaries when he wrote in 1769 that the only reason men consent to have government is “. . . with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed, above what they could enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature,” and then went on to assert that “the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.”2 John Adams calmly asserted that “Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of Government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.”3 Washington took happiness for his theme repeatedly, returning to it for the last time in his Farewell Address.4 The concept of happiness and the word itself appear again and again in Revolutionary sermons, pamphlets, and tracts.5
What may annoy the modern reader approaching these texts is that these eighteenth-century writers never stipulated what they meant by happiness. The word appears in a sentence and then the writer or the speaker moves on. It is as if they were addressing people who would of course know what was meant by “happiness”—not only know, but agree. And so they did. They did not necessarily agree on the details. Some took their understanding from Aristotle and Aquinas, others from Locke, others from Burlamaqui or Hutcheson. But educated men were in broad agreement that happiness was a label for
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a ubiquitous concept, the concept of the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. The logic behind this concept is simple and highly intuitive, going roughly as follows.
Anything we enjoy—anything that is a “good” in some sense—we enjoy for itself, but we also enjoy it because of other goods to which it leads. I enjoy getting a new car, let us say. Perhaps I enjoy it for the thing-in-itself known as a New Car, but I also obviously value it for other things such as driving places. Or: I value friendship as a good-in-itself. But I also use friendship for other ends besides friendship. Friends may educate me, which is also a good; they may make me laugh, which is also a good; or they may loan me money when I need it, still a third good.
The
