In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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or the rich one?
This time, it seems likely that some people will choose the rich couple—or more accurately, it is possible to think of ways in which the decision might be tipped in that direction. For example, a wealthy person who is indifferent to a child’s education might nonetheless ship the child off to an expensive boarding school at the earliest possible age. In that case, it is conceivable that putting the child with the wealthy ne’er-do-wells is preferable to the poor-but-virtuous couple, if they end up providing the values of the poor family through the surrogate parenting provided by the boarding school—dubious, but conceivable. One may imagine other ways in which the money might be used to compensate for the inadequacies of the parents. But failing those very chancy possibilities, I suggest that a great many parents on all sides of political fences will knowingly choose hunger and rags for their child rather than wealth.
Again, the question is Why? What catastrophes are going to befall the child placed in the wealthy home? What is the awful fate? Would it be so terrible if he grew up to be thoughtlessly rich? The child will live a life of luxury and have enough money to buy himself out of almost any problem that might arise. Why not leave it at that? Or let me put the question positively: In deciding where to send the child, what is one trying to achieve by these calculations and predictions and hunches? What is the good one is trying to achieve? What is the criterion of success?
One may attach a variety of descriptors to the answer. Perhaps you want the child to become a reflective, responsible adult. To value honesty and integrity. To be able to identify sources of lasting satisfaction. Ultimately, if I keep pushing the question (Why is honesty good? Why is being reflective good?), you will give the answer that permits no
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follow-up: You want your child to be happy. You are trying to choose the guardians who will best enable your child to pursue happiness. And, forced to a choice, material resources come very low on your list of priorities.
Reprise: A Question of Priorities
We have begun with the most obvious of all the enabling conditions. How is policy to be arranged so that everyone has enough material resources to pursue happiness? Let me try to draw together the discussion in terms of the usual way of construing the problem, the problem reconstructed according to the pursuit-of-happiness criterion, and where this leaves us.
Construing Progress: The Usual Understanding. The contemporary intellectual basis for talking about public policy and material resources has been redistribution. Great inequalities in material resources exist. They are at the least morally suspect and, if they are morally permissible at all, must be justified.* A main function of public policy is to define a floor of material resources below which no one should be permitted to fall. The criteria for assessing public policy are the poverty line (progress consists of reducing the number of people who fall
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below it) and distribution (a widening gap between rich and poor is in itself seen as a problem, independently of other considerations).
One need not endorse the ethics of redistribution to be in favor of a redistributive solution to the problem of poverty, however. Probably everyone who is troubled by the problem of poverty in America has at one time or another thought something like this: “America is so rich that it can afford to give everyone a decent income. Let’s do it and be done with it: Guarantee an adequate material base, then let people work out the other goods they need to be happy as best they can. Maybe it’s not the ideal way, but at least I won’t have to worry about poverty anymore.” The underlying assumption in all such formulations, whether they are proposed enthusiastically from the left or reluctantly from the right, is that the way in which people provide for their material needs is more or less independent of the way in which they provide for their other needs.
Recasting the Role of Material Resources. In this chapter, I have limited the discussion to a narrow point: In deciding how to enhance the ability of people to pursue happiness, solutions that increase material resources beyond subsistence independently of other considerations are bound to fail. Money per se is not very important. It quickly becomes trivial. Depending on the other nonmonetary enabling conditions, poor people can have a rich assortment of ways of pursuing happiness, or affluent people can have very few.
The thought experiments and the farfetched scenarios of future general affluence were stratagems intended not to convince you of any particular policy implications, but rather to induce you to entertain this possibility: When a policy trade-off involves (for example) imposing material hardship in return for some other policy good, it is possible that imposing the material hardship is the right choice. For example, regarding the “orphaned child” scenario: If a policy leads to a society in which there are more of the first kind of parents and fewer of the second, the sacrifices in material resources available to the children involved might conceivably be worth it.
The discussion, with its steady use of the concept of “near-subsistence” as “enough material resources to pursue happiness,” has also been intended to point up how little our concept of poverty has
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to do with subsistence. Thus, for example, if one simply looks at the end result of how people live, a natural observation of contemporary America might be that we have large numbers of people who are living at a subsistence or sub-subsistence level. But I have been using “subsistence” in its original sense: enough food to be adequately nourished, plus the most basic shelter and clothing. The traditional Salvation Army shelter provides subsistence, for example. In Western countries, and perhaps especially the United States, two problems tend to confuse the issue. One is that we have forgotten what subsistence means, so that an apartment with cockroaches, broken windows, and graffiti on the walls may be thought of as barely “subsistence level,” even if it also has running water, electricity, heat, a television, and a pile of discarded fast-food cartons in the corner. It might be an awful place to live (for the reasons that the South Bronx can be an awful place to live), but it bears very little resemblance to what “subsistence” means to most of the world. Secondly, we tend to confuse the way in which some poor people use their resources (which indeed can often leave them in a near-subsistence state) with the raw purchasing power of the resources at their disposal. Take, for example, the apartment I just described and move a middle-class person with middle-class habits and knowledge into it, given exactly the same resources. Within days it would be still shabby but a different place. All of which is precisely the point of the thought experiments about Thailand and the South Bronx: Money has very little to do with living a poverty-stricken life. Similarly, “a subsistence income” has very little to do with what Americans think of as poverty.
That being the case, I am arguing that the job of designing good public policy must be reconstrued. We do not have the option of saying, “First we will provide for the material base, then worry about the other enabling conditions.” The enabling conditions interact. The ways in which people go about achieving safety, self-respect, and self-fulfillment in their lives are inextricably bound up with each other and with the way in which people go about providing for their material well-being. We do not have the option of doing one good thing at a time.
In the discussion of the enabling conditions, I have put material resources first on the list only because that is where it has stood in
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the political debate. I am suggesting that properly it should be put last. This stance still leaves us with the problem of making sure that the basic material resources for pursuing happiness are available to all. Warmth, shelter, and food are still essential. Under present social policy, large numbers of people are cold, unsheltered, and hungry. But before we decide how these basics are to be provided, let us examine the framework within which they should be provided if the other nutrients of happiness are to be available as well.
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