In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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used in the rest of the book. My objective in part 1 is to reach a common understanding about ultimate ends that readers from many perspectives can accept. Acknowledging this common understanding about ultimate ends doesn’t imply anything about whether a specific policy will succeed or fail in achieving those ends—such issues remain suspended for many more chapters.
Part 2, “When There Is Bread,” will, I hope, be for my readers what it was for me, an excursion into some fascinating topics. They include the uses of money in the pursuit of happiness, what “safety” means, the basis for self-respect, and my personal favorite, how people enjoy themselves. These are what I will call “enabling conditions,” the raw material for pursuing happiness. My purpose is to explore each of them, sometimes drawing on recent empirical work, sometimes trying to tease out the implications of questions that don’t have hard-and-fast
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answers (What is “enough” money? “Enough” safety?), but which lend themselves to more systematic exploration than one might have imagined.
My purpose is also to have fun with these questions, to play with them, and I hope that readers will relax and enjoy. You are not being led down a path that will suddenly leave you stranded in unacceptable company. On the contrary, as I point out in the text, a reader may with perfect consistency agree with the main points of part 2 and still disagree with just about everything I say in part 3.
That having been said, however, it is also true that part 2 presents what I believe to be evidence (even without subsequent interpretation) for fresh ways of looking at social policy, even if it doesn’t logically compel one set of solutions. The subtext to part 2 is that old clichés about human lives (money can’t buy happiness, the importance of self-respect, and so forth) examined closely not only are true but can powerfully influence one’s thinking about policy.
Part 3, “Toward the Best of All Possible Worlds,” begins with a proposition which must be true but rarely is acknowledged: Policy analysis is decisively affected by the analyst’s conception of human nature. One may consider a government policy to be practical or impractical, safe or hazardous, only according to one’s conception of what is good for humans, and that in turn has to be based on one’s conclusions about the potentials and limitations of humans acting as social creatures. For decades, the dominant intellectual view in the United States seems to have been that humans acting in the private sphere tend to be uncaring or inept, whereas humans acting in the public sphere tend to serve (or can be made to serve) the common good. I associate myself with the view that humans acting privately tend to be resourceful and benign whereas humans acting publicly are resourceful and dangerous. After explaining the nature of that view and the reasons for it in the opening chapter of part 3, I analyze the policy implications of the preceding chapters from that perspective.
There is within part 3 a change of voice. For two chapters (9 and 10), I argue on behalf of new ways of evaluating results and designing solutions to specific social problems, saying in effect that there are better ways to conduct social policy than our current one even if you prefer reform in small doses. Significant improvements, I argue,
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would follow just by changing the frame of reference for perceiving what we are trying to accomplish. In chapters 11 and 12, I use successively broader strokes to present my reading of the implications of the material—implications not just for how we might best tackle specific social problems, but for the larger question, how society is to be organized so that it best serves “the happiness of the people.” Chapter 13 closes the book by taking this line of thinking to its ultimate expression.
For many readers, this book will pose more questions than it offers answers. I will be satisfied with that. If we have learned nothing else from our problems in formulating good social policy in recent decades, it is that we need better questions about what we are doing and why. And I continue to hope that the longer the questions are pondered, the better the answers will become.
Charles Murray
Washington, D.C.
March 20, 1988
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A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.
—James Madison
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Measuring Success in Social Policy
This book is first about how people pursue happiness in their lives, and then about how government can help in that pursuit.
It is not a topic that is easy even to name, for “happiness” is an honorable word fallen on hard times. We have gotten used to happiness as a label for a momentary way of feeling, the state of mind that is the opposite of sad. Happiness is the promised reward of a dozen pop-psychology books on the airport book rack. It is a topic for bumper stickers and the comic strips—happiness as warm puppy. A book on public policy about “happiness”? Surely there is a sturdier contemporary term I might use instead. “Quality of life,” perhaps: “This book is about personal quality of life, and what government can do to improve it.” Or more respectable yet: “This book is about noneconomic indicators of perceived personal well-being, and their relationship to alternative policy options.” But there’s no getting around it. Happiness is in fact what we will be talking about.
What Is the Criterion of Success?
The first, natural question is why one might choose to discuss public affairs in terms of this most private and elusive of goals. The pragmatic reason is that policy analysts are increasingly forced in that direction by events. The experience of the last half-century and more specifically of the last two decades 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