Is It Possible To Maximize Happiness For Every American?

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that emotional well-being in Americans increases with family income up to ~$75,000 (in 2008 dollars). Beyond $75,000, more money no longer improves the emotional quality of the everyday experiences of individuals in the household.

I think one goal of every society should be to maximize happiness for all of its citizens. Naturally, the question I asked myself when I heard about this study was: "Would it even be currently possible for every American to maximize their happiness (under an admittedly drastic redistribution plan), based upon the total national income and the number of households?"

In short, the answer is YES.

The total national income is about $12.9 trillion [source; note that here income includes salary, investment returns, etc.]. The total number of households in the United States is about 105.2 million source.

$12.9 trillion/105.2 million households = $122,623/household

This gives everyone more than enough to be happy! Of course, it leaves no room for some people to make more money than others, which many people believe is an important motivational force. What if we just give every household the bare minimum of $75,000? How much money would that leave for the more ambitious members of society to compete over?

105.2 million households * $75,000/household = $7.89 trillion

$12.9 trillion - $7.89 trillion = $5.01 trillion

That's a whole $5 trillion that the rich can fight over! After all, that's enough for 5,000,000 millionaires, or 5,000 billionaires! Heck, there are only about 400 billionaires in the U.S. right now!! [source] Give a billion to those 400 people and there's still enough for 4,600,000 millionaires or 2,300,000 multimillionaires! Heck, there are only about 2,886,200 millionaire households right now! [source]

I'd say there's plenty of money to maximize every American's day-to-day emotional well-being ("the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, fascination, anxiety, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant") AND to give incentives for people to work hard.

Next post: what happens when we try to do this calculation for the whole world?

Oprah loses finger in accident

Well, okay, not really. But that's what a spam message I just received said. Is anyone else getting these ridiculous made-up news stories in their spam boxes?

A few other good ones:

Obama endorses Ludacris rap music

New National Anthem Proposed by Bush (Watch the video)

American hostages beheaded in Colombia

Batman is gay. Watch the proof.

Carbomb in Washington kills hundreds

IBM to file for bankruptcy

FBI on the Hunt for Facebook users

NASDAQ plunges 15% overnight


and one that is disturbing when considering that these are the subject lines that they think will get them the most hits:

Miley Cyrus describes her dream man

Olbermann on why Habeas Corpus hates America

I caught Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight. There was a guest host (a woman who has a radio show on Air America, can't remember her name right now), but they played an old clip from the October 10, 2006 show that absolutely fantastic. Found the clip on Crooks and Liars. Definitely watch this.

Random thoughts

Lately I’ve been wondering whether being in science is “doing enough.” I’ve been reading Collapse, by Jared Diamond, which talks about all these past societies that have collapsed due to environmental destruction, and then I watch/read/listen to the news about poverty and disease and war and hunger and environmental destruction, and I see how corruption and greed and hate and selfishness and pettiness and short-sightedness serve as seemingly insurmountable obstacles to solving all of these problems, and I get depressed. I kinda feel like I need to be doing something more hands-on to make things better. Science and technology are so abstractly related to human wellbeing. To be sure, they can do a great deal of good, when used properly. But it’s so much easier for science and technology to be used by the “bad guys” (esp. since they have so much to gain from it, and are therefore very, very motivated). Last night, while trying to get to sleep, I had a thought: I wonder how many CEOs and national politicians are psychopaths. I bet if we could study every member of congress and the president and vice president and all the CEOs of the major corporations that are making billions of dollars in profits while destroying rain forests and contaminating local drinking water, etc., and then compared the percentage of those people who are psychopaths to the percentage in the general population it would be significantly higher. I mean, some of these people just have to be psychopaths, right? How else could they pursue agendas that are so willfully damaging to the other 6 billion people on this planet so that they can drive fancy cars and fly personal jets and snort cocaine off of hookers’ tits?

Side note: I think I’m suffering from PTSD from 9/11. And George Bush’s presidency.

Barbara Bodine on UCTV

I caught the question and answer portion of what was probably an interesting lecture on UCTV while riding on one of those exercise bikes with a video screen at the gym this morning. Video is available online here.

The speaker was Barbara Bodine, former Ambassador to Yemen and coordinator for central Iraq in charge of Baghdad at the outset of the war in 2003, and her talk seemed to focus primarily on the situation in Iraq.

While answering a couple of questions (at about the 38 minute mark), Bodine brought up a few things which I had heard before but had almost forgotten about and which I think get right to the core of how the United States screwed up the reconstruction and just how criminally inept Bush's Department of Defense really was.

First, there was the "de-Baathification" of the Iraqi government shortly after Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech. Basically, anybody who had been a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party was not allowed to participate in the new government. While this might sound like a reasonable policy to someone unfamiliar with the social and political dynamics in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, in reality it was a tragically unfair decision. It was unfair because membership in the Baath party was not really voluntary. Bodine gave one example of a man who had never been a member of the party until his daughter was accepted into Baghdad University and he was told that he had to join the party or she would not be permitted to attend. Baghadad University was among the top universities in the country, so he did what any loving father who wanted the best for his bright daughter would do -- he joined the Baath party. Many others joined the party out of fear of being tortured or killed if they refused to join, or because it was simply what you had to do to keep your job. For the United States to make a sweeping judgment that everyone who had been a member of the party was a Saddam loyalist and therefore must be kept out of the new government must have deeply hurtful to all of those people who had only been doing what they had to do in order to stay alive and keep food on their family's table in a repressive regime. What's more, the former Baath party members were often the most experienced and well qualified people for the jobs that they were being denied now by the new Coalition Provisional Authority. This meant that the United States was effectively ensuring a lower quality of government employees across the board at all levels.
[More on the nature of the Baath Party and their tactics of intimidation to maintain control here.]

The second point brought up by Bodine was about the dissolution of the Iraqi National Army. Here again, the U.S. showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the social and political dynamics of Saddam's Iraq when they dissolved the army under the assumption that the army was loyal to Saddam. In reality, Saddam himself never fully trusted the army, which was why he decided to create the Republican Guard! Yet, here we were coming in and again making this unfair, sweeping judgment as to the integrity of a huge number of people. What made this decision even worse though, was that it created a large population (almost 400,000) of unemployed, angry young men who knew how to shoot guns and blow stuff up. This population almost surely provided a huge boost to the numbers of recruits joining the budding insurgency.

Finally, there was the determination of the U.S. Department of Defense to almost completely ignore the 18 months of work that had gone into the State Department's Future of Iraq Project. The Project was intended to answer the question of how to deal with an Iraq in which Saddam Hussein had been removed from power. It involved working groups that in total included over 250 Iraqi exiles in the U.S. from many different ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds, as well as international experts, academics and State Department officials. Basically, it was a fount of valuable information about what the U.S. should do in the days and weeks following Saddam's defeat. More than just ignore it, though, the Defense Department explicitly excluded anyone who had participated in the Future of Iraq Project from participating in the actual post-war reconstruction efforts. Effectively, "the more you knew about the reconstruction of Iraq, the less your chances of getting a job in the reconstruction of Iraq," according to Bodine. This attitude of excluding outside opinions and sources of information, more than anything else, sealed the fate of post-war Iraq.

how ironic

Dennis Kucinich seems to be getting more press for dropping out of the Democratic race than he ever did while he was in the race. Our nation is truly in a sad state....

Happy Belated MLK Day

I just had the fortune to read Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" for the first time today and it blew me away. It's perhaps as close to perfection as writing can get. I encourage everyone to take the time to read it in its entirety and to reflect on the genius of this man and his vision of justice.

I can't resist but include a few of the more powerful paragraphs:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Read the full text here:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

It's Kucinich Time!

From a recent Esquire profile of Dennis Kucinich:

But the deepest truth of all is also the most simple and most plain: The mark of the boy's poverty etched into the man's face. It isn't any sort of metaphor. It isn't shame and it isn't anger and it isn't hunger and it isn't need. It's all of those -- and more: the fire to make things right for those who truly suffer -- and it isn't going away.

No pity -- it's a matter of respect and gratitude. Whatever helped to make that boy grow up into this man, making fun of it means only that you never knew a kid as poor as this guy was -- and that you're too bereft of soul yourself to count your own blessings.

Awesome. Truly awesome.

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