Thoughts on "Insufficient certainty," happiness, and the impact of the socioeconomic crisis

Posted June 9th, 2009 by stephen.healy

Last week members of AESA produced a set of reflections on a blog published by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert in the New York Times. Gilbert’s article, briefly put, argues that what’s threatening the happiness of citizens in the United States is not the prospect for a diminished standard of living as a result of the economic crisis (high unemployment, the collapse of housing markets, the decimation of invested retirement accounts) but the sense of uncertainty that this crisis engenders. Gilbert argues that people can accept a diminished standard of living and remain unhappy but they cannot feel happiness while experiencing the anxiety that uncertainty induces. 

 Jack Amariglio started the exchange with a brief observation on the role that certainty/uncertainty has come to occupy in mainstream economics as well as in popular discourse. What is of interest here is not so much the ontological status of ‘certainty’ or ‘uncertainty’ but rather the role that these concepts have come to play in organizing particular understandings of economic space. The chief “power” of the uncertainty thesis is its biological essentialism. Gilbert’s position is that it is human nature to experience uncertainty with a certain amount of anxiety and that, in turn, is a source of unhappiness. To validate this proposition he points to studies of people who suffer traumatic injuries. Those who suffer permanent disability—partial paralysis or loss of their colon—and are forced to adjust to life without limb/digestive function do so more rapidly than those individuals in whom there is a chance for recovery. According to this logic, once the anxiety is dispelled happiness can return. What makes the present economic crisis unbearable, according to Gilbert, is not diminished investment portfolios and rising unemployment but the sense of uncertainty they engender and the anxiety this provokes.

Our national gloom is real enough, but it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty. Americans have been perfectly happy with far less wealth than most of us have now, and we could quickly become those Americans again — if only we knew we had to.

 
It should be noted in the exchange that follows, none of the commentators take issue with the biological effects of anxiety or how individuals deal with the prospects of life after loss of a functioning limb or colon. Rather, it is the extension of this conclusion into the domain of the economy that is subject to critique. People with missing colons or limbs must mourn the loss and accept it because these are permanent transformations in the body’s condition. In relation to the US or the Global economy the question is whether or not “acceptance” (and a return to whatever happiness we may have) is the only option available to us.  Is Gilbert saying, without stating it directly, that the fortunes lost in this latest catastrophic economic downturn are like so many lost yards of colon or an eviscerated limb and that our only choice is to mourn our diminished fortunes and move on? It is, I believe, symptomatic that he cannot state his argument this clearly. My suspicion is that he is hoping his words will join with the chorus of voices which in effect tell us that the smooth functioning of the economy requires expert management and a quiescent preferably “happy” (optimistic) citizenry. As Rick Wolff argues in his response below, Gilbert’s argument amounts to telling his readers they are not to analyze, critique, or mount a political response to the current economic crisis but to accept it as natural and instead focus on our attitude and try to remain “positive” in our outlook.

 These initial postings precipitated a flurry of commentary coming at this question of the relationship between uncertainty, happiness, and economics from a variety of perspectives. Yahya Madra pointed out that while American ego psychology validates the connection between happiness/certainty/and stasis, psychoanalytic traditions operative elsewhere in the world are quick to remind us that such a condition can be quite stifling to the human psyche. Going further Yahya points out; one need not go to psychoanalytic theory to find other views on the significance of “uncertainty”. As Yahya points out, G. L. S. Shackle’s radical Keynesianism understands uncertainty as a condition of freedom. One could likewise consider how Hayek’s conception of entrepreneurial freedom is connected to the contingencies of the market place—a willingness to risk “punishment” for the sake of “reward”.
 

S. Charusheela further complicates this point, initially with a set of reflections on the “stability” of human subjectivity in the context of culture—where our attachment to “change” or “continuity” can be affected by our relation with “modernity” vs. “tradition”, for example.   In other words—the affective implications of uncertainty cannot be reduced to the experience of changes in the physical body or the economy. Instead, our relationship with uncertainty is context specific in a whole host of ways. As Charusheela writes:

With uncertainty, it seems to me that the issue of uncertainty (to toot my own horn -- have some articles on this in relation to households and feminism, and of course Colin Danby's work) has to do with the ways in which one secures and narrates or fails to secure/narrate a future-present in the world.  Since the future is by definition as yet unmade (the realist element that Yahya pointed to) uncertainty is a 'fact of life.'  But what then follows from this fact, I think, remains open in terms of the ways humans seeks to constitute or consolidate their future:  you seek to secure 'certainty' (i.e., make a future present) by institutionalizing or 'culturalizing' relations and ties and rights and obligations, but also seek to do so in ways that leave room for negotiation, for changes in your mind, for not feeling trapped, the whole host (the distinction between the psychological and psychoanalytic readings of the emotive and subjective dimensions of uncertainty) of reactions and adjustments.
 

Uncertainty is, indeed, a “reality” that one can receive with joy, dread, or indifference depending upon a larger set of circumstances that are, as David Ruccio insists in an Althusserian fashion, overdetermined. Althusser’s notion of overdetermination, as a part of his aleatory materialism, points to a long standing trend in the Marxian tradition of taking uncertainty seriously without imagining its affective implications in advance. As David reminds us—Marx in urging us to criticize everything no matter where our criticism takes us is also a way of understanding and even embracing uncertainty. 

While a number of the posts wrestled with ontological uncertainty, other posts considered uncertainty as a signifier and its relation to other signifiers. As Vin Lyon-Callo points out:

What if "insecurity" was used in place of "uncertainty"?  In one of his short books on neoliberalism shortly before his death Bourdieu describes how the multiple restructuring occurring was producing both economic and emotional insecurity for many people (of course, I'm not sure of the original French as I read the English translation).  I don't believe he was suggesting any particular causality or that this insecurity would necessarily determine any particular responses, but, rather, that insecurity was being produced and was a response worth considering if one wanted to understand how best to intervene politically. 

Insecurity is clearly a much more explicitly social reality that pertains to the lives of some (most) in US society—to say nothing of people elsewhere in the world. As Gilbert suggests, we can adjust to living with less—indeed ecological contradictions may compel us to. That is possible. On the other hand, as Ric McIntyre points out, if this new “lower” standard is accompanied by an intensification of the rate of exploitation we are likely to have both additional uncertainty and an additional level of insecurity. Economic insecurity affects not only our work lives but our ability to attend to other responsibilities, such as care for a sick parent (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/07squeeze.html?hpw).

While there are other thoughts worthy of reflection here, Sue Feiner ends our discussion of uncertainty by examining it through a marxian/feminist lens.  Susan points out that the feminist project (in its “social” and “economic” dimensions) has long been concerned with the conditions under which one can both inhabit and determine the meaning of gendered identity. Like Vin’s intervention she uses the work of Simone de Beauvoir to trace the signifying links between “uncertainty” and “freedom” and the conditions under which one can claim/transform one’s own being.

The insights here about economic insecurity, uncertainty, happiness, and freedom have both ‘individual’ and ‘social’ implications. Of course we make our identity and our history, but not under the conditions of our own choosing and never with any guarantee of an outcome.   The federal government’s partial nationalization of General Motors may or may not restore the company to profitability and this may or may not involve finishing the job global outsourcing started—namely allowing GM to divest itself from the industrial heartland. I suppose it is a matter of uncertainty whether or not the tax payer will be “paid back” for their investment in productive-capital, but what does seem certain is that workers and their communities in the Midwest will continue to suffer.   One question I am left with is how receptive people might be to the conclusion that Rick Wolff comes to in “Capitalism Hits the Fan”—what if the solution to the economic crisis actually involves a transformation in the class process? What if there was a social movement that had (and perhaps still could) direct(ed) economic-recovery towards the support of worker-owned and controlled enterprises? This was, of course, one of the main outcomes of Argentina’s national economic meltdown a few years back. In Argentina the movement of unemployed workers was crystal clear in their understanding that their attempts at organizing a new economy were by no means guaranteed. Instead, they regarded their chance for success as directly related to their efforts at building a solidarity economy in which each of the worker-occupied factories supported one another—facilitating in turn the formation of a larger set of social institutions that worked to produce a more collective/just economy.

As one Argentinean worker observed:

“Against the certainty of injustice we must respond with the uncertainty of social solidarity.”

 

Jack Amariglio writes

It's been interesting for me to read over the past two years the rise of the importance of discussions of "uncertainty" in explanations for the affects and effects and consequences of the economic crisis.  I don't buy uncertainty (or much of anything else) as an ontology or a state of nature, but I do see it as a discourse or set of discourses with varying and powerful, at times, determinations and material practices that contribute to an uncertainty ontology-effect, contradictions and all.  Nonetheless, it has been fascinating to note how much psychic disutility and anomie has been laid in the past 2 years at the feet of uncertainty and the decline in "happiness" because of it.

 

This is my perspective, and the one that David Ruccio (though he may disagree) and I laid out in many of the things we wrote over a period of about 15 or so years, culminating in our book Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics (2003) (hereafter PMME) as well as in some of our comments, individual and together, in the years after.

 

Any thoughts on this perspective?

 

Rick Wolff responds

There is, I suspect, a nice ideological effect achieved by (1) associating social malaise with something that is itself "natural" and hence unchangeable such as uncertainty and (2) then offering the solution of resignation to and "making the best of it." There is little social struggle here. There is no drive to alter social structures and conditions to improve life and no utopian longings shaping political action. Maybe the slaves in the US south, too, were "really" worried about the uncertainties of how they would be treated by the master, and so maybe they too might have learned from this Harvard (of course) professor how to "make the best of it." But many slaves and slave revolts eventually made slavery their target, something social and socially changeable, something that was overcome notwithstanding the uncertainties associated with both slavery and the systems that replaced it.

 

Neoclassical economics once banished uncertainty - in the interests of celebrating capitalism's virtues. Now a clearly dysfunctional capitalism provokes placing uncertainty into the center of an argument as to why efforts to change a dysfunctional capitalism would be misguided. Something here smells.

 
Ric McIntyre Responds

This article reminds me of something Antonio Callari said at one of the RM panels at the recent Left Forum. In the wake of the crisis, we should now expect a variety of arguments about how "Americans" need to accept a lower standard of living, how this will actually be good for "Americans," etc.

I would also expect a rather weird intersection between such essentially corporate arguments for "Americans" to live more frugally and the already existing ecology and simplicity movements which are so popular amongst youth. In other words, in the name of simplifying "our" lives, reducing "our" footprint, etc., such movements will come together to accept that the reduction in the price of labor power is also a necessary reduction in the value of labor power, potentially supporting a restart of the capitalist profit machine.

Of course these movements also have the potential to challenge capitalism. But without an explicitly class agenda in the current moment they may have the opposite effects.

 

Yahya Madra responds

As I see it, this argument is a perfect example of why such modern-day ego-psychological discourses are "ideological" in the worst possible sense of the term.  (Yes, I am resuscitating the science/ideology distinction—sorry Jack!) Uncertainty makes us unhappy -- economic crisis creates uncertainty -- economic crisis makes us unhappy because it creates uncertainty.

After reading the blog entry and the exchange on the list, I suddenly thought: why should uncertainty cause despair?  It could as well be the reverse—as Rick suggests in relation to slavery with toxic sarcasm.  The stability can be quite sickening and suffocating and uncertainty can be quite thrilling and invigorating for the subject.  In fact, for psychoanalysis this is exactly the case: "anxiety" (granted, a different kind of category than "happiness") arises from finding something where nothing should be.  An example from Žižek comes to mind:  imagine yourself opening a door and instead of an opening, finding a wall).

This type of psychological discourse, however, in contrast to psychoanalysis, lines up uncertainty with despair and cannot entertain the possibility of another mode of affective relationship with uncertainty.  And the alibi of this universalization of a particular affective mode is the control-group sanctioned experimental results—as if the scenarios or social relations covered by these experiments can exhaust the vastness of the social experience.

But we do not have to go to psychoanalysis to entertain the possibility of a different kind of relationship to uncertainty—as Jack and David discuss in their seminal chapter in PMME,"Keynesian Economics,” for Shackle, a realist choice-theoretical (read theoretical humanist) economist who is critical of the formalism, but not the individualism, of the neoclassical tradition, uncertainty is a condition of possibility of the freedom. (Of course, for a philosophical romanticism, freedom can indeed be the cause of despair.)

But lining up uncertainty and despair is not the only thing that is taking place here. One should note with interest the ease with which happiness is regarded as something of value. Speaking  of happiness as a sign of a healthy society at a time when the public discourse is saturated with stories of war, torture, greed, and economic despair (has it ever been otherwise?) is to valorize an affectively numb and anesthetized subject.

Again, this is not about replacing one form of essence with another (where unhappiness signals mental health, etc.). Rather it is about recognizing that one's affective relation to "uncertainty" is constituted in relation to one's subjective and political stance towards the particular organization of the social order (to capitalism, for instance).  To put it bluntly, we cannot abstract the meaning of these categories and affective registers (uncertainty, happiness, etc.) from the class perspectives and positions (which do not necessarily line up) of the subjects who experience them.  Ego-psychology, due to its modernist taste for abstractions and positivist generalizations ends up universalizing bourgeois experiences...

 
 

Susan Jahoda responds

During the month of April Jesal Kapadia and I attended a series of lectures in NYC in association with an exhibition titled On Certainty. The lectures are on line at <http://www.bosepacia.com/news-and-events/> if anyone is interested. Lawrence Liang’s presentation was particularly good <http://vimeo.com/4138745>

 

Ken Levin responds

I have been reading this exchange and want to thank contributors for their insights.

I'm surprised that we are focusing on uncertainty. Clearly, that does not reflect the current condition for many. Go ask the 2.5 million who just lost their job since Obama's inauguration. Their situation is certainly lousy.

 

S. Charusheela responds

I am struck by something here that is similar in structure, if not content, to other debates.  We are, of course, interested in uncertainty due, among other things, to the Post Keynesian intervention (hence Yahya's comment on Shackle) and the rise of this language in popular discourse.  But what Yahya's post really helped me see that is fascinating about these presumptions about the relation between uncertainty and happiness/unhappiness is that they follow a structure whereby we

i)                    seek to find a stable set of human/social relations or psychic states that follow from this or that arena (here uncertainty), and

ii)                  Presume that ethical judgments can easily follow directly from the psychological states or value of this or that state in itself (here from the presumed value of 'happiness' which has been correlated to uncertainty).

The content changes (care, community, individuation, etc. etc.) but the two-step structure of argumentation does not seem to.

Perhaps the deeper arena it lead us to, then, is the structure of argument itself? After all, we seek to find ethical valuations in similar ways for a host of things. Take, for example, the question of modern v. traditional in sexual personae:  I have never been convinced that commodified forms of grasping sexual personae are necessarily always wrong or inevitably limiting.  The fact that my niece wears 'westernized' clothing and looks borrowed from Hollywood and eschews desi-chic very aggressively in rejection of the 'traditional' under the sign of globalization does not make her unable to critique US foreign policy.  Similarly, the fact of arranged marriage or the adoption of 'traditional' sexual personae have not left my parents or any of my friends who adopted these personae unable to critique or renegotiate the problematic elements or meanings of 'tradition' either.  The deeper difficulty lies in the ways in which each group—whether adopting a 'modern/commodified' or 'traditional/non-commodified-perhaps feudal' (though I think that equation is a mistake as folks know given my critique of the category of the feudal) -- imagines, or fails to imagine the space for negotiation or self-reflection in the 'opposing' personae, and the ways in which, given that our engagements are always also social and never merely 'individual, expanding the space of possibility for one is experienced, rightly, as the foreclosure of the space of a future-present for the other mode of resolving the binary on either side of the divide.  Similarly with care:  on the one hand, to care properly requires a social engagement with the presence of others. But that engagement orients one toward the presence of the other in the relationship at state, whether it be friend, family member, colleague, inside of a commercialized or other non-commercialized relation.  And the better one provides care for near-present people, the more one prioritizes them above the far-unpresent, which provides some rationale for the more rationalist and un-emotive concepts of ethics at least in terms of why they may retain value.  This applies as well to the Polanyi-esque sadnesses over loss of community versus the modernist celebrations of the end of traditional forms of oppression (two sides of the same coin though presenting themselves as oppositional).

With uncertainty, it seems to me that the issue of uncertainty (to toot my own horn -- have some articles on this in relation to households and feminism, and of course Colin Danby's work) has to do with the ways in which one secures and narrates or fails to secure/narrate a future-present in the world.  Since the future is by definition as yet unmade (the realist element that Yahya pointed to) uncertainty is a 'fact of life.'  But what then follows from this fact, I think, remains open in terms of the ways humans seeks to constitute or consolidate their future:  you seek to secure 'certainty' (i.e., make a future present) by institutionalizing or 'culturalizing' relations and ties and rights and obligations, but also seek to do so in ways that leave room for negotiation, for changes in your mind, for not feeling trapped, the whole host (the distinction between the psychological and psychoanalytic readings of the emotive and subjective dimensions of uncertainty that Yahya points to stem, I think, from this structure of absent-presence of the future-unmade in the structures of psyche and relation, but here I stray too far from my field of knowledge vis-a-vis the psychoanalytic tradition) of reactions and adjustments.  And your efforts do not carry guarantees of success, as everyone else is doing the same, and not everyone can draw on the same set of discourses, material resources, etc. in undertaking that effort, so also seek to leave open the room to redo your efforts at securing a future-present as the conjuncture changes.

AND, it also remains open as to ethics:  The ability or inability to secure or not secure a future of a particular type rests on the ability or inability to intervene in the world, and the implications of that ability or inability for the texture of relations and consequences/possibilities for others.  Ethics can't be 'read off' the register of this map or relations and emotions in one way or the other.  In some sense, that is where I think the Austrians go wrong, they seek to read the value of uncertainty-as-freedom in a simple register of opposition to the Keynesian register of the value of stabilizing the unstable in the classic legacies of the British Planning debates that have lived on in our discipline as the Chicago-Keynesian debates and pretty much every other debate about state-versus-market since the 1950s.  From our perspective, both sides are wrong BECAUSE both sides are right -- the ethics of either certainty or uncertainty as social states depend, if you will, on the conjuncture and the structure of social relations within which the efforts unfold, so one can always find examples for EACH side where they are right, and counterexamples where they are wrong. So, what if we treat uncertainty as just that -- a realist proposition whose presence/analog within our own work is found in the proposition of overdetermination?  In itself, that gives you no automatic mode of reading off either psyche or ethics...which would follow as well for overdetermination, of course:  An obvious point, but one worth raising since it then also raises the question of step 2, the effort to constitute an ethics as a specific type of future-present in our engagements with the world as we undertake our overdetermined Marxian analyses/interventions, something I still struggle with and suspect will continue to struggle with for pretty much my entire life (in particular, I need to figure out how the role of contradiction in overdetermination shapes not just the analytical description of the conjuncture or the epistemological entanglements of undertaking such analysis, but also the ethical problematics surrounding the types of possibilities and foreclosures that emerge in our efforts to constitute some types of future-presents in our interventions into/necessary entanglements with the social).

 
PS.  It should be obvious to most folks, but in any case, let me thank Colin Danby, whose pretty serious work on constituting a non-modernist (as opposed to anti-modernist) Post Keynesian perspective, and especially whose work on care and the gift, have really helped me figure the trace of these two steps of moving from certainty/uncertainty to a) a presumed psyche, and from there, directly or indirectly to b) a presumed ethic; and who has helped me really think hard, if not always successfully, about the problems with taking those steps.  Colin moves then, as do many Post Keynesians/Postcolonial/Poststructural theorists, into the terrain of the material via the concept of the 'real', we do it via the concept of conjuncture, for step a).  The issue of how we move from step a) to step b), or what their relation may be, I haven't worked out well for myself as yet, but thanks to the many AESA folks whose writings on ethics and conjuncture have helped.

 
 

David Ruccio responds

I couldn't agree more with the points about the centrality of uncertainty in discussions about both the conditions and consequences of the current crisis as well as the relationship of uncertainty to issues of happiness. One of the things I find most infuriating is the ubiquity (at least in the MSM) of discussions of job uncertainty and the self-help advice that is offered as the solution.

Since we're on the subject of uncertainty (no pun intended), let me also note a couple of the philosophical connections to Marxism. One is Marx's "ruthless criticism" letter (the September 1843 letter to Ruge) in which Marx refers to "ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at." Presumably, these results cannot be foreseen, and are therefore uncertain.

The other is Althusser's notion of aleatory materialism, especially his comparison with the passengers on a train (in the interview with Fernanda Navarro, which Antonio and I used in the introduction to our Postmodern Materialism book). If memory serves me, Althusser draws the distinction between the idealist philosopher, who catches a train knowing from the outset the station they will be leaving from and the one they will be arriving at, and the materialist philosopher, who catches a moving train, knowing neither origin nor destination, and strolls through the cabin chatting with the passengers.

So, at least on some points, in some areas, it is possible to stake out a partisan position in favor of uncertainty (which is not, as Jack reminds us, an ontological statement) as the condition for a particular way of thinking--of criticism (Marx) and of philosophizing (Althusser). This, of course, is very different from viewing uncertainty as a problem to be solved and/or the source of unhappiness.

 

Vin Lyon-Callo Responds

What if "insecurity" was used in place of "uncertainty"?  In one of his short books on neoliberalism shortly before his death Bourdieu describes how the multiple restructuring occurring was producing both economic and emotional insecurity for many people (of course, I'm not sure of the original French as I read the English translation).  I don't believe he was suggesting any particular causality or that this insecurity would necessarily determine any particular responses, but, rather, that insecurity was being produced and was a response worth considering if one wanted to understand how best to intervene politically.  Perhaps some people who feel insecure will relish the new possibilities that may emerge.  But, also, perhaps some people will reach out for some sense of security and embrace the Lou Dobbs xenophobia, or the Glenn Beck moves, or the "faith" that Obama and Bernanke will solve their problems and restore some security? 

What I'm suggesting is that everything everyone has written thus far is very helpful for thinking about the ways in which this is playing out politically.  But, perhaps, at the same time, many people are feeling quite uncertain and insecure.  And, many of those people don't really like those feelings. And, that has multiple possible social consequences worth exploring.  When people are uncertain or insecure, how can we on the left help craft the possibilities for responses that we may find more appealing emerging as thinkable or possible? 

 

Dr. Lapin responds

In my simple-minded way, I would just like to throw in my 1/2 cent with everyone else who is criticizing the notion that uncertainty is necessarily a problem and “the” or “a” cause of unhappiness. Furthermore, what's infuriating about this is, as Yahya pointed out, the patently "ideological" and explicitly political purpose of this move, for it does not take any sophisticated philosophizing to realize that the purported relationship is false. If uncertainty is the source of unhappiness, why do so many people enjoy sporting events in which the outcome is uncertain? Why do so many people gamble? Why do people put their mp3 players on shuffle, or listen to the radio? Why do people sometimes prefer to make love with another person rather than masturbate? Not only is uncertainty not always or necessarily a source of unhappiness; even more so than suggested by Althusser's materialist philosopher train passenger (who, from David's short description above is possibly happy notwithstanding, rather than unhappy because of, the uncertain destination), uncertainty is often a significant source of pleasure, joy and happiness.

Vin's distinction between insecurity and uncertainty is useful, but notice even here, the gambling or sports examples (in the latter case because fans can identify with a particular team) suggest that insecurity, like uncertainty can contribute to pleasure and happiness. I think there is something to be said for people getting to choose uncertainty, or even insecurity, or not. If we take Vin's point, though, we see a kind of intellectual dishonesty in the slip from material insecurity to conceptual uncertainty. It is only in certain specific forms of society (including ours, alas) that economic uncertainty threatens security. This elision is a pre-emptive strike that seeks to reinforce the neoliberal lie that there is no alternative.

 

Kenneth Levin responds

With Adorno's conception of the "sublime", we already have extensive textual development of our issue. If people are going to embrace the thrill of uncertainty and channel it, they must already have a strong psychological, social, and intellectual foundation. Otherwise, uncertainty leads to disorganization and the likelihood of very poor choices.

 

Susan Feiner responds

I hope I'm not covering old ground here. Two things immediately strike me as bordering on the ridiculous in the MSM/MSE displacement of economic crisis with concepts of "insufficient certainty" and "happiness."

1) If there is insufficient certainty because people don't always behave perfectly rationally, then if they did behave perfectly rationally there would never be a crisis. Flawed humanity, not anything systemic, is the source of our worldly suffering. How Christian. This is a born again economic faith: Confronted by the ruthless, omnipotent power of GOD (the market), we can achieve salvation, and therefore be saved only by saving our institutions of saving. All hail the BANKS.  Even though insufficient certainty of the new religion and the perfect certainty of the old religion are superficially different, both end up elevating "saving" to a most holy act. 

 

2) Attempting to assess the functioning of the economic system via concepts of "happiness" or "subject wellbeing" (the frequent synonym) is silly, at least in part, because it is taking for granted that happiness is good, and that self reported levels of wellbeing actually tell us something useful about the self's state of being. There are some remarkable words on the subject from Simone de Beauvoir (in The Introduction to the Second Sex). 

For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens; we shall pass judgment on institutions according to their effectiveness in giving concrete opportunities to individuals. But we do not confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness, although that is another common point of view. Are not women of the harem happier than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them.

 In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.
 
Now, what peculiarly characterizes the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.