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> Skills | > Estimating Wellbeing | > In a group |
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> Skills | > Estimating Wellbeing | > In a group |
If a person wishes to "spread happiness," then it is helpful to know which initiatives would be most appreciated. Similarly, for leaders in charge of social organizations or nations, they may wish to make choices that bring satisfaction to their members or electorate.
In order to determine the overall wellbeing of the group, we could use the wellbeing of each individual and calculate an average of all of them.
The reason why we calculate an average rather than a total is as follows: a total of individual satisfactions would increase with the size of the population. It is not necessarily a good idea to increase the population, as it eventually could result in overpopulation and problems of starvation or lack of other resources. Moreover, the average is more meaningful, because it fits on our "traffic light" scale of satisfaction levels.
That's the basic calculation, which seems easy except for a couple of things: a) it's hard to get the individual wellbeing data, and b) there are some situations where we may need to make adjustments to the individual wellbeing data. Those problems will be addressed below.
While it is useful to rate the overall wellbeing of the group, it is also useful to know the results for each component that yields satisfaction. Are they satisfied with the homes they live in, with their food and clothing, with their education, etc.? If one is to organize for making improvements, it is necessary to know what is going well and what isn't. Likewise, it would be useful to break down the information across geographic areas. And if there are any people in a "disaster" situation (that we would rate as a "double-red" level of satisfaction), we especially need to know where they are, so they can get urgent attention.
Regardless of what is the average satisfaction, each individual needs to benefit from being part of the group. This is especially true when the individual is severely in need of help.
If a group merely attempts to raise the average satisfaction of group members, that can still leave some people unserved. That's especially bad if they are in dire need of the group's service. If that is allowed to happen, it will result in discontent and potential breakup of the group.
So, it is best for the group to define rights for its members, to ensure that regardless of what might be an "optimum overall average," that nobody is abandoned. This concept was covered during the previous chapter, but it is reiterated now. Protection of rights and reserving surplus capacity for progress are important parts of every group decision.
Now we will focus our attention on the resources that are to be applied for the benefit of the group, beyond what was already committed for fulfilling the rights that the group defined for its members, or for contributing to progress for the future.
To get the full willing cooperation of group members, each of them should be treated as equally important with each other group member. If we are calculating the overall wellbeing of the group, each person needs to be counted as one. No person shall be treated as only half a person, or as some fraction of a person, nor as being more than one person. This same principle shall apply to voting.
This differs from how a corporation counts votes from shareholders, which is done according to the number of shares each holds. That's because the corporation is designed to optimize wealth, and those with the most shares have the biggest stake in that. Also, the membership is entirely optional, as each shareholder can buy or sell shares as they please, and can exit the organization entirely by selling all of them.
For an organization that exists to support the wellbeing of its members, however, and where membership is not optional, it becomes critical that each person feels like part of the "all-for-one and one-for-all" agreement. That way, each member will be motivated to contribute to the success of the group, rather than being in opposition.
Examples of groups that have this characteristic include families and nations. (Note: Although a person can emigrate from a nation, it can be difficult to find a new home and it's upsetting to leave family or friends behind. It is not a suitable characteristic of a nation to drive some segment of their population away.)
In the previous chapter about happiness in one person, there was an example given for Joe's choice of a dance club. Joe had specific preferences for motivational fulfilment, and he assigned an importance level for each of them. This was used to calculate a weighted average for his overall satisfaction.
You can think of those weights as representing Joe's personality. It's what was important to him. Other individuals would set those weights differently.
In fact, it is fortunate that people have different personalities and preferences, so that they will learn different skills, and so that different people can fill the various roles that are needed in society. It is not necessary for each person to be the same.
Because of different preferences, this may mean that some people earn more money than others. Some may prefer to work long hours to earn more, while others may prefer shorter hours so they can relax more. Some may choose difficult or miserable work that is in demand, while others choose work that they enjoy more but which isn't as highly valued by the customers. Some may devote many years of education to prepare for a higher paying job, while others prefer a shorter education and to get to the earning part sooner.
Regardless, for determining overall success of the group, each person still only counts as one person. Each person's wellbeing fits on a scale that doesn't exceed 100%.
This is true for children too. A child is a person, equally important in a family or a nation as an adult would be.
When a nation collects votes only from adults, that's just because the child isn't capable or knowledgeable enough to choose from the candidates. It is expected that the adults will make decisions where they care as much about the children as they care for themselves.
Note: We call an animal a "person" when it acts independently (it's autonomous) and when it is capable of communicating and cooperating with other animals, so that it can function in a group, or that it gains those capabilities as it grows up. It includes all humans, across all races and genders. The only humans that would lack that would arise in cases of severe brain damage.
Earlier it was explained that each person has rights, and further that the person should be counted as one individual when assessing the wellbeing of a group.
When a person is assigned a right, it is assumed that the person ought to be granted that right along with all other people. It is a default condition. This is also true for being included within the wellbeing of a group. But it is possible for a person to lose a right.
Consider this scenario. Let's assume that a person has a cruel streak in their nature, whereby they love to torment others. We'll call the cruel person Jill and her victim is Jack. Jack didn't just fall down the hill to break his crown: Jill pushed him! So they go to the judge, and here is Jill's argument:
"Judge," she says, "we are both people and therefore we are entitled to equal happiness. Jack is only mildly hurt by falling down the hill, but I get intense joy by tormenting him. If we were to score his displeasure at being hurt, it would only score a -1, whereas my intense joy from cruelty scores a +3 for me. This results in a net score of +2 overall. If you had stopped me, Jack would be back to 0 and so would I be at zero, which adds up to a lower score overall. Therefore, in order to optimize happiness in our society, you ought to let me continue behaving as I do."
Do you think the judge will accept this argument? Would you? Most people don't wish to be victims, and therefore they will not support cruelty, no matter what malevolent joy it might give to the cruel person. Typically we only support "cooperation-compatible" motives, but not the "incompatible" motives.
If Jill persists in this kind of behavior, she will likely find that she is put in jail. There she will not only lack pleasure from her cruel nature, but she will suffer from a lack of liberty as well. Liberty is one of the motivators in our list, so the lack of it would definitely be a displeasure.
Do we calculate Jill's lack of liberty as a disadvantage, resulting in a lower "wellbeing" score for the society? No, we do not, for the same reason that we do not count her cruel joy as a benefit.
However, neither do we remove all of Jill's rights. She still must have the right to not be tortured or starved, for example. Excluding those rights is unnecessary to the protection of society. Arbitrary exclusions are never permitted, as they are counter to the goal of mutual happiness in the society.
A society is a social contract, and we are particularly wishing to have a social contract that spreads happiness. Jill has broken that contract, and in so doing she has given up a right to liberty, but not more than that. Apart from keeping Jill restrained, it is also the intent to reform her, so that she can again travel freely in the society and contribute to its success. It is an act of kindness to bring her to that condition, and a matter of some satisfaction to achieve it, if it is possible.
As a leader, you may wish to build a society in which each person is equally happy. That seems fair, doesn't it? However, you might discover that some people are hard to please! If one person requires twice as much of everything in order to be as happy as someone else, would you allocate more resources to that person?
The answer to that is "it depends." An adult may require twice as much food as a child, because the adult is bigger. So, if some natural disaster falls upon them that destroys their food supply, a kind society may indeed offer more food to the adult than the child during their rescue. But on the other hand, if we find that among two adults, one demands twice as much in order to be "happy" we might instead judge that adult as being greedy. In such a situation they would not likely get enough sympathy for others to supply them with the extra amount.
Another example is a person who could supply food for himself, but who has an extreme distaste of work, so that he wouldn't be very happy if he had to take care of himself. Will others in society supply him in order that he can be as happy as everyone else? More likely they would judge him to be lazy, and they would not transfer food to him.
The society will make some collective value judgements about what assistance they believe to be appropriate in various circumstances. Those judgements will depend a lot on what most people would hope to receive if they were in similar circumstances, or that they would wish for those who they judge as worthy (such as their children, family, or friends).
War is a similar situation to crime, but more extreme. A war may start as a disagreement that some people attempt to solve with violence, but which is not solved and it escalates.
Typically the people of the nations or regions at war do not want to have the war, but they get dragged into it anyway. Most of the citizens on both sides are effectively in the situation of hostages.
As an example, imagine a small group in one nation who forms a militia, parks themselves in the middle of a populated area, and then launches missiles into a neighboring nation or region. The officials in the neighboring nation cannot permit that to continue, so they need a solution. Most likely they would collaborate with the officials where the militia resides, to see if they could work together to stop the militia without harming the nearby citizens. It would be a police action, similar to capturing a criminal who has hostages.
But what if those officials endorse the militia's action instead? How will the attacked nation respond? Most likely they wouldn't be so careful about protecting nearby civilians any more, and simply drop a few bombs on the area. If it were their own citizens, they might be more careful, but to them it is just "collateral damage." What this means is that they have applied a "worthiness exemption" to those citizens. They have been exempted from their right to not be harmed.
You can see how this would quickly escalate into violence. The militia might have been destroyed, but now there are dead and wounded innocent people, many of whom have friends and relatives. Those people will assume that all this suffering was an injustice perpetrated by the neighboring nation, because that's the evidence readily available to them. They will demand that their own nation takes retaliatory action. Worse, their own leaders might also assert that it was the neighboring nation's fault, because they themselves don't want to be considered guilty or negligent.
So, they might make their own retaliatory strike, to which there will be a yet bigger counter-retaliatory strike, and soon it is a full-scale war. It is the nature of war to turn a small injustice into a bigger one, and soon both nations have many innocent victims. The people on both sides will be filled with fear and anger and hate. If at first there was a rational solution that would result in mutual happiness, they no longer want that. Each side wants instead to create as much suffering on the other side as possible.
An analogy to this is a campfire that turns into a forest fire. The problem is much easier to prevent than to solve! Wars have happened throughout history, often on a very trivial complaints as compared the destruction they cause. It is inevitable unless everyone understands how to prevent war and build peace.
If a nation does need to disregard the rights of foreign citizens in order to protect themselves against an attack, they need to keep those "rights exemptions" to a minimum. That means showing restraint in any military defence, so that the response does no more harm to innocent victims than they had suffered, and preferably less harm. Even then, it may be difficult to de-escalate the situation.
A nation's ability to respond to an attack in a very narrow and targeted way will depend on the severity of the attack. If one nation starts a nuclear war against another, it would trigger mutually assured destruction ("MAD"). MAD is not a deterrent unless the attacked nation is willing to respond to a full-scale attack with a full scale response. In this case they will not be showing restraint, to leave some people alive. If the attacked nation has fewer citizens, that doesn't mean they will leave some alive in the attacking nation. That might not be an adequate deterrent. Nobody is calculating wellbeing in that case.
That is why it is critical to avoid getting into that situation.
Thus far, the means of calculating wellbeing of a large group of people would be to survey them, or to survey a representative sample, and ask them questions about their wellbeing. The questions would each be related to their satisfaction on typical motivators, or perhaps a subset of motivators in order to keep the survey reasonably short. Each respondent would count as one person, and an overall average could be produced for each kind of satisfier and for the wellbeing overall.
If some alternatives for the group were being considered, the survey could address the specific kinds of satisfaction or dissatisfaction that the alternatives might cause.
On a very large population, however, it could be very difficult and costly to gather that information. So, it is more typical to use alternate measures instead. For example, if we wish to assess how satisfied people are with the adequacy of their food, clothing, and shelter, we might instead collect data about how much those things would cost for a person or a family, and then collect information about incomes of people according to family size. From this we could make an inference about how satisfied they are likely to be on those things.
We might also be able to assess education or health by a similar means. For other satisfiers it's not so easy, but one can get a pretty good assessment of basic wellbeing using available data.
At an international level, various methods have been devised to do this, such as the United Nations Human Development Index, which seeks to measure success on three dimensions: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and having a decent standard of living.
Other methods of international comparisons include the Quality of Life Index and the Gross National Well-being.
Among these, we might expect some variance between the results, depending on which organization conducted the research and how the did it. In general, any of them would be adequate to separate the "very awful" regions to live in from the "very desirable" ones. But among each of the extreme ends, there may be some close to being tied. In those cases, different research methods might result in different results on breaking those ties.
If we really care about trying to solve the "close ties," we could perhaps try to average the results, or to see which results seem most frequent in the various research reports. But most likely we don't need to know exactly, as the more useful information is how each region is doing on the various measures, and the causes of why one may do better than another. That requires more investigation yet!
Underlying everything, we need to understand what it is that gives rise to happiness, as it is the mutual happiness of the population that defines their wellbeing. If that is the goal, then creative and dedicated people can surely find ways of inferring how well that goal is met, and of implementing solutions to support wellbeing.
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