How To Be Happy: A 10 Point Plan

 

Photo by Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash

By Bryan Caplan

2020 felt like a bad year.  I was definitely less happy than normal.  Yet every day, I tried to be happy.

You could question the realism of the goal.  “Be happy during a pandemic?  When over a million human beings are dying?  When the global economy crashes?  When billions lose their freedom?  When immigration restrictions go from draconian to suffocating?  When police murder innocents in broad daylight?  When fanatics riot in the streets?  When friends lose their minds?  When they lose touch with friendship itself?  Not possible.”

A totally different reaction, however, is to question the propriety of the goal.  You’re not supposed to be happy when the world is in tatters.  Only a vicious person could be happy when fellow citizens are dying of the plague, when whole populations live under house arrest, when their friends are acting like Martians.  Just because you can be happy in 2020 doesn’t mean you should.

Emotionally speaking, this is a powerful point.  Logically speaking, however, the implications are absurd.  Fellow citizens die every day.  Without fail!  When you hear that total 2020 mortality is 15% above normal for the U.S., this means that last year death claimed about 7 times as many Americans as COVID took this year.  The upshot: If you can’t be happy now because your fellow citizens are dying, you can’t be happy ever.

And even if your own country was doing great, what about the suffering masses in every other country on Earth?  If your country is perfectly free, should you be sad because North Korea exists?  Should Norwegians be gloomy because of American police brutality?  As I’ve said before, any non-oblivious person has to choose between (a) daily misery, or (b) personal happiness in a world of woe.

When you put it that way, (b) is the only rational choice.  Social Desirability Bias notwithstanding, each of us has the right – nay, the duty – to try to be happy despite the shortcomings of society and the universe.  The key question then becomes: How?

I ponder this key question regularly.  Here are the main steps I’ve taken to pursue happiness in 2020.

1. Continue ignoring the news unless it affects you personally.  Dry statistics are OK, but avoid any information source that tries to engage your emotions.

2. Break bad but weakly enforced rules that get in your way.  Never be Lawful Neutral.

3. Refuse to be stampeded.

4. Don’t give up on your friends, but lower your expectations to rock bottom.

5. Living Dale Carnegie I: Try extra hard to make new friends.

6. Living Dale Carnegie II: Help your kids make new friends.

7. If schools won’t even provide daycare, cut the cord and homeschool.

8. Start new projects that you enjoy.

9. Move to Texas for a spell.

10. General rule: Ask “what options are left,” not “what options are lost.”  And make your Bubble beautiful!

Confession: My hardest realization of 2020 is that even most seemingly reasonable people go crazy in the face of a rather minor crisis.  Biologically speaking, this pandemic could have easily have killed ten times as many people – or people we’d miss ten times as much.  Never mind World War III.  Taking a far view, I expect a lifetime median of two additional global events worse than COVID.

But I’m not going to let that bother me on a typical day, any more than I’m going to fret about my own mortality.  Instead, I’m going to remember how lucky I am to be alive at all.  As I wrote long ago:

If you read Woody Allen very charitably, he seems to have a perfectly reasonable desire to live longer. But his real complaint is that the time he has is meaningless because he only has a finite amount. And his conclusion resonates with a lot of people, and has for a long time.

I’ve never understood the appeal of this argument. If a finite quantity of life is worthless, how can an infinite quantity be desirable? Sure, you could trot out mathematical structures with this property, but come on. If an infinite span of days is so great, what’s stopping you from enjoying today?

I suspect that many readers are telling themselves, “This is going to be a great year once the vaccine brings us to herd immunity.”  Wrong.  This is going to be a great year starting today if you choose to make it great.  And if you postpone happiness until society gets its act together, you’ll be waiting for a lifetime.

Happy New Year now!

(Source. Original title, "When May We Be Happy?")

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Reprinted by permission of the Liberty Fund.  The Liberty Fund is a private educational foundation dedicated to increased knowledge of a society of free and responsible individuals.

Forty Things I Learned in Forty Years

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

By Bryan Caplan

Today I turn 40.  To ease the pain, I’ve decided to write a list of important lessons I’ve learned during my first four decades.  In no particular order:

Economics

1. Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

2. Almost anyone can understand supply-and-demand if they calmly listen.  Unfortunately, the inverse is also true.

3. Poverty is terrible, and economic growth, not redistribution, is the cure.

4. The proximate causes of unemployment are labor market regulation and workers’ misguided beliefs about fairness.  But the fundamental cause of unemployment is excessive wages.

5. Free competition is far superior to “perfect” competition.

6. Governments with fiat money have near-absolute power over nominal GDP, but much less over real GDP or employment.

7. Moral hazard and adverse selection are largely the product of – not a rationale for – regulation of insurance.

8. Immigration restrictions are a fruitless crime – and do more harm than all other government regulations combined.

9. Communism was a disaster because of bad incentives, not lack of incentives.

10. The last two centuries of rising population and prosperity should fill us with awe – and the best is yet to come.

Philosophy

1. The greatest philosophical mistake is to demand proof for the obvious.  See Hume.

2. The second greatest philosophical mistake is to try to prove the obvious.  See Descartes.

3. If you can’t explain your position clearly in simple language, you probably don’t understand it yourself.

4. When possible, resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

5. Ignoring the facts of dualism and radical free will is anti-empirical and unscientific.

6. Talking about morality if there are no moral facts is like talking about unicorns if there aren’t any unicorns.

7. There are moral facts.

8. Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

9. Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

10. The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”

Politics

1. Voters are irrational.  So is believing otherwise.

2. Government isn’t a solution to externalities problems; it’s the best example of the problem.

3. The main output of government isn’t “public goods,” but private goods that people pretend to want much more than they really do.  See Social Security and Medicare.

4. People rarely make the the most internally consistent argument for government action: paternalism.

5. The realistic path to freer markets isn’t “free-market reform,” but austerity.

6. Democrats and Republicans are about as different as Catholics and Protestants – and 80% of the union of their mutual recriminations is true.

7. Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far better.  After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse.

8. Big reasons why democracy isn’t worse: Unequal participation, political slack, and status quo bias.

9. Libertarians are the dhimmis of democracy.

10. Despite everything, life in First World democracies is amazingly good by world and historic standards and will keep getting better.  So cheer up.

Life

1. Life is a gift, and the more the better.

2. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  Yep.

3. Be friendly as a matter of policy.  Turn the other cheek in the face of ad hominem attacks.  It might seem crazy, but it works.

4. Obsessiveness is an powerful solution for physical and social problems.  Unfortunately it’s also a major cause of emotional problems.

5. Once you’re an adult, religious people will leave you alone if you leave them alone.

6. People vary more widely than you think.  Tell yourself it’s nobody’s fault.

7. Selection is the key to social harmony.  Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are.  If you don’t see any around, quest for them.

8. Raise your children with kindness and respect.  “I’m your parent, not you’re friend” is a reason to treat your kids better than their peers do, not worse.

9. Your mind ages at a slower rate than you expect when you’re young, your body at a faster rate.

10.  Evolutionary psychology is by far the best universal theory of human motivation.  Ignore it at your own peril.

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Reprinted by permission of the Liberty Fund.  The Liberty Fund is a private educational foundation dedicated to increased knowledge of a society of free and responsible individuals.

Ten principles for making friends

 

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

By Bryan Caplan

Here are ten more principles of social success that I’d add to Carnegie’s classic lists.

1. Before you treat another person in a less-than-perfectly-pleasant way, always ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish?”  You’ll rarely have a good answer for yourself.

2. Before you speak to another person in a less-than-perfectly-pleasant way, always ask yourself, “Is there a more constructive way to say this?”  There almost always is.

3. When you witness one person treating another in a less-than-perfectly pleasant way, always ask yourself, “What was he trying to accomplish?!” and “What would have been a more constructive way to say that?”  The extra distance – and constant practice – really pay off.

4. “Go with the flow” should be your default.  It is conflict that demands justification.

5. Under-promise and over-deliver.

6. If you think of a nice, true thing to tell another person, say it.  It will probably be the best thing that happens to them all day.

7. On average, intimidation and deception have low returns and high risks.  They work well in rare circumstances, but most people are terrible at identifying those circumstances in advance.  As a rule, intimidation and deception are acts of impulse, not a conscious strategy – and it shows.

8. On average, being pleasant has high returns and low risks.  It fails in rare circumstances, but most people are terrible at identifying those circumstances in advance.

9. Don’t bottle up negative feelings, but don’t release them impulsively, either.  If someone is making you angry or sad, sharing your feelings with this person usually just makes your problem worse.  Instead, unburden yourself with very close friends.  If sharing your feelings with anyone is likely to just make your problem worse, try writing down your feelings in private until you have nothing left to say.

10. Think of your candor as a gift that other people must earn with equanimity and good humor.  Try to surround yourself with people who have earned your gift.

(Original title, "How to Win Friends and Influence People: Supplementary Principles.")

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Reprinted by permission of the Liberty Fund.  The Liberty Fund is a private educational foundation dedicated to increased knowledge of a society of free and responsible individuals.

Credits

All blog posts on this website are written by Dr. Bryan Caplan,  professor of economics at George Mason University. 

Each post originally appeared at the EconLog blog. They are reprinted by permission of Bryan Caplan and the blog's publisher, the Liberty Fund. 

Liberty Fund is a private educational foundation dedicated to increased knowledge of a society of free and responsible individuals.