Geek Heresy (16 page)

It’s just not true, though, that not-for-profit models can’t have sustainable impact at scale: Most developed countries have government-subsidized universal health care.
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Even Rwanda has national health insurance that covered 92 percent of its population in 2010.
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In 2011,
91 percent of the world’s school-aged children were enrolled in primary education, most of them in government-subsidized schools.
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The International Committee of the Red Cross has helped “victims of war and armed violence” around the world for over 150 years. It raises more than $1 billion a year, almost entirely through private donations.
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Other nonprofits, such as CARE, Goodwill, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, and United Way, are similarly large and effective. However much governments and nonprofits are criticized for their waste, none of them generates $300 million payouts for their chief executives and pretends that’s an effective way to direct goodwill.

I’ve participated in several social enterprise competitions as a coach, mentor, or judge. Talented twenty-somethings feverishly pitch projects, hoping, like Blake Mycoskie, to “do well by doing good.” The projects are tested mainly for their financial sustainability (read “profitability”), their scalability (read “market penetration”), and novelty and uniqueness (read “potential monopoly power”). In the mad rush to conjure money out of hoi polloi, the “social return on investment” often becomes an afterthought. It’s as if there’s no point to saving lives or teaching children if you have to keep paying to do so.

Real social change is no easier to achieve with social enterprises than with not-for-profit models. The hype, though, allows business success to be confused with social impact.

Happiness and Its Discontents

Social causes seek economic prosperity, social justice, human dignity, and expanded freedoms, so packaged interventions aim for these goals, too. But what if the goals are themselves misguided?

In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan proposed an alternative measure of progress. He announced that instead of Gross National Product, his country would judge itself by what he called Gross National Happiness. And before we deride a young king of a small, far-off land for his idealism, it’s worth remembering that Thomas Jefferson, representing a once young, once far-off land, enshrined “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right on par with life and liberty.

Jefferson and the Bhutanese king knew what they were talking about. Philosophers have proposed happiness as the highest good and the ultimate goal of human activity at least since the Buddha and Aristotle. A couple of thousand years later, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill expanded the notion to whole societies. In their utilitarian philosophy, the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number.

Amazingly, in the past decade or so even no-nonsense economists have started taking happiness seriously. Neuroscientists such as Richard Davidson have shown that certain kinds of brain activity – measurable by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – are correlated with self-reports of happiness.
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Alluding to this work, the eminent British economist Richard Layard wrote, “Now we know that what people say about how they feel corresponds closely to the actual levels of activity in different parts of the brain, which can be measured in standard scientific ways.” Satisfied that happiness was real, Layard wrote an entire book arguing that happiness, not wealth, should be the basis for public policy.
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All of this adds to an ongoing case made by scholars, policymakers, and activists who argue that today’s dominant metrics of national progress are deficient. In 1995,
The Atlantic
asked, “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?”
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The country collectively repeated that question in 2009. GDP recovered from the recession, but employment didn’t. A good metric should correlate with the overall well-being of a country. What’s the point of a metric that increases while so many people are miserable?

King Wangchuk was ahead of his time. There’s no point to wealth or social change unless they lead to greater happiness. War, illness, hunger, thirst, poverty, oppression, ignorance, unemployment, and powerlessness are problems in great part because they’re obstacles to happiness. Prosperity leads to the material requirements for happiness. Justice seeks the moral conditions for happiness. Dignity lays the material and political basis for happiness. And freedom, as Nobel-laureate economist Amartya Sen wrote, allows people to live “lives we have reason to value” – that is, lives we think would make us happy.
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If there were a community of poor, ignorant, marginalized people who were nevertheless always happy, we
wouldn’t feel any need to help them. In any case, they probably wouldn’t want our “help.”

With this recognition has come a wave of public interest in private happiness. Books with titles such as
Authentic Happiness
,
Stumbling on Happiness
,
The Happiness Hypothesis
, and
The Happiness Project
are proliferating, competing to counsel us on how we can individually be happier.
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Global leaders have also turned to happiness and related concepts. In 2009, French president Nicholas Sarkozy commissioned a group featuring five Nobel Prize winners to devise a metric that captured true quality of life.
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In 2010, British prime minister David Cameron prompted his government to start measuring happiness.
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And at his second inauguration in 2013, President Barack Obama reprised Jefferson: “That is our generation’s task – to make . . . life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.”
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The Ant and the Grasshopper

If you had to suppress a giggle at the mention of Gross National Happiness – or perhaps you didn’t even bother to suppress it – you’re not alone. Happiness seems like cotton candy, pink and fluffy. It calls to mind a laughing young satyr prancing about in some meadow while others hunker down to the serious business of life. Scholars try to make happiness more respectable by calling it “subjective well-being,” but that doesn’t make it any less fluffy.

What taints happiness? One problem is captured in Aesop’s tale of the ant and the grasshopper. During the summer, the grasshopper sings and frolics while the ant toils to prepare for winter. Come winter, the grasshopper suffers in the cold while the ant sits comfortably fed in his lair. In the original Greek fable, when the grasshopper knocks on the door, the ant tells the grasshopper to go dance and shuts the door in his face.
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In modern versions of the story – cleansed of unhappy endings – the ant takes the grasshopper in, and the grateful grasshopper realizes the error of his ways.

Most people would agree that it’s the ant who is happier in the long run, even though it’s the grasshopper who seems explicitly
focused on happiness. In other words, short-term pleasure often leads to long-term dissatisfaction. That intuition underlies the psychologist’s distinction between
hedonia
and
eudaimonia
. Pleasure-seeking hedonism is questionable, but maybe long-term eudaimonic life satisfaction is good.

But is that enough? Modern psychological tests of happiness, which policymakers increasingly rely on, ask questions about current mood and life satisfaction so far. According to these measures, happiness depends on the present and the past.
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Yet the future is where all of our potential happiness lies. If happiness is present mood and present satisfaction, then efforts to increase happiness will tend, grasshopper-like, to focus on today, not tomorrow. This is exactly what is recommended by the recent spate of happiness literature. Take
The How of Happiness
, in which leading positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky lists 12 Happiness Activities and 5 Hows Behind Sustainable Happiness. The latter include positive emotion; variety in life; social support; motivation, effort, and commitment; and habit. The first two are clearly present-focused, and even the last three are upon closer reading. Consider motivation, effort, and commitment. These sound more ant than grasshopper, but Lyubomirsky gives the section only four pages of which just one is dedicated to the question “What if you’re too busy?” Her answer is to do simple things that take no additional time, such as “observing your job, partner, and children with a new, more charitable and optimistic perspective, saying a kind word to your spouse, distracting yourself when you find yourself dwelling on something, uttering a short prayer before a meal, smiling at strangers during your commute, empathizing with someone who has hurt you, and so on.”
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Nothing in the section suggests that motivation, effort, and commitment require motivation, effort, and commitment. Like so much positive psychology, all Lyubomirsky recommends are fleeting attempts to improve one’s present mood.
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There is nothing about practicing habits of courage, diligence, or integrity that might enhance future happiness. And in the course of her 350-plus pages, only ten are devoted to creating more happiness for others through kindness. Even there, the main
concern is how kindness promotes one’s own happiness, not others’. So, according to one of the world’s foremost happiness experts, happiness is not about laying the foundation today for happiness tomorrow or happiness for others, but to do more as pop musician Bobby McFerrin sang: “Don’t worry, be happy.”

Happiness may be the intended end of all human effort, but as Aristotle recognized long ago, it is a by-product of other activity. You might be as happy as a grasshopper today, but it’s only through careful preparation that happiness lasts through the winter. McFerrin was wrong. If “the landlord says your rent is late,”
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the right response isn’t not to worry. It’s to move in with a relative, live on a tighter budget, get another job, upgrade your skills, apply for public assistance, or do anything else that would sow, antlike, a future in which there would be less cause to worry.
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Measure for Immeasure

At first glance, randomized controlled trials, social enterprise, and happiness as an objective have little in common. The first is a research methodology, the second a type of organization, and the last a policy goal. Yet these three concepts share traits that recall the problems of technologies and packaged interventions.

For one thing, they all make a fetish of measurement. Randomistas look down on knowledge not gained through quantified experiment. Social enterprises are pushed to reduce their impact to a number. Happiness gained currency only when social scientists developed metrics for it. And whether it’s vaccines injected, laptops issued, loans disbursed, or ballots submitted, one reason why packaged interventions are popular is that they are easy to count.

Measurement undoubtedly helps us verify progress. There’s a danger, though, of worshipping the measurable at the expense of other key qualities. We can know the number of mobile phone accounts, but we can’t know how many life-changing conversations they’ve carried. We can count votes, but we can’t tell how many citizens will risk hazards to protest injustice. Someday these intangibles might be quantifiable,
but even then, much will remain unmeasured. As the saying goes, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
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If so, it’s important that we acknowledge here and now that important but numberless qualities will always exist, and that we account explicitly for that fact in our decision-making. Unfortunately, in our world of big data, we are losing sight of bigger wisdom. As more kinds of numeric data become available, we focus only on the numbers and neglect qualities that don’t come with measurable outcomes.

Technocrats like to say that “if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed,” but this is simply not true. Most of us manage our relationships with friends and family without measurement. (And you’d worry about anyone who needed metrics to manage relationships.) Many countries have experienced dramatic economic growth well before they have had a system of national accounts.
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Surely, Homer thought of his
Iliad
as much more than 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter. The important thing is to establish meaningful goals first, whether or not they can be measured. Where direct metrics don’t exist, there might be indirect proxies. And where there aren’t proxies, there should be a judicious weighing of measurable and unmeasurable factors. It’s foolish to neglect metrics where they’re available – but to think that only what’s measurable is meaningful is pure sophistry.

The Tech Commandments

The problem with measurement obsession is the obsession, not the measurement. The drive for lower-cost books squeezes out all but best sellers. A mania for RCTs crowds out complementary approaches. Social enterprises distract from other paths to charitable action. Near-term happiness diverts us from long-term foundations. A tunnel vision on technology steals attention from nontechnological essentials.

In the hype surrounding these technocratic approaches, certain biases appear and reappear constantly. They are the distortions of our technological and technocratic age – what could be called the Tech Commandments:

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Measurement over meaning:
Value only that which can be counted.

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Quantity over quality:
Do only those things that affect millions of people.

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Ultimate goals over root causes:
Focus narrowly on the end goal to ensure success.