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JohnH comments on Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place? - Less Wrong
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The best way to know that is to ask them if they are happy/unhappy. The next best way is to look at proxy measures of happiness or unhappiness.
Money is an extremely poor proxy measure of happiness. In fact the amount of money that one has is almost completely unimportant to ones happiness (with some obvious exceptions). Ones beliefs about the direction ones money is heading is however fairly important for most peoples happiness, if one is or one thinks that one will be gaining more then one is happier, but once one has that extra money then one is just about as happy as one was before one knew that one might get that money.
The divorce rate and the suicide rate are the two best proxies that I am aware of for unhappiness. Knowing that when compared to the rest of the nation should roughly tell us if they are happier or unhappier then anyone else.
Although as Robin Hanson was just pointing out, suicide rates may not mean what we would expect...
Surely suicide rate is a much more trustworthy marker for (un)happiness than "numerical response to a survey question". So it is our previous flimsy understandings of what areas are happy (based only on the highly suspect methodology of surveys) that is wiped out by the new data regarding suicide rates.
As gwern points out, divorce is a poor marker; suicide remains a useful marker because it is nearly-univerally forbidden.
I actually don't think I'd consider suicide rates a very reliable proxy for the average happiness of a population, although I'm not sure if a numerical response to a survey question would be better or worse. They might easily end up having more to do with rates of mental illness, or with sudden changes in individual happiness rather than its base rate; even if the absolute value of happiness does turn out to dominate, its variance over a given culture might be more significant to suicide rates than its mean. And then there are culture-bound attitudes to deal with, which grow considerably in importance when dealing with highly heterodox subcultures like Kiryas Joel.
Self-reporting does have its own issues, though.
I don't mean to overstate the reliability of suicide rates for happiness. A variety of factors may influence them. However, there are reasons to believe they correlate with happiness.
What is a good measure of happiness? Virtually all measures are deeply flawed, but the most reliable is probably: Intra-observer self-report in situations when signalling is unlikely. People are probably decent at knowing when they were happier or less happy within their own lives. Inter-observer reports are far harder to justify.
People report being happier when they live in places with adequate sunshine; inadequate sunshine correlates with increased suicide rates. People report being happier when they are not facing loss of job, public humiliation, divorce, and a number of other events; these events correlate with increase suicide rates. People report being happier when mental illness symptoms are reduced (particularly depression); people with mental illness (particularly depression) have a higher suicide rate.
Obviously, suicide rates are not a perfect proxy for happiness... but I cannot find a more reliable easily-measured statistic.
Thank you for that link, it was interesting.
Did they take into account that Utah is an outlier within the US in the Religion aspect? Not that I expect that to be influential in the slightest.
So then suicides are a strong indicator of personal unhappiness but a potential indicator of overall social happiness. That is very interesting.
I know a decent portion of people on Less Wrong are utilitarians/consequentialists what are the implications of the results of this study from that perspective?
My first thought was that if everyone with a low happiness level had already committed suicide it would bump up the average happiness. I mean, the dead don't answer those polls.
Killing the unhappy to make sure everyone is happy is an amoral solution, is my conclusion from a utilitarian perspective. Yep. Don't do that. Engineering peeps with higher happiness set points seems the moral counterpart, but we can't do that yet.
And not especially useful proxies in this case; while divorce is permitted, I would be deeply surprised if it did not come with huge social sanctions and other deterrents in Kiryas Joel. Suicide is outright forbidden.
Finally, JoshuaZ points out that the ultra-Orthodox generally lie/under-report about that sort of thing.