In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

1. Measuring Success in Social Policy

[ 3 ] 1 Measuring Success in Social Policy This book is first about how people pursue happiness in their lives, and then about how government can help in that pursuit. It is not a topic that is easy even to name, for “happiness” is an honorable word fallen on hard times. We have gotten used to happiness as a label for a momentary way of feeling, the state of mind that is the opposite of sad. Happiness is the promised reward of a dozen poppsychology books on the airport book rack. It is a topic for bumper stickers and the comic strips—happiness as warm puppy. A book on public policy about “happiness”? Surely there is a sturdier contemporary term I might use instead. “Quality of life,” perhaps: “This book is about personal quality of life, and what government can do to improve it.” Or more respectable yet: “This book is about noneconomic indicators of perceived personal well-being, and their relationship to alternative policy options.” But there’s no getting around it. Happiness is in fact what we will be talking about. What Is the Criterion of Success? The first, natural question is why one might choose to discuss public affairs in terms of this most private and elusive of goals. The pragmatic reason is that policy analysts are increasingly forced in that direction by events. The experience of the last half-century and more specifically of the last two decades must arouse in any thoughtful observer this question: What constitutes “success” in social policy? For most of America’s history, this was not a question that needed asking because there was no such thing as a “social policy” to succeed [ 4 ] “the happiness of the people” or fail. The government tried to be helpful to the economy in modest ways. It facilitated the settlement of the frontier. It adjudicated and arbitrated the competing interests of the several states. But, excepting slavery, the noneconomic institutions of American society remained largely outside federal purview until well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1930s, there was still no federal “policy” worthy of the label affecting the family, for example, or education, or religion, or voluntary associations. Some laws could be argued to have effects on such institutions (the child labor laws on the family, for example), but the notion that the federal government had a systematic relationship with the “success” of parents in raising their offspring, of schools in educating their students, or of poor people’s efforts to become no longer poor would have struck most observers as perhaps theoretically true, but rather an odd way of looking at things. Over a period of time from the New Deal through the 1970s, the nation acquired what we have come to call “social policy,” with dozens of constituent elements—welfare programs, educational programs, health programs, job programs, criminal justice programs, and laws, regulations , and Supreme Court decisions involving everything from housing to transportation to employment to child care to abortion. Pick a topic of social concern or even of social interest, and by now a complex body of federal activity constitutes policy, intended to be an active force for good. This brings us to the question of measuring success. For if the federal government seeks to do good in these arenas, there must be as well a measure of what “good” means. Whether you are a citizen or a policymaker, the same question arises with regard to any particular aspect of social policy: Are you for or against? Let’s build more prisons. Yes or no? Let’s dispense more food stamps. Yes or no? For many years—certainly during my own training during the sixties and early seventies—social science faculties in our universities assumed a substratum of truths about why certain policies were good or bad things, and policy analysts did not have to think very hard about why the outcomes we analyzed were good or bad. We knew. Fighting poverty had to be good. Fighting racism had to be good. Fighting inequality had to be good. What other way of looking at good and bad might there be? And what other way of measuring progress might there be except to measure poverty, crime rates, school enrollment, unemployment? measuring success in social policy [ 5 ] By such measures, however, the policies didn’t work out so well. In fact, by most such measures things got worse...