Marco has blogged about the recent Freakonomics blog series on the politics of happiness. He’s tied the discussion to biases within the political and social system against certain people (in particular women and black people; he’s viewing it in light of the current U.S. Presidential race).

He asked the blogosphere:

Given this amazing election year, if I look at the race as a “happy religious conservative”, seeing two people with the societal deck stacked against them, one of whom is very possibly the next POTUS, what am I to conclude about how they got there?

To which I responded:

If you’re willing to not put much thought into it, you can conclude absolutely anything you like.

If you are willing to put thought into it, you can only conclude that the situation is far to complex to assign it to any handful of factors that can be explained with one-word descriptions. We simply can’t measure these things accurately enough to really have any good idea.

Marco, in turn, responded with the question that prompted this post:

Do you, yourself, have a feeling about any of that? Does finding the situation too-complex-to-assess make you happier? Sadder? Or does it just lead to not really caring about inequity?

Firstly, I’d like to thank Marco for an excellent question.

I can say that my goal is to be indifferent to the complexity itself — it is what it is, and getting an emotional response to it one way or the other doesn’t help things much.

On the other hand, I do have an inherent desire to know *why* things like this occur, so the fact that we can’t here is a bit depressing.

On the third hand, complexity itself can indeed be interesting; the interconnectedness of things means that we’re always being surprised and intrigued. I enjoy it when we find out things that are non-obvious (which is why I like reading Freakonomics blog myself; their whole purpose is to point out socioeconomic novelties).

Now, Marco’s question (and blog post to a larger extent) also asked how inequality makes me feel. My answer to this is that it depends very much on the nature of the inequality.

Some inequalities are caused by forces that I’ll label as “natural”. Effectively, they are ones that we cannot (currently) change. For example, if you are born with a severe mental handicap, then your chances of wealthy (or even independently living comfortably) are slim to non-existent. That stems largely from the fact that you are incapable of creating the sort of economic value that humanity desires and rewards. You could definitely call this “unfair”, but there’s little point in doing so, because you’d be rebuking a universe that doesn’t listen, much less care. Assuming you cannot change these things, there’s no benefit to feeling bad about them; you lose a bit of your happiness without any corresponding increase in the happiness of anyone else.

Another class of inequality is that which is unnecessary and/or changeable: you can call it “unnatural” inequality if you like. For example, if you are a woman or black (or Catholic in the not-so-distant past), your chances of becoming President of the U.S. are reduced (and at one point they too were slim to non-existent). The bias against women and non-whites is largely based on faulty or non-existent reasoning — in particular, assuming the properties of a group also apply to an individual is not valid. This type of inequality means that humanity loses some of its potential, and is definitely something to be upset over. Ideally, we would be upset enough to change the situation so that the bias no longer occurs.

Lastly, there is inequality that is actually desireable. For example, if you have a useful skill (take your pick, there’s lots; medical is the most palatable example), then you can use your advantage to produce more value. You will typically benefit from the value you produce; since we share our value with the less fortunate (to varying degrees), others will benefit as well. Trying to bring equality to these situations is actually counterproductive. If you force the skillful to produce at the same rate as everyone else, then there’s a missed opportunity for more vale. You can try to make the less skilled produce value at the same rate as the most skilled, but most often this is impossible (the top producers are usually at the top due to some combination of factors that can’t be replicated). This kind of equality makes me happy, because I see the benefits that come with it.

So, I don’t not care about inequality. It’s not easy to see which type of inequality is in play at any given time (and it’s usually a combination of the three), and it’s even less easy to know what to do about it. I try my best to do what is appropriate depending on the circumstances. With that philosophy, it’s relatively easy to avoid unhappiness for the bad kinds to gain happiness from the good kinds.