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David Brooks on Freedom and Commitment

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[Note: This post is part of Social Animalapalooza -- a series of posts on David Brooks' bestseller The Social Animal exploring in greater detail issues I couldn't tackle in my review of the book. I recommend reading that first.]

Chapter 12 of The Social Animal, "Freedom and Commitment," contains Brooks' attempt to draw on contemporary research in the psychological and social sciences to adjudicate between what he sees as two fundamentally incompatible forms of life: the life of freedom and the life of commitment. Brooks thinks happiness studies and other bodies of research vindicate the superiority of the life of commitment on empirical grounds. But Brooks' grasp of the relevant research appears to be precarious and incomplete.

"Hey, do you want to come to L.A. and become a TV producer with me?" asks twenty-something Harold's charismatic bestie, Mark. Here's how Brooks has Mark pitch his wild idea to a skeptical Harold:

Produce a few trashy shows at first--maybe infomercials and cop shows. Then take a few years off with their money and have fun. Then do something more legit. Then buy some houses in various parts of the world and have more fun. Then do big dramas on HBO and change the world. The great thing, as Mark described it, is that you'd make boatloads of money, have total freedom, and never be tied down to one thing or one project or one idea. It was perfect liberty.

Sounds great to me! Harold demurs, though. But not because he thinks Mark's plan isn't realistic. Harold is convinced Mark can pull it off. Harold's objection is that "That's no way to live." His idea of the good life is the standard one: a life of "loving relationships and stable bonds--old friends over for dinner, watching the kids grow up, making a difference in a town or community."

"It was," Brooks writes, "the debate between freedom and commitment, about whether life is happier footloose or firmly rooted."

Guess who wins?

The family of Jim Bob Duggar - Image via Wikipedia

"To the extent that social science can solve debates like this, the data is on Harold's side," Brooks contends. Is it really?

The rest of this post will examine how, and how well, Brooks applied the social-scientific evidence to this question. Initially I thought I would cover the relevant areas of research and say what I take them actually to say, but I saw that would lead to a monstrously unwieldy post. So what I'll do instead is simply report what Brooks says , mention some problems with what he says, and write a few promissory notes for more focused, evidence-heavy posts on the topics at hand.

Brooks begins his case for commitment with a discussion of pertinent findings in happiness research. The first item on the docket: money and happiness. Brooks notes that "richer people tend to be happier than poorer people, but the relationship is not that strong...." He then goes about marshaling empirical evidence in his usual way, mixing half-comprehended items of relevant research with irrelevant and confusing factoids, while omitting all kinds of pertinent information. So, for example, we are told that "Nigerians rate themselves just as happy as the Japanese, even though Japan's GDP per capita is almost twenty-five times higher than theirs." Brooks intends to communicate something to the effect that the relationship between money and happiness is dicey, but actually he's pointing to the fact that there are cultural differences between Nigerians and Japanese people that lead them to answer happiness surveys differently, rendering cross-cultural comparisons dicey. Anyway, he tosses in a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the argument between Harold and Mark, other than that past a certain relatively handsome income "the happiness curve flattens out". The section on money and happiness concludes with the finding that "People who place tremendous emphasis on material well-being tend to be less happy than those who don't."

OK. How do we score this? On Brooks' own terms, it looks like Mark comes out ahead by a smidge. Assuming, as Harold does, that Mark accomplishes his goals, he's going to be wealthier, and other things equal, wealthier is happier. As Brooks describes him, Mark is not terribly materialistic in the sense the psychologist Tim Kasser has in mind in his book The High Price of Materialism. Mark is "fun" and "freedom"-oriented, which is quite different from kind of "materialist" orientation which is bad for happiness. Indeed, Mark seems determined to spend his money on memorable experience--on travel and fun--which is exactly how to get the most happiness bang from your bucks.

Here's your IOU for this section: a stand-alone post on the latest happiness research on money and happiness.

"If the relationship between money and happiness is complicated," Brooks writes, "the relationship between social bonds is not." He's right. Social integration -- lots of friends, lots of mingling, parties, church potlucks, etc. -- have a bigger effect on happiness than just about anything else. However, Brooks confuses matters by reporting shallowly on the effects of marriage. "People in long-term marriages are much happier than people who aren't," he writes. Later on he has Harold talk about "the two things he wanted from his own life," which are, he says, the two things "adults should want" :

First, he wanted to have a successful marriage. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn't matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn't matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

Then, Harold continued, he wanted to find some activity, either a job or a hobby, which would absorb all his abilities. ...

He knew that his two goals were in conflict. Marriage might drain time away from his vocation, and his vocation might steal time he could be spending with his friends. But those were the things he wanted, and neither of them was compatible with the peripatetic, freewheeling life Mark was interested in.

Well, I've already discussed briefly how the finding that married people are on average happier than unmarried people is partly attributable to reverse causation (happy people are more likely to get married) while hiding significant variation. Marriage makes many people less happy. In a stand-alone post on marriage, I'll say more about how individual personality traits affect happiness in marriage. Indeed, it's beginning to emerge that personality mediates the effect of just about everything on happiness. The profound significance of personality and the differences between individuals are almost entirely ignored in The Social Animal.

But let's go back to Harold's strange reasoning in the passage above. First, Harold/Brooks seems to assume that it is unrealistic to find a spouse who is also interested in a peripatetic, freewheeling life. Why? When he died in 2007, the adventurer Steve Fossett had been married to his wife, Peggy, for 29 years. Second, I know of no research supporting the claim that unmarried people accomplish less in their careers. (Anybody got anything on this?) There is certainly a trade-off between working and spending time with friends. It's Mark, you'll notice, who is building time off from work into his life plan.

The truly weird thing about Brooks' attempt to vindicate Harold's idea of the good life is that he doesn't give us any reason to believe that Mark can't also have a deeply satisfying marriage and an absorbing career. Moreover, there is a growing literature on the profound importance of a sense of freedom/autonomy/personal control to happiness, none of which Brooks mentions, and would tend to make Mark's plan look pretty sensible.

Here's how Brooks finishes off the section on freedom and commitment:

Harold had grown up in a culture that, for forty years, had celebrated individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal liberation. But he sensed what he needed was more community, connection, and interpenetration. He couldn't bring out his best self alone. He could only do it with other people.

If Harold feels he needs more community, connection, and interpenetration, then he probably does (the "affective forecasting" literature notwithstanding.) But that doesn't mean individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal liberation aren't equally important. In my forthcoming post on freedom, autonomy, and happiness, I'll show not only that Mark could end up having it damn good, but that freedom and commitment are false alternatives.