In the second interview for the series ‘The Good Life: Conversations for the King’s Review,’ Jonas Tinius and Johannes Lenhard invited anthropologist and social entrepreneur Edward F. Fischer to reflect on the core themes of his latest book The Good Life: Aspirations, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Well-Being  (Stanford, 2014). We spoke about the imperfect but valued  opportunities of entrepreneurship for realising desires for a better  life;  hopes for a better future, and the role of economies and markets  in thinking about well-being.

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KR:

What do you understand by the notion ‘the good life’?

Edward F Fischer:

‍I see you are starting off with  the trick questions. A large part of the attraction of the phrase is  precisely its semantic slipperiness and strategic ambiguity. We may all  agree that we would like to live ‘the good life,’ and yet differ  radically —sometimes violently — in the specifics. It turns out that the  grammatically singular ‘good life’ is realized as a multitude of varied  good lives.

I do think it is useful and valid to speak of the good life in the  abstract, as a concept common to the human condition, removed from  particular parochial moral valuations. In anthropology, we are very  sensitive to difference and heterogeneity, so much so that we sometimes  lose sight of a common humanity, the human experience. Looking at what  constitutes a good life across time and space reminds us of our  existential similarity that can justify (at least sometimes) using the  first person plural in anthropological writings.

But, back to your question: what is the good life? To paraphrase  Aristotle, it is a life worth living, a fulfilled life. Importantly,  this goes beyond ‘happiness’, at least that giddy joy many of us  Americans associate with the term. A fulfilled life may well involve  pain and deprivation; certain kinds of suffering and sacrifice define  us, are central to our identity and life projects. Most would say that  Mother Theresa probably led a very fulfilled life, and yet it was not  necessarily one of happiness. I am reading Moral Laboratories[i]  right now by Cheryl Mattingly in which she shows how parents of  chronically disabled children in Los Angeles build and negotiate their  identities in the morally fraught world of burdensome long-term care.  Theirs is a radical commitment to another individual, but subjective  fulfilment may well be found in abnegating the self to a collective.

A good life certainly can be happy, but it also involves sacrifice: Amartya Sen[ii] reminds  economists of the importance of what he calls ‘commitment’, people’s  willingness to make counter-preferential choices because of a commitment  to an idea or ideal. And such commitment is deeply meaningful for  identity, subjective well-being, and one’s ability to lead a good life.

A key part of this sacrifice and struggle is the hard work of  becoming a certain sort of person – living up to, and not, certain  ideals. Thus, the good life is not a state to be achieved, such as  enlightenment, but rather the often arduous journey itself.

KR:

So, the good life is more than a mere striving for happiness. You link it to Aristotle’s notion of ‘eudaemonia‘.  Can you spell out what this reference means for you?  Do you see the  striving for a happy and good life as a kind of modern virtue?

EFF:

Reading Aristotle is always humbling. He  grappled with so many of the fundamental questions that we continue to  engage today that it sometimes seems hard to go too far beyond what he  already wrote.

His term, eudaemonia denotes a couple of key aspects. First is the distinction between hedonic happiness and fulfilment; eudaemonia refers to the broader sweep of the latter, flourishing and not just surviving.

Second, the idea of eudaemonia situates virtue and  fulfilment in social context. That is to say, what is seen as good and  just and virtuous is defined by particular moral communities. True,  Aristotle did not problematize an assumed sort of mind meld between  individuals and Gemeinschaft. But he left the door open, and  philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre give us  productive readings of culturally sensitive Aristotelian virtues. We are  all engaged in moral projects that give meaning to our lives; the  particulars vary widely, but, at its broadest and most ecumenical, the  general quest is human.

Virtue, then, as an ideal and as an aspirational practice, is key to eudaemonia.  And while virtues may be idiosyncratically understood and felt, their  power also derives from a shared understanding, a social consensus of  what is good and right.

So, the question becomes, what sorts of modern virtues do we see as  contributing to the good life? There is a growing interest in Europe and  the U.S. in the non-material elements of wellbeing, reflected in the  explosion of books on happiness over the last few years. The best of  these tomes remind us that happiness is not a thing we can find or  possess, but a difficult and murky journey guided by broad moral values.

KR:

Imagining the good life as a collective state of  wellbeing is sometimes seen to contradict individual, self-optimising  gain. How do you see the link between these two?

EFF:

The balance of private gain and public good is  in many ways what defines the values and institutions of a society. We  are at a moment (in 2015) of increased openness to redefining this  balance in the Anglo-American political economies, as we grapple with  finding our way in an emerging post-neoliberal era. And there has been a  newfound regard for the virtues of the German social market economy  model.

Public debates over executive compensation, the fair trade movement,  and recent academic inquiries into the limitations of rational-choice  paradigms[iii] all point to the relevance of moral values in our economic decision-making.

All economies are ‘moral’ in the sense that they embody and reproduce  certain values about who gets what. Economic systems are built upon  assumptions – often taken for granted and naturalized assumptions –  about what is good, desirable, worthy, ethical, and just. These are  culturally informed and historically particular assumptions, even though  some actors (say, policymakers, neoclassical economists, or human  rights advocates) struggle to codify certain values as ‘universal’.

Individual material self-interest can, and frequently does, come into  conflict with common goods and collective wellbeing (from pastoral  tragedies of the commons to Wall Street’s high speed trading). We are  self-interested. But not only. Other researchers and I have conducted  experimental economic games in different places around the world, and  one remarkable and near-universal finding has been that people are more  generous than neoclassical theory would predict, and that most people in  most places around the world place a high value on fairness (even if  they may differ in exactly what ‘fair’ is).[iv]  It turns out that people are just as predisposed to cooperate as  compete, and that we often act in ways counter to our own material  self-interest to show commitment to an idea (such as ‘fairness’) or a  person (a beloved) or a collective.

What I found in talking with Maya farmers in Guatemala and German  shoppers in Hannover is that one key element of wellbeing and conception  of the good life is commitment to a larger project, a project that goes  beyond one’s narrowly defined self-interest. These may be broader or  narrower, from mastering a skill to stopping climate change; and they  need not be what we would consider positive or acceptable (from  religious proselytizing to hate-group fervour). But it is a commitment  to something bigger that helps give meaning to our mundane struggles.

In the Aristotelian tradition, virtues are individually lived but  collectively defined; we are all part of moral communities.  Understanding happiness and wellbeing in this context means that we have  to look at the larger context and not just the individual.

To come back to economics, economists distinguish between two sorts of preferences, stated (the sometimes crazy things people say  they want) and revealed (what they really do). It is thought that when  the rubber hits the road and the cash changes hands, one’s true  preferences are revealed: actions speak louder than words. Yet, what we  in anthropology bring to the table is an acute sensitivity to what  people say as well as what they do. I have found that people’s stated  preferences are often more pro-social and with longer time horizons  than revealed preferences might suggest. Perhaps, then, new sorts of  public policy might take seriously the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of  people and develop structures which, with our consent, help us to be  our better selves.

KR:

You argue that markets are ultimately a tool to provide  everyone   with access to a good life. In a time that has been documented by  Thomas Piketty and others as witnessing greater and greater  inequalities, what attempts do you see to make markets into a tool for  bringing about a good life?

EFF:

Markets are neither inherently good or  inherently bad, although anthropologists have historically tended to  focus on the corrosive effects of markets on traditional lifeways and  the ways in which global markets disadvantage marginalized peoples. This  can make it difficult to engage economists, who tend to see markets as  the primary route for people to achieve the good life. In this context,  it is useful to view markets as Foucauldian technologies that can be  used toward various ends.

Markets can and do erode certain social relations. Marx famously  showed how the anonymity of markets tore apart the social relations that  had previously bound individuals at both production and consumption  ends. And many markets in this privatized, securitized, globalized world  are stacked against the common person — a retiree saving a modest nest  egg is no match for the quants who come up with sophisticated financial  instruments.

Yet, It may be the case that market interactions can strengthen and  promote social relations as well as erode them. James Ferguson, in his  recent book Give a Man a Fish[v],  describes what he terms a “rightful share” of collective wealth; he  shows that while money and markets alienate, they also build social  relations. And anthropologist Daniel Miller has shown in his A Theory of Shopping[vi] (1998) how the task of supermarket shopping is at once market transaction and a deeply meaningful part of familial love.

Markets are a tool — one tool, not the tool, nor are they  naturally or scientifically better than other tools. They are more  efficient than most, and thus their spread and success. Markets  (specifically capitalist markets) have contributed to the dramatic  lengthening of life spans and greater material prosperity for the many  as well as the few over the long twentieth century.[vii]  It is uneven, for sure, and filled with injustices large and small. But  in terms of efficiency of production and distribution, capitalist  markets do it amazingly well.

At the same time, we have come to see markets as some sort of natural  order of things, as if we discovered supply and demand and equilibrium  in the same way we uncovered neutrinos and atoms.

But, of course, markets are contrivances, meant to serve our ends  rather than vice versa. We can organize them as we see fit. Although in  recent years (and decades) we have been too quick to disavow tough moral  choices on to the presumed natural forces of the market – it has become  (rhetorically and materially) a moral arbiter.

It is difficult for many economists to allow that markets are  embedded in particular social and political power structures and that  ‘free’ market transactions are often less free than first meets the eye.

Maya coffee farmers I work with generally want more engagement with  the market. They would like for it to deliver on more of its  meritocratic potential. They just want a fair shake, their rightful  share of the spoils of their labour. They know all too well the risks of  commodity agricultural production, with its turbulent boom and bust  market cycles.

They are acutely aware of the perils of dependency on fickle global markets.

Yet, as they describe it, coffee represents an opportunity in a  context of few opportunities, an imperfect but valued means to realizing  their desires for a better life; it is tied up with hopes, dreams, and  desires that go beyond mere income. What it lacks in stability, it  balances with hope, hope for a brighter future.

KR:

Do you see a distinct attempt to bring together a  collective ideal of well-being and market economy in the German notion  of a soziale Marktwirtschaft, a social market economy that benefits the individual and society? Has this model successfully survived from its founder Ludwig Erhard into the present day?

EFF:

Yes, it is a successful middle ground. Not  perfect, with its problems, but still efficiently competitive but humane  with lots of dignity and fairness built into the system. Institutions  matter, Douglas North reminds us. And Germany has built up a system of  co-determination that promotes a particular balance of short-term  sacrifice and long-term growth.

It has its problems, as VW’s recent scandal has highlighted. There is  a cosiness and collaboration between labour and capital. As with all  large German companies, VW’s “works council” (elected by workers) holds  half of the corporate supervisory board’s seats. From an Anglo-American  perspective, this is incredible, almost unthinkable. But the German  model of co-determination treats employees as stakeholders alongside  stockholders.

BMW, in the spirit of compromise between capital and labour, made it a  policy a few years back that executive wages should not exceed 25 times  the company’s average wage. That is still generous by continental  standards (although the US is in an all together different league, with  Russia and India and China, the USRICs), but is a crucial symbol of the  value placed on solidarity.

KR:

In your paper “The Good Life: Values, Markets and Wellbeing“[viii],  you discuss that poverty alleviation is but one aspect of an increase  in wellbeing. What other measures are there to promote wellbeing on a  societal scale. And what role can policies play in ‘bringing about’  happiness?

EFF:

‍Poverty is not just an absence of income. It is  more than that, just as health is about more than the absence of  illness, and wellbeing is about more than day-to-day happiness. Poverty  results from a lack of agency as well as deficits of material resources;  it is intimately related to family relations and social structures; it  both leads to and results from ill health. So we need to understand  poverty as intensely multidimensional.

It is interesting that what often goes under the rubric of “happiness  studies” in the US and UK, is termed “multidimensional approaches to  poverty” when applied to the global South. Our choice of terms is  revealing, shining a light on the implicit assumption of their need versus our desires. My work tries to break down these implicit and often romantic assumptions about them  (whomever they may be), showing that what Maya farmers want for their  future, in broad terms, would not be foreign to an Anglo bourgeoisie.  Subsistence Maya farmers do not want their kids to be subsistence  farmers (as much as we may love to think of the food security  and spiritual symbiosis such hard scrabble living conjures in our  distantly comfortable circumstances); they hope for something more,  something better.

Income is important — let us say that upfront and clearly. Income, or  overall material resources, predicate much of the rest of wellbeing.  Income is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for wellbeing. As  Amartya Sen points out, we also require agency and empowerment, the  capabilities to work toward a life that we value.[ix]

This also raises the question of how one measures wellbeing. A single  measure of overall subjective wellbeing (SWB as it is know in the  literature) may stand in for more complicated metrics. (The question is  often something such as: imagine a ladder with ten steps; the lowest  step presents the worst possible life you could image and the top step  the best possible life imaginable; looking over the course of your life,  where would you place it on this ladder?)

This is a pretty good metric, and it is hard to argue with people’s  own informed self-perceptions. But it is limited by one’s own (and in  the case of the rural poor, often circumscribed) frame of comparison.  What is the best possible life one can imagine? How do we come to  inhabit this capacity to aspire?

Research from around the world clearly shows that wellbeing depends  on income, health and physical security, and strong social relations.  These are all domains with clear public policy implications. Thus, if we  gave multidimensional wellbeing measures as much weight as we do the  fortunes of the FTSE and GDP growth, we would have very different sorts  of public policies.

But some key elements of wellbeing are hard to measure: aspiration, dignity, commitment to larger projects.

Arjun Appadurai observes that society struggles with a tension  between “the ethics of possibility” (of hope, aspiration, desire) and  the “ethics of probability” (of systematized rationalities, risk  management, and cost/benefits). And the ethics of probability is  currently crowding out the realm of possibility. In his compelling new  collection of essays [The Future as Cultural Fact[x]],  Appadurai calls for a renewed commitment to an ethics of possibility  “grounded in the view that a genuinely democratic politics cannot be  based on the avalanche of numbers — about population, poverty, profit,  and predation — that threaten to kill all street-level optimism about  life and the world. Rather it must build on an ethics of possibility,  which can offer a more inclusive platform for improving the planetary  quality of life and can accommodate a plurality of visions of the good  life.”

I agree, and anthropology has a lot to add to such an ethics of hope.  Joel Robbins has advocated an anthropology of the good, I have called  for a positive anthropology, Appadurai calls for an ethics of hope, and  the list goes on. It is an exciting moment in the field.

KR:

What is the role of elites, money, and notions of the good life?

EFF:

High levels of inequality seem to be bad for  overall metrics of wellbeing. This is exacerbated in our current stage  of late capitalism because of the growing importance of symbolic and  positional goods that can lead to consumption arms races. (The value of  “positional goods” owes more to their scarcity and social identity  aspects than to their material properties: the real utility of that  $3000 Birkin handbag – to carry stuff around – is about the same as a  plastic shopping bag.) We adapt to new material circumstances quickly  and then aspire to more.

Status symbols are the iconic example of positional goods. In his book The Darwin Economy, Robert Frank[xi]  presents a revealing thought experiment: which world would you choose?  In World A, you live in a neighbourhood with 6,000-square-foot houses,  while other neighbourhoods have 8,000-square-foot houses; or in World B,  where you live in a neighbourhood with 4,000-square-foot houses, others  in neighbourhoods with 3,000-square-foot houses.

The materially maximizing rational choice is, of course, World A. But  most Americans choose World B. This little exercise reveals that the  value of house construction is not just in its pragmatic utility as an  abode but in its relative size compared to others.

This leads Frank to the surprising conclusion that a highly  progressive consumption tax would not only divert resources toward more  productive ends but actually might increase the utility and wellbeing of  those same high-income households.

KR:

What can anthropology reveal about the role of the good  life in the individual- market-state nexus that other disciplines  cannot?

EFF:

‍Anthropology is more comfortable offering  critiques than positive alternatives, but the possibility exists to  combine our critical proclivities with non-prescriptive,  ethnographically informed positive alternatives that engage public  policy debates. If a society’s goal is to have people live meaningful  and fulfilled lives — and not just increase income and consumption at  all costs — then we should look to ways to help people realise their  longer term goals, the moral projects of their lives, affluence (and its  converse, poverty) as seen in all of its multiple dimensions.

This is to advocate studies of economic behaviour that work between  the “is” and the “ought” of David Hume’s distinction, between how the  world can be empirically shown to work (the “is”) and how the competing  and diverse value systems that anthropological research documents can be  linked to moral reflection about things might be different (the  “ought”).

Perhaps, then, we anthropologists should more fully embrace the constructive possibilities of a positive anthropology.  To fully enter into national public discourse, to exert the influence  that most of us think we should have, it will be necessary to offer  answers as well as critical questions.

Anthropologists shy away from prescriptive stances for good  historical and epistemological reasons. Ethnography, in building up  knowledge through a dialectical engagement with individuals and  communities, continually counters the sorts of generalisations that  answering the big questions of public discourse implies: the complexity  we observe through the microscopic ethnographic lens resists the  essentialising broad strokes required for much punditry.

And yet. And yet. Perhaps we could, even should, try to offer  positive alternatives, contextualized in a way that avoids moral  judgment — non-prescriptive, non-definitive options that might inspire  other ways of looking at particular issues. And, of course, the  ethnographic approach is key to understanding how we weigh the different dimensions of wellbeing: what is important, not just what ‘the market’  wants.

A positive anthropology could contribute more readily to public  discourses about what the good life should look like, documenting  cultural norms, social structures, and institutional arrangements that  seem to promote wellbeing in their specific contexts.