Politics Snippet - granting of happiness to citizens by the state

The granting of happiness to citizens by the state

When washing up the dishes after our Sunday brunch, I suddenly recalled a movie we saw almost 10 years ago - The Pursuit of Happyness. Back then, as a recent university graduate embarking on an exciting career, there were a lot of reminiscence, not least in my pursuit of a decent graduate job offer during my final year in university, and the bright future open to me after securing one. The right to pursue happyness, back then, was a good philosophy and a right to be advocated.

Ten years on, both my wife and I were subjects to a whole host of wide-ranging events, from redundancy through to entrepreneurship and political deterioration in our birthplace. As we experienced these upheavals, our world views matured, and became more sympathetic. Our "middle class upbringing" might have enabled us to access good education followed by a good start in career, but such good lives were far from guaranteed; we are as vulnerable to hard times as much as anyone else. And for people who have landed in hard times or had been born into hard times, why should they be condemned instead of being given resources and opportunities to rise up again? Having the right to pursuit happiness, it now appears, is too simple, sometimes naive.

A compassionate and fair society is insufficient in not stopping people from pursuing opportunities which would give them happiness, satisfaction and fulfilment. It could be argued that for people without access to such opportunities or resources (or means of acquiring resources) to pursue opportunities in front of them, the other side of the coin would be to open up access and equip them with resources. There is nothing wrong with this more encompassing view, but arguably it is still incomplete - this solution still demands citizens to actively (or be forced to) look out for opportunities and capture. For some citizens and for some aspects of life, this is simply not practical.

Let's take two simple examples, namely education and medical care. The right to pursuit happiness would be a free market approach in which the rich people would have access to quality private education, whereas the rest are left with bog-standard or no care. If these situations were to be improved by opening access or equipping people with resources, the government might subsidise bright students from modest background to attend the privileged private schools, or in the case of medical care promoting self-care knowledge or courses to substitute assisted care.

As you can feel, in the first example, the private education community (the schools and the privately-educated families) gains collectively, as they poach the best talents in the state education community, thereby enhancing the results of the private schools and introduces a more synergetic education environment for the fee-paying students. On contrary, the gain of the modest community is individual, as only the lucky few could benefit from quality education and rise through the ranks, while the rest stay in their original modest positions. The state education community would collectively suffer, as the brightest students were lost leading to negative synergies, while the schools become even less appealing as they constantly lose out on league tables and comparison charts.

In the second example, the modest families benefit from more knowledge for better self-care, but medical care is an inherently complex and self-care is only a partial solution. When a young and healthy person falls ill, seeking consultation is not just a technical requirement but also an emotional requirement to be re-assured that nothing serious is lurking behind the milld symptoms. Turning young patients away or giving them appointments that are 3 days later are not just frustrating, but also puts the whole public system to question. How many severe illness cases have missed early diagnosis opportunities? How many people have been forced to take private medical care out of their tight household budgets? You can have as much self-care training as you like, but unless you train everyone to a doctor's or senior nurse's standard, the remaining gap will still be too wide to bridge.

The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human right, but so is a basic level of happiness - good & comprehensive education, medical care that helps citizen to stay healthy and avert long-term ailments (e.g. through healthy eating), just to name a few. The more modest a household is, the fewer automatically opened opportunities and skills are available to their members, and the more efforts they have to put in just to get to the starting point of an opportunity (equipping with resources) and then to cultivate in a number of opportunities to yield some success. Below a certain level of modesty, we may argue that so much efforts would be required for them to pursue the opened opportunities that it ceased to make sense to pursue. The distance between their current position and the access point would take all their remaining energy and financial resources to cover. Why bother?

This is the main difference between the Anglo-Saxon libertarian capitalism and the European social capitalism. In libertarian capitalism, all emphasis is on the availability of opportunities, and people who have "made it" are the role models who should be praised and encouraged to flaunt their wealth as a symbol of success. For the rest who have not "made it", the deal is to open up access to opportunities and resources so that they could also participate in the game. But opportunities are more often than not plentiful, meaning that it's the same set of opportunities and rewards, but many more people competing and losing out. For those who have lost in the pursuit or not joined in the first place, they were deemed "lazy" and not worth any support. A portion of the society gets very happy, another portion is quite happy, the rest unhappy but it's their own fault and not the society's.

The European model of social capitalism, on the other hand, provides not just an opportunity to pursue happiness, but also an opportunity to happiness itself. Education is regarded as a means of generating genuine equality and as such private education is a fringe provision and state education made to be all inclusive and of good quality; the idea of "living wages" also offers citizens who are at a loss some form of happiness before they are clear about what type of happiness they should pursue. People who have pursued happiness are reminded that not everyone is able to make a successful pursuit, whether due to lack of opportunities, lack of availability to start pursuing an open opportunity, or lack of luck in succeeding in the pursuit. As such, the successful people are not encouraged to display their success by showing off, but by caring about those who have not pursued.

Which model is better? Judging by economic success and current source of global growth or advancement, the libertarian model keeps people hungry for success (for the alternative can be quite scary and tragic) which creates multiple "stars" that contribute towards collective success. It is also "cheaper" for the government to run this model as the need to consider what constitutes principle happiness is divested to the individuals and the market and the cost is fully borne by the requestor of service.

However, the flip side is the human cost - for every poor student who was promoted to private schools, there are at least ten who had similar capabilities but simply lost out due to limited availability. And the degree of hostile competition which yielded not collective improvement (vs. healthy competition) means efforts are devoted to zero-sum games instead of mutually beneficial scenarios. The masses who could not weather any failure due to limited resources also lost their social mobility and opportunities to fulfil their ambitions or inherent capabilities, and are forced to sell their labour to the highest bidders instead of having the freedom to pursue genuine happiness.

It's a philosophical question, but personally both of us prefer the social capitalist model. It's more expensive and more complicated to execute, but more people ACTUALLY get to pursue happiness in the end.