Stoicism provides the answers to a good life
How virtue has improved my life, the welfare of humanity, and my journey into effective altruism.
Last week, I discussed how, although positive discount rates are justified, we likely undervalue the future in our daily lives more than market fundamentals can justify. Not only can many of society's greatest pathologies be attributed to our impatience, but if we accept Parfit's and Cowen's argument that future generations are of equal moral worth to present individuals, then this could be a major externality [1]. Whilst I'm critical of paternalistic attempts to coerce others into choices contradicting their preferences, on the margin the power of persuasion clearly can shift utility functions. Anyone aware of the literature on signalling knows that beliefs and tastes yield an endogenous component [2]. Therefore Aristotelian virtue ethics, essentially attempts to lower our discount rates and promote conscientiousness, plays a salient role in improving the welfare of humanity.
Economics provides answers regarding outcomes given the preferences we hold, and the tradeoffs we face to satisfy them. However, the following questions are focal to our interests in the social sciences: what makes a good life? How can we best live a good life? How can we reduce the inherent emotional turmoil that plagues us daily? If suffering is inevitable, then how best do we cope? Unfortunately, the answers impose functional forms on our preferences, and economics is not well-equipped to model endogeneity in utility functions. Yet many, although unwilling to enter binding contracts that enforce credible commitments to lifestyle changes, are crying out for answers on how best to live. Religion, the self-help market, and therapy becoming a prominent ritual, all satisfy that demand. In an age where increasing numbers, particularly of younger generations, evaluate their mental health as poor, these questions are perhaps the most important inquiries that one will endeavour. Yet the number of lifestyle philosophies is indefinite, with some being harmful cults, so where should we start?
Stoicism, a broad set of heuristics that in essence aggregate the basic principles of most of our prominent faiths, is a good candidate to start our quest. Providing the prime insipration for CBT, there's a body of empirical literature suggesting a possible positive influence on mental health [3]. Before I encountered stoicism, I was easily in the right-tail of the neuroticism distribution, and now my position has reversed. I achieved this without any therapy, but rather a radically changed outlook on my life. Whilst I'll probably never be truly happy (a major flaw of mine is that I hold a proclivity towards pessimism and negative affect beyond what the fundamentals justify - probably genetic), I'm rarely sad either. A few years ago, I was mired in what ostensibly appeared to be an unescapable depression, with increasing resentment. The most mundane and trivial inconveniences would ruin my day. That was no way to live!
Today I'm broadly healthy, and have cultivated a rigorous prioritisation of logic over emotion. Again I'm not happy, yet the discourse on mental health severely overrates happiness and underrates emotional resillience. I live in one of the richest countries in the richest epoch in history, with Mathusian poverty being the norm for most of humanity's existence. My anhedonia is unjustified, so I don't let it ruin me. To live in permanent misery is an insult to human progress and the Enlightenment.
Going from depressed to neutral is a significant phase transition. I'm not convinced that permanent happiness is even feasible for most anyhow. Life satisfaction, distinct from average happiness levels, is the variable we should (and can) be optimising here, and on this score I'm performing strongly. More broadly, emotions are transitory chemical fluctuations determined to a large extent by our neurobiological and genetic makeup that's out of our hands, so unreliable as a focus for optimisation problems. All this of course is downstream from the core tenet of stoicism, to ignore the exogenous shocks we cannot control yet to rigourously assert responsibility for what we can change. Worrying about the former is a one-way ticket to unnecessary anxiety and sadness. To neglect the latter, our actions and perceptions and attitudes, would be to let unnecessary suffering continue.
What then follows is the radical departure from how most people live. As material wellbeing (us economists define such by consumption) or wealth is subject to unanticipated exogenous or transitory shocks, this should not be our primary motivation per se. This is not to suggest we shouldn't optimise on these variables, yet whilst they affect our ordinal utilities (yes we prefer to be wealthier than poorer), it shouldn't determine our base cardinal utilities (we shouldn't be sad because we're poor), or else we're perpetually vulnerable to depression. Instead, we must cultivate our proper character, as that is always fully in our hands. This entails always acting ethically (our preferences should be determined by what is moral), with courage, via acquiring the formal and tacit knowledge to achieve this, whilst maintaining a meta-rationality that supersedes our primitive emotions. This is not emotional suppression, but rather acknowledging our emotions and possible causes, then opening them up to logical scrutiny as we would any other scientific hypothesis. Moreover, there's also a focus on delaying gratification and resisiting addictive temptations, which could present adjacent complementarities that lead us to ruin. Addictive preferences are not bad per se, yet you better maintain the steady-state equilibrium! Examining our beliefs, assumptions, and perceptions is critical; hence why I emphasised gratitude for our historical progress. Today we get upset by a snide remark, yet fail to consider that we have the nutrition for this concern to even be possible.
Crucial to the heart of stoicism, which separates it from other comparative philosophies, is the primary emphasis on our agency. Indeed, in a capitalist world, agency matters more than anything else, so philosophies emphasising this of course rise in relative status. Daoism yields uncanny similarities in its focus on locuses of control, yet argues that because we cannot control all variables, that we should abandon our attempts to optimise, as it can only generate unnecessary suffering. Buddhism goes further, and aims for the elimination of desire, and for the mind to become a blank-slate devoid of emotion, as emphasised in their practice of meditation. Denial of agency and desire is why I think these faiths (if you consider them as such) have not gained in mass popularity post-Enlightenment. There's also a disturbing implicit moral nihilism underpinning Buddhism. Did Jews suffer throughout the Holocaust as they wanted not to be slaughtered on an industrial scale in concentration camps? It's no coincidence that Mao's famine, and the Khmer genocides, some of the greatest catastrophies as a proportion of the population in human history, occured in places where Buddhism is popular. Your desire to feed yourself and to live is the cause of your suffering, not these evil tyrants burning entire civilisations to the ground, according to this logic.
All of this implies that morality is objective, which both utilitarians and deontologists can agree on. Therefore, if we know what's right or wrong, we ought to act accordingly. If we hold an idealist outlook on metaphysics, then abstract phenomena such as morality can be objective (existing independently of our own perception or judgement). Our primary constraint is whether we (can) know the properties of morality. Illusions can exist, our sense of vision provides approximations at a lag, and even physical reality (the set of physical objects that exist, where existence is defined by what can theoretically be sensed objectively) could exist on a holographic plane that we interact with. Yet objective reality not only exists, but we can know the properties describing such. If we expand objective morality to cover abstract as well as physical objects, then this holds for morality.
Increasingly, I consider a moral life to be defined and ranked according to one's contributions to the welfare of humanity. Living altruistically with virtue, not solely via selfish hedonistic desire, makes sense once one considers the externalities of our actions. Of course, if everyone self-sacrifices to a sufficiently large extent then the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics breaks down. Yet if we consider altruistic behaviour as a public good, with free-riders imposing externalities, then we can model this without compromising on individual optimisation.
On the margin, more altruism is a good thing, and the allocation of altruistic behaviours and resources more so. This is broadly the countours of how effective altruists address one of the core criticisms of the movement. Effective altruism has made immense strides in providing moral meaning to its adherents via explicitly using our rationality to answer the question of how best to live a moral life. Critics and alternative philanthropic networks have yet to develop a superior framework for improving outcomes and delivering results - functioning primarily on vibes. Previously one of those critics myself, I am convinced that all those that seek to make a positive difference to global civilisation to the fullest extent possible should embrace this philosophy.
One could even add a Nietzchean spin to morality. Even Singer recognises (as he does in his defence of animal rights) that sentient beings differ in their moral worth according to their contributions to aggregate welfare. Virtuous humans outperform the non-virtuous on this scale. So to answer another of life's big questions, how can we be the best that one can be, living a moral life is vital.
Fundamentally, every single literate society in history holds some version of virtue ethics as focal to answering the primary questions one faces regarding the meaning of life. From a Hayekian and Burkean standpoint, these norms being the cultivation of centuries of wisdom are integral to the nature of humanity itself. The burden of proof must fall on those who seek to deviate. We should consider some notion of virtue as a human universal (to invoke Brown's taxonomy): one which via maintaining civilisation has likely accelerated our biological and cultural evolution.
In many OLG models, intergenerational transfers to older generations are Pareto efficient, yet these results generally only hold for a sufficient rate of population growth. What I like about Cowen and Parfit (1992) is that this overturns that conclusion. However, greater intergenerational transfers in the opposite direction too are possibly implicated in the global fertility decline. I do think that modelling the dynamics of intergenerational redistribution, assuming explicitly that discounting is an externality, could be an intriguing avenue for future macroeconomic research.
Another reason why Lucas-critique proofed models are not a panacea. Internal consistency is vital to discipline our thinking, yet there's different layers of microfounding. We model preferences and technology, yet don't delve beyond to microfound utility functions. Prior to AI, this abstraction was necessary for tractability, yet today millions of additional parameters can be incorporated to augment standard theory. Gödel's theorem makes the tradeoff between logical consistency vs parsimony binding, yet AI extends this frontier. I do think there's much about preference formation that is a black-box, which is why we should downgrade our certainty on our priors here. Hence, if preferences are endogenous, I'm justfied in producing self-help advice.
The evidence base for CBT is a lot more robust and conclusive for that of stoicism as a distinct philosophy. Interestingly, Chat makes a distinction between stoicism as virtue ethics vs stoicism as emotional suppression. I've never considered the latter as salient.