Why Utopias Are So Miserable

Advances in the study of human wellbeing have produced many visionary attempts to engineer the perfect society. These attempts have an undeniable appeal. Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia had, at the time, many vocal admirers in the West, only much later rectified by revelations of the tremendous suffering created by these totalitarian regimes.

The modern study of life satisfaction might well inspire further utopian visions. Put simplistically, if unemployment, ill-health, secularism, and divorce reduce people’s wellbeing and increase suicide rates, why not make divorce illegal, make healthy eating mandatory, provide guaranteed jobs for all, and establish an obligatory state religion? The flaw in this logic is readily apparent in the life satisfaction data. While marriage, jobs, and good health tend to increase life satisfaction, there is an overriding contextual factor: Freedom of Choice.

On average, people’s self-reported freedom of choice is so strongly correlated with wellbeing that this factor alone may determine close to 50 percent of life satisfaction (see graph)*. Hence, policies that undermine freedom of choice will have, on balance, the unintended effect of sharply reducing wellbeing.

People have a strong desire for security, including of income and health. These factors have strong statistical relationships with life satisfaction. But the relationship between freedom of choice and life satisfaction is many times stronger. Hence, coercive attempts to produce security by imposing equality tend to produce not the utopias depicted by socialist and communist ideologues,but rather, unintended misery, as people trade a feeling of control over their lives for the lack of options imposed by state controls. The countries with the highest levels of wellbeing tend to provide political freedom, civil liberties, and widely distributed opportunities, as distinct from societies which seek to impose an enforced equality of outcomes.

*  This data on freedom of choice -- the response to the question, “how much freedom of choice and control you have over the way your life turns out” -- is collected in the World Values Survey, and can be viewed at www.worldvaluessurvey.org.