Recently, there has been a spate of mainstream Democrats pooh-poohing the progressives and warning that they threaten this fall’s widely expected blue wave in the midterm elections.

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein were on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago claiming gains by leftists as “a 911 call for the Democratic Party and America.” Penn, pollster, and Stein, New York City Council president 33 years ago, are ideal WSJ Democrats, which is to say, Republicans-lite. Thomas Edsall was in the New York Times saying the socialists “threaten to limit potential center-left gains in voting in the midterms.”

And just this week, the Times was absolutely giddy over a razor-thin 0.47-percentage point victory—3,500 votes out of almost 800,000 cast—by “moderate” David Crowlkey over his democratic socialist rival Francesca Hong. Neither candidate broke the 40% mark.

But the problem the Democrats have isn’t with the leftier wing of the party. No, it’s the right wing, the so-called “moderates” who abandoned the party’s long-term policy goals 30 years ago. It was Jesse Jackson who, rightly, diagnosed the problem in the 1988 Democratic presidential debates. He said his opponents—who included Al Gore, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and the eventual nominee, hapless and hopelessly bland Mike Dukakis—were all talking about “managing Reagnomics” rather than rolling it back. The managers have been in charge ever since.

Starting with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the mainstream of the party moved so far to the right as to become unrecognizable as the party that dominated the government for 50 years. It’s been nearly that long since Ronald Reagan was elected president, and Reaganomics became the foundational philosophy of both political parties.

Here’s a distillation of the core policy goals of the Democratic Socialists of America. Is there anything here that any working-class Democrat of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s would disagree with? Clinton moved the party to the right, and it lost its hold on the white working class because it abandoned the economic goals of the workers and left it to the Republicans to replace them with fake “social” issues. Look at this list and tell me what any proud Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson-Carter Democrat would object to:

• Universal Public Services: Implementing a single-payer Medicare for All system, making higher education tuition-free, canceling all student debt and expanding free universal child care.
• Labor and Workplace Democracy: Expanding labor union rights, raising the minimum wage and instituting a 32-hour workweek without a reduction in pay.
• Housing Justice: Establishing universal rent control and expanding massive public investments into multi-income “social housing” to treat housing as a human right.
• Climate Policy: Enacting a Green New Deal to transition the United States to a 100% renewable energy economy while guaranteeing jobs for displaced workers.
• Racial and Social Equity: Defunding traditional police structures in favor of community reinvestment, and eliminating systemic oppression based on race, gender and sexuality.
• Democracy and Foreign Policy: Eliminating corporate influence in politics through publicly funded elections and reducing the U.S. military footprint overseas.

While Americans may be spooked by the term “socialist,” the policy goals of the Democratic Socialists and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party were fundamental Democratic positions through most of the 20^th century. The objections to the left-leaning policies have far more to do with the label than the objectives.

If the Democrats seriously want to win Congress this year and the White House in 2028, the moderates better get with on the left side of history and become Democrats again.

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The great historian David McCullough (1933-2022) won the Pulitzer prize for biography twice, for his books on Truman and John Adams, but he also wrote best-selling books on the Panama Canal, the Johnstown Flood, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wright brothers, and others. Here are his comments in a 2002 interview with Bruce Cole on the importance of writing as an act of thinking and learning (Humanities, “The Danger of Historical Amnesia,” July/August 2002, 23:4, my emphasis):

 I am adamant on the subject that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that’s invaluable. You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. …

We all know the old expression, “I’ll work my thoughts out on paper.” That’s exactly right. There’s something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes. And the teacher who teaches history should be grading the writing, too.

The post “To Write Well is to Think Clearly”: David McCullough first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Let’s say you’re a Middle East expert on the Trump White House national security team, or maybe you’re what they call a “planner” in “Muscles” Hegseth’s Pentagon. It’s sometime in 2025. Israel’s so-called 12 Day War, and the U.S. “Operation Midnight Hammer” strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been over for several months.

Holes have been found in Trump’s claims that the attack had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the effectiveness of the strikes was leaked. The DIA concluded that while entrances to Iran’s underground bunkers were destroyed, it was unlikely that Iran’s enriched uranium and the centrifuges necessary to enrich it were destroyed. In an interview, Vice President Vance admitted that the administration didn’t know where Iran’s enriched uranium was kept. The DIA estimated that all those bombs and bunker busters dropped by B-52’s and B-2 bombers had put Iran’s nuclear program back by “a few months,” not the total destruction claimed by Trump and Hegseth.

Trump got mad. He ordered an investigation into who leaked the DIA report. In August, Hegseth fired the DIA Director, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse.

The upshot was that Iran still had a nuclear program. Trump began raising the alarm again: Iran could have a nuke in a matter of months, not years.

The word went out from the Oval Office or the 12^th hole at Trump’s Doral golf resort, or wherever it is that Trump makes his Big Decisions. It’s time for a war on Iran.

In years past, even during such bumbling administrations as that of George W. Bush, who started a war with Iraq without planning what he would do after he took over the country, the least that the Pentagons of the past would do is have a look at the history of past conflicts involving the target country. Well, in the case of Iraq, the First Gulf War pretty much decimated Saddam’s army in just a few days, which led to the decision by Vice President Cheney and his pet Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that the U.S. did not need to field the gigantic army that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell had contended was necessary for victory. So, Rumsfeld famously, or infamously, went with “the army you have rather than the army you want,” and they sent about 140,000 troops into battle and fired Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who had disagreed at a congressional hearing about the number of troops necessary to attack Iraq, saying, correctly as it turned out, that “several hundred thousand troops” would be necessary.

I’m bringing up all this now-ancient history to make the point that exactly none of this sort of planning happened at the Pentagon or anywhere else before Trump decided to attack Iran on February 28. If they had taken a look at the history of Iran’s military and its political leadership since the revolution of 1979, they would have discovered that Iran was attacked by another country, Iraq, in 1980, and fought a war for eight long years to defend itself.

Casualty figures for that war are disputed, but most historians agree that a total of 500,000 soldiers from both sides lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq’s official tally is about 250,000 “martyrs.” Iran’s “Foundation of Martyrs” admits to having lost 155,000 to 172,000 soldiers. Other estimates are much, much higher, with at least one study holding that Iran lost between 500,000 and 750,000 soldiers in the war. Figures for the wounded are also in dispute, but there appears to be some agreement that 400,000 to 600,000 Iranian soldiers were wounded severely enough to require hospitalization.

Whatever the true figures, the Iran-Iraq war was terrible. Both countries had modern air forces with jet fighters and fighter-bombers. Both had huge armored forces. Both were able to conscript hundreds of thousands, even as many as a million, young men to fight in their armies. Both had massive stockpiles of munitions. Both had economies that used oil money to keep going. Iran was backed by a coalition of countries including North Korea, Libya and China. Iraq received military aid from Russia and targeting information from the U.S., as well as loans from Saudi Arabia and other gulf nations opposed to Iran.

The war itself resembles the war between Ukraine and Russia. Iraq was the aggressor, invading Iran in September of 1980. Iraq was able to seize some Iranian territory. Both countries tried unsuccessfully to destroy each other’s air forces. The war quickly settled into trench warfare, with Iran gradually taking back territory it had lost with forays through the front lines to encircle Iraq’s forces. Both sides, but primarily Iran, used variations of “human wave” attacks against the other, causing huge casualties and loss of life. Two days into the war, there was a battle for the Iranian city of Khorramshahr that lasted over a month and cost each side about 7,000 deaths and an unknown number of wounded. The city was occupied by Iraq for two years, and then a second battle returned it to Iranian control, again at great loss of life.

The war ground on. A ceasefire was proposed in 1982, but rejected by Iran, which went on the offensive, attacking Iraq again and again. Iraq was largely on the defensive after 1982, but Iran suffered huge losses in its offensive against Iraq. From 1983 to 1984, the war was stalemated, with neither side gaining advantage. Both countries spent great percentages of their gross domestic product on their militaries.

Iraq attacked Iran’s Kharg Island in 1984 and bombed Iranian tankers, trying to goad the West into entering the war on Iraq’s side to return oil shipping back to normal. Lloyd’s of London estimated that during the war, about 550 commercial vessels were attacked and more than 400 civilian sailors were killed.

In 1985, Iraq went on the offensive, launching air attacks on Iran’s cities. Iran launched a counteroffensive, crossing the Tigris River and taking a section of the Baghdad-Basra highway. Iraq counterattacked using chemical weapons and flooding Iranian trenches with river water from the Tigris.

In 1986, Iran attacked northern and central Iraq, its forces getting as close as 70 miles from Baghdad. Saddam started conscripting large numbers of Shiites into its army and throwing them wholesale into the battles with Iran. Later, after the U.S. took control of Iraq, Saddam would be accused by the Shiite majority that ended up in control of the country of using the Iran-Iraq war to control the Shiite majority simply by having so many young Shiite men killed in the war.

The war went back and forth for the next two years, with Iran launching human-wave attacks trying to take Basra, and Iraq hitting Iranian oil refineries and firing large numbers of its Scud missiles at Iranian forces. Iran used drones armed with warheads from RPG-7 rockets for the first time during the war.

By 1986 and 1987, Iran had developed its own defense industries, producing its own ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, tactical missiles, artillery pieces and ammunition. All of this is still true of Iran…and more…and it started during the Iran-Iraq war.

Both countries were weary of the war and looking for a way out. Saddam threatened Iran with massive attacks using “weapons of mass destruction,” which meant chemical weapons. Iraq had bombed Iranian Kurdish villages with chemical weapons repeatedly, so it wasn’t an idle threat.

Finally in July of 1988, Iraq bombed more Kurdish villages with poison gas. Iran’s political leadership told its religious leaders that the war might last until 1993, and the continuation of the war would bankrupt the country. Iran accepted a U.N. ceasefire resolution on the 20^th of July, 1988. There were sporadic attacks back and forth on each other’s shipping and more chemical attacks by Iraq on Kurdish villages controlled by Iran, but finally by early September, the anti-Kurdish attacks ended and many Kurds that had been in northern Iraq fled into Iran. As many as 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds had been killed by Iraq.

Prisoner exchanges went on for years. Iran continued a naval blockade of Iraq’s oil port, but Iraq used Kuwait and other Gulf nations and Turkey to ship its oil. The negative economic effects on both countries went on for years.

What lesson should have been learned by Pentagon planners before they shot a single missile or dropped even one bomb on Iran? The punishment Iran was willing to take to defend its land, its people, and its oil business was enormous. Eight years and more than a million total casualties. It is unthinkable, really.

Trump is in the sixth month of his war with Iran. Despite the noises he’s made about ceasefires and Iran wanting to “make a deal,” there is no ceasefire, and there is no deal, and there are no negotiations. Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, having learned from Donald Trump himself that their power as a country is larger than the size of its population, the strength of its military, or even the possibility it may one day have a nuclear weapon.

Iran has been ejecting invaders for four thousand years. Iraq was just the latest invader, before Trump and Hegseth decided that the way to defeat the Islamic Republic of Iran was to blow through practically every missile we have with no backup plan and no ability to restock our supplies of offensive and defensive missiles.

Trump famously doesn’t read. All Hegseth apparently reads are his tattoos and the labels on whatever he’s hiding in his desk these days.

Iranian leaders know their own history by heart. They laughed at Trump’s Fourth of July fisticuffs on the White House lawn and his pathetic “fair” on the National Mall. All his flyovers of U.S. jets did was waste fuel, the price of which has continued to rise as Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz goes into its sixth month, with no end in sight.

One of the things Iran has learned since its revolution is the power of what they did to Jimmy Carter in 1980 by keeping the hostages locked up until he lost his election. Do you think that Iran’s leaders might have the same sort of plan for Donald Trump as the date of the mid-term elections approaches? All they have to do is sit back and say that the Strait is closed until they say it’s open. That’s it. Words alone will do it, and there aren’t enough missiles or bombs in the U.S. arsenal to change that.

This is what Trump’s insane ambition and his refusal to study history does. It costs blood and treasure. Our blood. Our treasure.

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IUX, the institutional-grade trading platform serving over 1M+ active accounts across global markets, has made its pricing data fully visible for side-by-side broker comparison—inviting traders to stack its conditions against competitors without reservation.

In a market where cost claims are common and verification is rare, IUX has taken a different position. The firm’s website presents its core trading metrics—raw spreads starting from 0.0 pips, execution speeds averaging under 30 milliseconds, and zero hidden fees—laid out transparently for anyone evaluating where to place their next trade.

For active traders searching for a low cost CFD trading broker , this level of openness is notable. Most brokers advertise competitive pricing in general terms. IUX publishes the numbers and invites the comparison directly.

What the Comparison Actually Shows

IUX positions itself on three pillars when measured against industry alternatives: spread tightness, execution speed, and pricing transparency.

On spreads, IUX reports an average of 0.11 pips across its raw account offering—a figure derived from interbank-sourced pricing with no markup embedded in the quote. The broker’s revenue structure relies on a fixed, disclosed commission per lot rather than widening the spread itself, which means traders see the actual cost of each position before entering it.

Execution infrastructure is the second differentiator. IUX records average order execution at under 30 milliseconds, supported by direct cross-connectivity through low-latency fiber-optic links to major liquidity providers. The system is built on conflict-free STP execution, routing orders directly to the market without a dealing desk intervening between the trader and the fill.

The point about there being no hidden fees is more difficult to measure, but it is probably the most important one for traders who have narrow margins. By completely separating the spread from the commission, IUX’s pricing model ensures that the total cost of a trade can be calculated before the order is given.

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IUX’s comparison page doesn’t rely solely on self-reported metrics. The broker has collected a series of industry awards that independently validate the pricing position it’s asking traders to evaluate.

In 2025, IUX was awarded ‘Lowest Trading Costs Broker in Asia’ and ‘Fastest Trade Execution in Asia’ by the Global Business Review Magazine Awards. For 2025, the Global Brands Magazine Awards awarded IUX the title of ‘Best Forex Broker for Low Spreads in Asia’. Further recognition from Money Expo Mexico, TrustFinance, and Broker View confirms a record that is based on evaluations from a number of different review organisations rather than just one.

In this situation, these recognitions are significant since they deal with the same claims that IUX makes on its comparison page—namely, cost and speed.

The Infrastructure Behind the Numbers

Tight spreads and fast execution don’t hold up without infrastructure capable of sustaining them under pressure. IUX addresses this through several layers of operational architecture.

The liquidity network used by the broker is supplied by a large number of institutional providers, the purpose of this being to minimise slippage risk when the markets are volatile. During periods of high volume, the platform remains running thanks to DDoS protection  and the use of enterprise-grade traffic filtering, and the level of platform uptime is such that executions can be carried out consistently regardless of the market conditions.

Funds are held in segregated accounts, separated from company operating capital and secured under advanced financial standards. For traders who prioritize both cost and security, this structure addresses both requirements without compromise.

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IUX offers access to more than 165 CFD instruments across currencies, commodities, indices, stocks, crypto, and thematic index products. Traders can execute across these markets through three platform options: the proprietary IUX Trade App, the IUX WebTerminal, and MetaTrader 5 — all carrying the same underlying pricing and execution infrastructure.

The broker is active in multiple regions, with 24/7 multilingual support available for account and trade-related inquiries. Deposits process instantly for supported payment methods, and the broker’s withdrawal track record is reflected in consistent user reviews across the App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot, and Investing.com.

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The CFD brokerage space has grown significantly more competitive in recent years, and traders have more access to pricing data than at any previous point. That shift has made the gap between advertised and actual trading costs more visible and more consequential for anyone executing at volume.

IUX’s decision to publish its conditions openly and frame them as a direct competitive comparison reflects strong confidence in what the metrics show. Raw spreads from 0.0 pips, sub-30ms execution, STP order routing, and a fully transparent commission structure form a package that IUX believes holds up under direct scrutiny.

For traders ready to run that comparison themselves, the full pricing breakdown and feature details are available at IUX’s broker comparison page.

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The post IUX Opens Its Pricing to a Direct Low-Cost Broker Comparison appeared first on DCReport.org.

This is a photo of Donald Trump playing golf at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey on Sunday, defended by an Army Avenger anti-missile system in case of an attack by an Iranian drone or missile. Who knows what the barbed wire is supposed to defend against. Zeroed-in Iranian attack rabbits? Remotely commanded assault squirrels?

There were no Avenger anti-missile systems present in Kuwait on the second day of Donald Trump’s war of choice on Iran. Six Army soldiers were killed and 20 more were seriously wounded when an Iranian drone struck a logistics headquarters on an army base in Kuwait. Two days later, on March 3, 29 more soldiers were wounded in what the Pentagon has termed an “enemy attack.” On March 18, 70 more U.S. casualties were recorded in Pentagon records. Two dozen of these were reported as due to an “enemy attack,” but there is no record of how the other soldiers were injured, nor are the locations of where the injuries took place in Pentagon records.

The army’s Central Command, which is in charge of the war, reported in following days that the missile capability of Iran had been “decimated.”

In the weeks that followed, 130 more casualties were recorded by the Pentagon. Records of the injuries to these soldiers and where they occurred are not supplied.

In all, since Trump’s war began, 642 soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines have been seriously wounded, and eighteen have been killed. These figures have had to be dragged out of the Pentagon by a Freedom of Information request filed by The Warhorse, a non-profit news organization dedicated to covering the service of military members and other defense issues. The Pentagon has fiddled the numbers multiple times since February. As the casualty numbers now stand, there were 14 deaths and 417 soldiers wounded during what the Pentagon has called “Operation Epic Fury,” and four deaths and 207 wounded since July 7 when Trump’s phony “ceasefire” with Iran broke down.

Here is something the Pentagon does not supply with its casualty figures. None of the soldiers were killed or wounded in what we think of as combat operations in the forward area of a war. All the casualties occurred in places that in previous wars would have been referred to as rear areas, behind the front lines of a war. In Trump’s war, there are no front lines, because he chose from the beginning to fight Iran exclusively from the air with missiles and bombs.

For years, the U.S. has had thousands of soldiers and sailors and members of the Air Force and Marines in the Middle East. They are stationed on U.S. military bases. Those military bases have now been emptied of members of the U.S. military because of the casualties and deaths that soldiers, sailors, airmen and women and Marines have suffered. The bases are empty, with military members relocated into civilian facilities such as hotels in the area, or they have been removed from the Middle East altogether to Europe and the United States.

This is why: The U.S. bases in the Middle East were essentially undefended from attacks by Iran using missiles and drones, which is the way Iran is fighting the war that Trump has been waging. There were no drone defenses on March 1 at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait. An Iranian drone flew across the Persian Gulf and aimed itself at the roof of the army’s logistics command center and penetrated the roof and exploded. The command center’s roof was not reinforced concrete designed to defend against drones and missiles. It was just an ordinary roof on an ordinary building.

Previously, I have published photos of the damage done by Iranian missile and drone strikes at the U.S. naval base in Bahrain. That base has now been emptied, with sailors reassigned out of the region.

The Pentagon had to move all U.S. troops out of the Middle East because there were no missile and drone defenses in the region, or if such defenses existed, they were inadequate. This is unprecedented in U.S. history. Our country went to war without preparing to defend the troops who were assigned to the region to assist in its fighting with logistical, intelligence, and other support. Trump’s Pentagon just left them out there with no defenses. That is why they had to be relocated to places beyond the reach of Iranian missiles and drones. Because there was no provision for U.S. defense against Iran’s weapons.

I’ll just bet you can’t guess where there are plenty of anti-missile and anti-drone defenses. Anywhere Donald Trump is. There are defenses for the White House, for Camp David, and now we have learned, there are Avenger Army anti-missile systems stationed at Trump’s Bedminster golf course. The Avenger is one of our older anti-missile defense systems, firing Stinger missiles from a mobile platform with a separate radar system that picks up incoming missiles or drones and commands the Stingers to fire. The Avenger system costs about $5 million each, with the Stingers themselves costing about $500,000 per missile.

So, the Trump administration didn’t think it was worth it to spend a few million dollars to defend our troops in Kuwait and Jordan and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where 18 have been killed and hundreds have been wounded, many suffering debilitating head injuries that occurred in blasts from exploding drones and missiles.

Our soldiers and sailors and airmen and women and Marines in the Middle East – those who are still in the region anyway – still aren’t defended against Iranian drones and missiles.

But Donald Trump is safe and secure at Bedminster. That fact is a good part of the reason that Iran is winning the war Trump started. They take war seriously, while Donald Trump goes golfing.

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My tradition on this blog is to take a break (mostly!) from current events sometime in mid- August. Instead, I pre-schedule daily posts based on things I read during the previous year about three of my preoccupations: economics, editing/writing, and academia. With the posts pre-scheduled, I can then relax more deeply when floating on my back in a Minnesota lake, staring up at the sky.

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Economists often use the term “happiness” synonymously with the term “utility,” which in turn is the basis for a basic economic model that people seek as best they can (given the cognitive constraints they face) to maximize their own utility. The connection goes back to the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who in one of the less-famous works of 1776 (overshadowed by the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), described the foundations of this theory of utilitarianism in “A Fragment on Government.” (Those of you who have read Bentham will be unsurprised that his “fragment” runs for several dozen pages.) Bentham begins with a “fundamental axiom” and then explains:

It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong … An act’s tendency to promote happiness is what we call its utility; its divergence from this is what we call harmfulness . So it is with actions that are among the objects of the Law: the only way to make a man see clearly the property of them that every man is in search of—i.e. the only way to give him satisfaction—is to point out to him their utility or harmfulness.

Of course, Bentham was not the first to give “happiness” a central role. John Locke in his 1690 An Essay on Human Understanding had made the term central decades earlier. Both “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence and Bentham’s utilitarian axiom of happiness were drawing heavily on Locke, who wrote:

Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) DO continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing … As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.

But when Locke was writing, the centrality of happiness was a relatively new idea. Phil Withington tracks it down linguistically in “The Invention of `Happiness,'” an essay published in the 2017 book Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations, edited by Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes (a reprint of the chapter in working paper form is available here). Withington starts off with a vivid example. Thomas More’s Utopia was published in Latin in 1516. For a century, translations of the work into English did not include the word “happiness.” But then they did. Withington writes:

The word ‘happiness’ is absent from the first English version of Thomas More’s Utopia, which was translated into English from the Latin in 1551 and again in 1556 by Ralph Robinson. ‘Happiness’ remains absent from the next four editions of Robinson’s translation, which was republished regularly to 1639. But when Gilbert Burnet translated Utopia anew from the Latin, in 1684, he used ‘happiness’ no less than nineteen times. What follows looks to explain and contextualize this striking semantic development.

In short, the modern idea of happiness in the English language seems to have been invented in the mid-16th century, latched on to translators like Burnet and writers like by Locke the later decades of the 17th century, and then passed forward to modern economics by way of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Jefferson, and doubtless an array of others. In modern times, there are self-help books about finding happiness and serious research and policy based on survey data on reported levels of happiness.

But what came before happiness? Translations of Latin works (like More’s Utopia) often used “felicitas (denoting worldly contentment) or beatitude (denoting spiritual fulfillment and redemption).” Other writers uses felicity or blissfulness. But the use of “happiness” was rare. Withington does a deep dive into historical writings from the 15th ot the 17th century and finds:

But taking the story back reveals … that ‘happiness’ has not always been as conceptually stable as contemporary commentators, or indeed historians, assume – that, indeed, it was only in the sixteenth century that the word began to acquire the meanings with which we associate it today. … Happiness’ derived from the Old Norse noun ‘hap’, meaning luck or fortune, was probably in use by the mid-fifteenth century. Before the 1550s the semantics of ‘happiness’ were largely informed by this provenance: the addition of the English suffix ‘ness’ to the adjective ‘happy’ made for a word that indicated the quality and state of hap (i.e. fortune) or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition. … But as well as signifying hap, between the 1470s and the 1550s ‘happiness’ was increasingly used to do new semantic work, accumulating connotations that it had not previously possessed … [T]wo other concepts to migrate to ‘happiness’ by the 1550s offer more concrete evidence that the word became an important conduit of classical and patristic ideas into vernacular and spoken English. These were the Greek notion of eudaimonia and the Latin sense of summum bonum: on the one hand, the realization and fulfillment of perfect and ‘natural’ selfhood; on the other hand, the overarching ideal – or ‘sovereign good’ – upon which the good life, the good person, and the good afterlife is based. … The cord between happiness and hap was broken.

By the 1560s, writers were distinguishing between “‘heavenly life, and true happiness’ (Christian ‘blessedness’) and the ‘civil’ happiness (‘felicity’) that was achievable on earth.” Moreover, “happiness” was in some cases explicitly used to refer to the overall good of a society or countrie, and in other cases to refer to the feelings of individuals. The multipurpose meaning of “happiness” has been an issue ever since it became such a broad catch-all term. For example, Locke carefullly warns in 1690 “that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness.” So who decides what happiness is imaginary or real?

Daniel Kahneman (Nobel ’02) was one of the founders of behavioral economics and also one of the early movers in using happiness survey data in economic research. However, later in life he emphasized the complexities of happiness: for example, one might consider happiness in anticipation of an event, happiness when an event occurs, or happiness in remembering an event. For a given individual, these categories of happiness may be quite different. Kahneman said to one interviewer:

I gradually became convinced that people don’t want to be happy … They want to be satisfied with their life. … People don’t want to be happy the way I’ve defined the term – what I experience here and now. In my view, it’s much more important for them to be satisfied, to experience life satisfaction, from the perspective of ‘What I remember,’ of the story they tell about their lives.

In my own mind, Kahneman’s formulation helps to explain why someone might, say, take classes in something where they are a novice (say, dancing or cooking), or serve a hot meal to a large family every day or enter an intense graduate program or work crazy hours at a start-up or train to run a marathon. In the business and stress of the moment, it might be hard to describe those experiences as always and continually “happy.” But they make complete sense if they are part of a narrative you like to tell yourself about your life.

I would not suggest revising the Declaration of Independence to refer to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfaction,” nor rewriting Bentham to say that “it is the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” But thinking about what people truly want from their lives is at the center of economics and the social sciences. From that perspective, “happiness” can be a useful catch-all term and short-hand as long as one remembers that it is a stand-in for a considerably deeper and historically mutable concept.

The post When Happiness Was Invented first appeared on Conversable Economist.