Otto Neurath And Happiness

I think of Otto Neurath primarily as a member of the Vienna circle. Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick were two ther prominent members. They developed the philosophy of logical empiricalism or logical positivism. No woolly dialectics or cultural criticism for them.

It was a custom, when they were meeting at their preferred coffee-house in 1920s Vienna, to interrupt any speaker who had strayed into much-despised metaphysics. Neurath did this so often that they told him to hold up his hand whenever the speaker said something that was not metaphysics.

When Neurath fled the Nazis, he took his wife and his mistress with him. They got along well.

A number of revolutions, inspired by the Bolsheviks, convulsed central Europe after World War I. I think of Hungary and the Spartacists, in particular. Neurath began implementing his ideas for central planning under the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He advocated planning in kind, without monetary prices.

This was long before the definition of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But Neurath would not be interested in optimizing GDP in his planning. He did not want to duplicate capitalism. Rather he looked at a broader array of measures:

"Neurath ... pioneered a measure of living standard. He took variables that are now familiar to economists, such as nutrition, health, life expectancy, housing, clothing, incidence of crime. He was also concerned to build these up in a single measure, and its level, as well as its distribution, were to be the concern of the socialist planner." – Meghnad Desai. 2002. Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism.

This measure is like the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), Bhutan's Gross National Happiness (GNP), or, say, metrics promoted by Joseph Stiglitz.

I suppose I ought to mention ISOTYPE, Neurath's pictorial language or symbols.

A century has shown that an unregulated, unrestrained capitalism does not deliver a broad-based prosperity for all, in which most can fully develop their capabilities. Suppose you care about the majority of your fellow citizens, not just a few at the top. Empirically, you should vote for socialists.