‘ Should Happiness Guide Public Policy?
October 2018

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In the modern world, you are more likely to die from obesity than starvation. You are more likely to die from old age than infectious disease. You are more likely to kill yourself than be killed by someone else.1 All around the world, rates of extreme poverty have sunk to all-time lows and life expectancies have soared to all-time highs.2 For the first time ever, the majority of Earth’s population will enter the global middle class in 2020.3 The regions of the world where this prosperity has yet to take root have now become exceptions to the rule. Contrary to popular belief, we seem to be living in the most prosperous and peaceful period in human history.

There are a variety of factors that have allowed us to accomplish these remarkable feats, although none have been determinative than economic growth. Over the past 200 years, economic growth has fought its way to the top of national and international policy agendas. Growth in per capita GDP has become virtually synonymous with progress. And for good reason. Economic growth has proven itself to be humanity’s most formidable opponent against poverty, disease, and war. However, governments in advanced societies are now being asked to do more than just prevent their citizens from suffering and dying prematurely. They are being asked to ensure well- being. This presents an entirely new set of challenges. To make matters worse, societies around the world are increasingly being forced to contend with the destabilizing forces of automation and climate change. Many nations are already feeling the political consequences of a diminishing sense of meaning in people’s lives. Economic growth not only seems incapable of solving these problems, it may very well exacerbate them.

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing movement to put another measure of progress at the center of global governance: happiness. According to Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations and professor of economics at Columbia University, “pursuing happiness is not only idealistic; it is the world’s best and perhaps only hope to avoid global catastrophe.”4 In this discussion, I will analyze the utility of happiness as a benchmark for public policy. In Section II, I will lay out a broad definition of happiness as subjective well-being, characterized by affective and cognitive dimensions and situated within a hedonist framework of well-being. In Section III, I will provide a brief exposition of the most common measurements currently used to assess happiness in economics and psychology and defend them against three interrelated objections of subjective uncertainty. In Section IV, I will offer a conclusion and summary of arguments. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that happiness can be a valid and useful tool for crafting and evaluating public policy.



The first challenge any policymaker is bound to encounter when considering happiness is how to define it. The concept is often conflated with the notions of “well-being” although there are important distinctions to be made between the two. In contemporary ethics, well-being refers to that which is inherently or non-instrumentally good for a person.5 Philosophical interpretations of well-being tend to fall into one of three categories: desire theories, objective list theories, or hedonist theories.

Traditionally, economists have tended to think about well-being in terms of “desire theories.” By these accounts, well-being is understood to be the satisfaction of desires. An individual is made better off by satisfying their desires, and their ability to do so is largely dependent on their level of income and market prices. For this reason, economists have largely focused on economic indicators as proxies for assessing individual well-being.6 Alternatively, philosophers including Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have argued for “objective list” accounts of well-being.7 Drawing on Aristotelian ethics, they argue that well-being is best understood as an objective list of inherent goods. These may include (but are not limited to) friendship, love, knowledge, autonomy, pleasure, health, and achievement. Well-being is determined by an individual’s ability to pursue projects that are inherently valuable.8 A third interpretation of well-being, commonly associated with utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, considers well-being in terms of subjective mental states.9 In its simplest form, a hedonist theory of well-being is primarily concerned with the relative amounts of experienced pleasure and pain.

Happiness, as it is generally understood in philosophy and psychology, refers to a positive mental state.10 For this reason, it is largely considered to be an outgrowth of hedonist theories of well-being.11 Happiness is by its very nature subjective, and is therefore often identified with the concept of “subjective well-being.” The literature distinguishes between two distinct dimensions of happiness: affective and cognitive. The affective dimension refers to the day-to-day experience of positive emotions. The cognitive dimension refers to an overall evaluation of one’s life as a whole, often referred to as “life satisfaction.” In so-called hybrid accounts of well-being, both affective and cognitive dimensions are considered relevant in assessing overall happiness. In a widely cited report published by the OECD, happiness is neatly summarized as “good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives and the affective reactions of people to their experiences.”12 In this discussion, I will consider this definition of “happiness as subjective well-being” as a potential benchmark for policymaking.

Figure 1:

                                


With this general framework in mind, we can now begin to ask targeted questions about the utility of happiness for public policy. Most importantly, can happiness be reliably measured? Unlike objective well-being indicators such as life expectancy and average income, individual mental states are not directly accessible to researchers. Instead, social scientists have to rely on other methods. One obvious way to find out whether people are happy or not is to ask them. For decades, massive randomized surveys including the World Values Survey, the Gallop World Poll, and the European Social Survey have assessed cognitive and affective dimensions of happiness with questions such as “All things considered, how satisfied with your life are you on a scale of 1-10?” and “Overall, on a scale of 1-10, how happy did you feel yesterday?”13 These surveys are the foundation of empirical happiness research. Their responses are meticulously studied and presented in countless academic publications and yearly reports including the the OECD Better Life Index, the World Happiness Report, and the Global Happiness Policy Report.

One of the most forceful objections to using the results of these surveys as tools for public policy is that the subjective nature of happiness renders them inherently unreliable. This objection has at least three distinct dimensions. According to one account, individual biases might skew the results. One person’s idea of an 8 out of 10 on a happiness scale might be very different from another person’s idea of an 8 out of 10, which would render the data essentially uninterpretable.14 As argued by the philosopher Daniel Haybron, “it is not always clear whether a given difference in reported life satisfaction is due to a genuine difference in well-being or is simply a product of differences in the way people report life satisfaction.”15

It worth noting that longitudinal panel studies seem much less problematic than cross- sectional studies in this respect. In the former case, changes in happiness are measured over time for a consistent sample of individuals, which largely controls for individual differences. However, even in cross-sectional analyses, where different samples of individuals are surveyed at different points in time, there are important reasons to doubt that individual biases are manipulating results. For one, international differences in happiness appear to be highly intuitive. Countries that do poorly in happiness rankings tend to do poorly in a variety of related objective measures including life expectancy, health outcomes, educational opportunities, and average incomes.16 This would seem to indicate that if individual differences in perceptions of happiness exist, they tend to be evenly distributed across populations. However, most public officials are not concerned with policymaking on a global scale. Populations targeted by public policy tend to be geographically bounded and culturally similar, leaving little reason to suspect significant differences in perceptions of life satisfaction. A person’s happiness is largely determined by the happiness of those around them.17 Social comparisons and reference points are crucial determinants of subjective well-being, and these are likely to be shared by similar groups of people.18

A related concern with using subjective well-being as an indicator for public policy is that different things make different people happy. Some people want to wake up early and run marathons, others want to stay up late and eat donuts. Even if happiness scales are reliable, and even if an 8 out of 10 for one person is comparable to an 8 out of 10 for someone else, there may be no way for public policy to target and accommodate the vast range of values and projects that constitute individual happiness in a given society.

However, while it is obviously true that different people have different ideas about happiness, a diversity of opinions need not render the concept useless to policymakers. In contemporary societies, people disagree about pretty much everything. We have different ideas about what constitutes good health, proper education, suitable income, meaningful work, and necessary security. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that health, education, income, work, and security are crucially important areas for policymaking. Societies are built on the idea that individuals share certain key commitments, and it is the task of policymakers to target that which all citizens can reasonable be expected to endorse.19 In other words, it is not necessary for citizens to agree about the fundamental nature of a good for it to be a useful target of public policy. All that is required is a generally shared commitment that it represents an important dimension of human life. Happiness surely passes this test. Furthermore, there may actually be much more consensus on the fundamental nature of happiness than one might expect. International analyses of life satisfaction have consistently revealed six key determinants of happiness: (1) social support, (2) GDP per capita, (3) healthy life expectancy, (4) freedom, (5) generosity, and (6) perceptions of corruption.20 Focusing on the social foundations of happiness may actually prove to be a far more effective and efficient way for lawmakers to reliably and sustainably improve the lives of their constituents. For example, increasing the proportion of citizens who feel as though they have someone to count on by just 10% predicts an increase in overall happiness equivalent to doubling GDP. Increasing the proportion of citizens who donate to charities by 10% predicts an increase in overall happiness equivalent to a 25% increase in GDP. Decreasing the proportion of citizens who believe corruption is a problem by 10% predicts an increase in overall happiness equivalent to a 20% increase in GDP.21 At least initially, there seems to be no good reason to assume that these areas would be impervious to targeted policy interventions.

There is at least one additional, more general worry regarding the utility of subjective well-being for public policy. Perhaps subjective judgments are just not the sort of thing that should be given weight by policymakers. After all, human decision making is notoriously flawed. Perhaps empirical analyses of subjective well-being can never truly be relied upon because individuals are simply incapable of accurately recognizing and representing their mental states.22 As such, policymakers would be better off worrying about more objective measures of well-being. One potential response to this objection stems from recent advances in neuroscience. Brain imaging studies have begun to produce useful insights into the neural correlates of happiness. In general, the experience of positive emotion tends to be associated with activity in the front left part of the brain, while the experience of negative emotion tends to be associated with activity in the front right part of the brain.23 This research implies a direct connection between brain activity and mood. These same regions of the brain are activated when participants are asked to complete life satisfaction surveys.24 Nevertheless, it still seems plausible to argue that reflective judgments concerning one’s life as a whole might be subject to the types of cognitive biases made famous by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.25 However, the claim that errors in human rationality should preclude lawmakers from relying on subjective judgments to guide public policy is vastly more radical than it appears. Most modern institutions and humanist ideals depend on a recognition of the inherent value of subjective judgments. Democratic elections and free market capitalism are founded on the idea that individuals can and should decide what’s best for themselves. It is entirely unclear why we shouldn’t extend this principle of respect for autonomy and self-determination to subjective judgments regarding individual happiness.


In this essay I have attempted to provide a brief analysis of the utility of happiness as a benchmark for public policy. I first situated the concept of happiness within a hedonist framework of well-being and defined it in terms of affective and cognitive dimensions of subjective well-being. I then offered an exposition of commonly used measures for assessing happiness in economics and psychology and attempted to defend them against three interrelated worries of subjectivity. Ultimately, I hope to have provided reasons to take happiness seriously as a useful metric for policymaking. The need to develop concrete policy solutions to direct human activity towards sustainable pursuits of individual well-being is becoming increasingly urgent. Luckily, there is every hope that reengineering governance agendas to maximize human happiness can effectively, efficiently, and lastingly improve lives over time and across generations.


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Footnotes

1 Ritchie, H. and Roser, M. (2018). “Causes of Death.” Our World in Data: ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
2 Roser, M. (2018). “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it.” Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts
3 Kharas, H. (2017). “The unprecedented expansion of the global middle class: An update.” Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf
4 Sachs, J. (2018). “Good governance in the 21st century.” In J. F. Helliwell, R. Layard, & J. Sachs (Eds.), Global Happiness Policy Report: 4.
5 Crisp, R. (2017). "Well-Being.” In Zalta, E. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/well-being.
6 Dolan, P., and Peasgood, T. (2008). “Measuring well-being for public policy: preferences or experiences?” The Journal of Legal Studies, 37(S2): S5-S6.
7 Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Sen, A. (1999.) Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf.
8 Seligman, M., and Royzman, E. (2003). “Happiness: The three traditional theories.” Authentic Happiness Newsletter (July): 2.
9 Bentham, J. (1776). A Fragment on Government. History of Economic Thought Books; Mill, J. S. (2016). Utilitarianism. In Seven Masterpieces of Philosophy. Routledge: 337-383.
10 Haybron, D. (2011). "Happiness.” In Zalta, E. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness/#TwoSenHap
11 Dolan, P., and Peasgood, T. (2008): S6.
12 Smith, C., and Exton, C. (2013). OECD Guidelines for Measuring Subjective Well-being: 10.
13 Smith, C., and Exton, C. (2013): 249
14 For an economic interpretation of this objection see Bond, T., & Lang, K. (2014). “The sad truth about happiness scales” (No. w19950). National Bureau of Economic Research.
15 Haybron, D. (2013) Review of Well-Being for Public Policy, by Ed Diener. Ethics, 124(1): 223.
16 Richard, L., and Jeffrey, S. (2017). World Happiness Report.
17 Hendriks, M. (2015). “The happiness of international migrants.” Migration Studies, 3(3): 343-369.
18 Boyce, C., Brown, G., and Moore, S. (2010). “Money and Happiness.” Psychological Science, 21(4): 471–475; Easterlin, R. (2003). “Explaining happiness.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(19): 11176-11183.
19 Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press: 137. 20 Richard, L., and Jeffrey, S. (2017): 18. 21 Richard, L., and Jeffrey, S. (2017): 31-33.
22 Versions of this objection are considered in Nussbaum, M. (2008). “Who is the happy warrior? Philosophy poses questions to psychology.” The Journal of Legal Studies, 37(S2): S81-S113.
23 Lane, R. et al. (1997). “Neuroanatomical correlates of pleasant and unpleasant emotion.” Neuropsychologia, 35(11): 1437-1444; Layard, R. (2011). Happiness: Lessons from a new science. Penguin UK: 17; Suardi, A. et al. (2016). “The neural correlates of happiness: A review of PET and fMRI studies using autobiographical recall methods.” Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 16(3): 383-392.
24 Urry, H. et al. (2004). “Making a Life Worth Living: Neural Correlates of Well-Being.” Psychological Science, 15(6): 367–372.
25 Kahneman, D., and Egan, P. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


Bibliography

Bentham, J. (1776). A Fragment on Government. History of Economic Thought Books.
Bond, T., & Lang, K. (2014). “The sad truth about happiness scales” (No. w19950). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Boyce, C., Brown, G., and Moore, S. (2010). “Money and Happiness.” Psychological Science, 21(4): 471–475.
Crisp, R. (2017). "Well-Being.” In Zalta, E. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/well-being.
Dolan, P., and Peasgood, T. (2008). “Measuring well-being for public policy: preferences or experiences?” The Journal of Legal Studies, 37(S2): S1-S30.
Easterlin, R. (2003). “Explaining happiness.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(19): 11176-11183.
Haybron, D. (2011). "Happiness.” In Zalta, E. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness/#TwoSenHap
Haybron, D. (2013) Review of Well-Being for Public Policy, by Ed Diener. Ethics, 124(1): 217-231.
Hendriks, M. (2015). “The happiness of international migrants.” Migration Studies, 3(3): 343-369.
Kahneman, D., and Egan, P. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kharas, H. (2017). “The unprecedented expansion of the global middle class: An update.” Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf
Lane, R. et al. (1997). “Neuroanatomical correlates of pleasant and unpleasant emotion.” Neuropsychologia, 35(11): 1437-1444.
Layard, R. (2011). Happiness: Lessons from a new science. Penguin UK.
Mill, J. S. (2016). Utilitarianism. In Seven Masterpieces of Philosophy. Routledge: 337-383.
Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2008). “Who is the happy warrior? Philosophy poses questions to psychology.” The Journal of Legal Studies, 37(S2): S81-S113.
Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Ritchie, H. and Roser, M. (2018). “Causes of Death.” Our World in Data: ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
Roser, M. (2018). “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it.” Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts
Sachs, J. (2018). “Good governance in the 21st century.” In J. F. Helliwell, R. Layard, & J. Sachs (Eds.), Global Happiness Policy Report.
Seligman, M., and Royzman, E. (2003). “Happiness: The three traditional theories.” Authentic Happiness Newsletter (July): 2.
Sen, A. (1999.) Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf.
Smith, C., and Exton, C. (2013). OECD Guidelines for Measuring Subjective Well-being.
Suardi, A. et al. (2016). “The neural correlates of happiness: A review of PET and fMRI studies using autobiographical recall methods.” Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 16(3): 383-392.
Urry, H. et al. (2004). “Making a Life Worth Living: Neural Correlates of Well-Being.” Psychological Science, 15(6): 367– 372.