1. Happiness is a tangible component of human experience, and can be measured, reliably if not very precisely, by self-rated scores.

and importantly, the self-rated scores also correspond to observed physical brain states - so it is not an entirely subjective score, states described as happy by person A correspond physically to the states described as happy by person B. For more on this see references in the economist december edition already cited earlier in the thread

2. Humans are genetically programmed to pursue happiness. This is a survival mechanism: that is, things that make us happy are conducive to good health, a longer life, more babies and so on.

this is one I simply don’t buy. Evolution does not care about happiness, just how many offspring survive. People genetically are pretty much just a slightly more socially adept chimp - and it is quite easy to observe that the most successful sires of chimps are not the most happy. It is a lot easier to make a link between absence of pain and genetics - but does this constitute happiness? Put simply, humans have not been around long enough for evolution to have predisposed us to more sophisticated emotional states. Conceivably hunter-gatherer humans were happy/unhappy 10,000 years ago but I doubt it: they had a hard time just attempting to live long enough to get a meal. Far more of a driver was avoidance of hunger, pain, cold etc. However, if the definition of happiness is a negative one (”absence of” any of the above) then maybe the proposition holds

3. Cross country data shows pretty consistently that on average happiness increases with income, but at a certain point diminishing returns set in. In the developed world, people are not on average happier than they were in the 1960s.

yes

4. In the short run, increasing income makes people happier, but the effect is short lasting for two reasons. First, we become quickly habituated to improved material circumstances, and their happiness returns to its original level. Second, we are hard-wired to be status conscious, so an increase in income only makes us happier until everyone else catches up.

but a drop in income makes us much more unhappy than an equivalent rise in income makes us happy. loss aversion is the driver. it is this psychological aspect that makes calls for reduced living standards implausible. This has important public policy implications (see below)

5. Some variables have at least as large an impact on happiness but a more durable one than income: in particular, health, family relationships, employment, the level of trust in the community, and the degree of personal freedom.

seems borne out by the research; worth looking at martin seligman’s work - a lot of academics don’t like it because it is popular, but I understand that it is borne out by serious research and data collection.

6. In pursuit of the short term payoff we get from higher income, we tend to sacrifice health, family relationships and community building, and in doing so fail to maximise happiness in the long run.

ditto

7. Happiness is a self-evident good. Other things that are good, like freedom, morality or affluence, are ultimately justified in terms of their ability to make us happier. But happiness is an end in itself, and can’t be justified in terms of anything else.

this is one of the trickiest aspects of the happiness researchers’ arguments. Happiness has to be axiomatic; we can assert that it is better to be happy than unhappy, but if someone has different axioms, its impossible to get a meaningful exchange going. (eg turning around the sequencing in the above, we could imagine someone who who argues that happiness is only justified when it can help keep us moral)

8. The highest goal of government policies should be to make us happier on aggregate, and therefore some index of happiness rather than one of material production should be the benchmark of national performance.

the objective function of politicians is to get elected/reelected, and policy is framed around that. often this coincides with making people happy but not always - especially where there are short term goals that government policy can achieve at the expense of longer term ones (an aggregation of the problem identified in point 6). An index of happiness is arguably worth developing in wealthier countries due to the diminishing returns from growth (3, above), and to help counter media fetishisation of GDP or GNP as a measure of progress - but against this it has to be observed that for most of the world’s population material standards of living are still pretty good proxies for how happy/unhappy they are. Even in the developed world, trends in material production do seem to correlate reasonably closely with electoral success, which is arguably a proxy for how happy people are with government policy. Incidentally, did you know that the alleged “gross national happiness” measure in Bhutan is a myth - it was just the musings of the king during a press conference on what might be desirable in theory?

as for the objections:

A. Self-rated happiness is not a reliable indicator at all, and useless for comparing happiness between times, people and societies. People might say they are not happier than they were forty years ago, but perhaps they simply don’t remember correctly. Or in any case their expectations might be higher. That is, happiness itself may be subject to habituation in the same way that material comforts allegedly are; and in that case happiness is no more useful as a gauge of progress than the material comforts themselves are.

see comment under 1) re the correspondence between self reported happiness and actual patterns of brain waves - although not a good enough response, and the objection still stands, if all the experiments are measuring is relative satisfaction, ie the only thing observed is the effect of the comparison. but also, note the advances in the field from a general presumption 20 years ago that happiness is ineffable and unmeasurable at all to having replicable measures (albeit with large margins of error) today - in other words, the objection may become less and less valid over time

B. Where government actions produce winners and losers, there is no satisfactory way to determine the net benefit, because the happiness of two or more individuals cannot be aggregated. Society might arrive at a consensus as to who was most deserving - the poor more than the rich, the old more than the young, and so on - and devise a set of weights. But these would always be arbitrary, and certainly not self evident.

I agree with the comments earlier in the thread that this is just a transposition of much longer standing arguments about the difficulty of comparing utility - in real live there’s hardly ever a pareto-optimal policy, and judgements are made all the time

C. Even if the promotion of happiness is an important objective in the development of moral principles, legislation and public policy, it may conflict with other basic principles like truth, honesty, property rights, contractual obligations, and so on. Attempts to resolve this through a concept of rule utilitarianism are doomed to failure.

depends on your axioms

D. Freedom is more important than happiness. Each individual should judge what’s best for himself, and governments have to govern as if people were competent to pursue their own happiness, regardless of what the experts think. Paternalistic measures that modify people’s behaviour for their own good, can only be justified in the cases of children, convicted criminals, and the intellectually handicapped.

seems to ignore the whole of western thinking since hobbes that governments have to limit freedom in various ways because in a pure anarchy our lives would be nasty, brutish and short. once we decide to have limitations on freedom in some form, then the question is which ones - and some rules to determine which are desirable are therefore needed.

E. The empirical studies claiming to show that happiness doesn’t rise permanently with income are contradicted by others showing that it does.

as per nick gruen

F. Even if it’s true that our happiness is affected by other people’s income, this is not a healthy or noble motivation. Envy should never be a basis for public policy.

again, agree with nick gruen. Would also add that given we are far more worried about losses than gains, and far more inclined to react to recent than to distant events (heaps of refs. in behavioural economics) then redistributive measures that across society tax future gains and redistribute so as to help ameliorate current losses increase welfare overall.

I woke up this morning thinking of a Police Brass Band playing in Rundle Mall when I was in Adelaide last Monday. It was a bloody good brass band. Now I can imagine economists, management consultants etc going through the police accounts and saying ‘what’s this - $X00,000 for a brass band? and giving it the shove. It’s not core business is it? Yet the brass band was a ‘merit good’. And it had lots of merit. It radiated merit. I haven’t heard a brass band play as crisply as that perhaps ever in my life. They had a singer and he was a cop - and he could really sing.

Now this expenditure I conjecture was massively conducive to happiness. About a hundred coppers playing magnificently a crowd around enjoying it. It’s hard not to believe that it improved everyone’s wellbeing a great deal, by improving morale around the place, the sense of belonging and community.

I thought of Paul Keating’s restructuring of the ABC Orchestras. I don’t know enough about it to know if it was a good thing or not, but it smacked of the central planner and the econocrat. The changes were based around some fairly simple ideas of rationality. The Sydney Symph did particularly well - surprise surprise. Maybe the worked out well, maybe not. But an alternative approach - a more small ‘c’ conservative one would be not to mess with institutions that seem to be doing a good job. I wouldn’t want to mess with the Adelaide coppers brass band. They were great.

(a) impose education programs on high school children about marriage, relationships etc with a view to equipping people with stronger interpersonal skills likely to produce more durable marriages?

(b) give substantial subsidies and tax breaks to families (as the Howard government and to an extent Hawke/Keating have done)?

(c ) make divorce more difficult (e.g. by re-imposing fault grounds as the only bases)?

(d) require lawyers to advise intending divorcing clients of the desirability of marriage counselling?

(e) forbid gay marriage on the basis that it undermines the traditional institution of marriage?

(f) impose censorship to ensure that marriage is portrayed positively on TV and in movies etc?

(g) prohibit employers from pressuring workers to work excessively long hours and night and evening shift work, phenomena which clearly undermine families?

etc.

I don’t have any problems with (d) and (g), have only slight reservations about (a) (namely that I’d prefer school hours to be reserved for more academic learning, leaving this sort of life learning for home and family), have mixed feelings about (b) and to a lesser extent (e), and would be strongly opposed to (c ) or (f).

1. Happiness is a tangible component of human experience, and can be measured, reliably if not very precisely, by self-rated scores. SUBJECT TO LARGE ERRORS ESPECIALLY AS PEOPLE GET HAPPIER.

2. Humans are genetically programmed to pursue happiness. This is a survival mechanism: that is, things that make us happy are conducive to good health, a longer life, more babies and so on. IF YOU LIKE. “GENETICALLY PREDISPOSED MIGHT BE A MORE CAREFUL WAY TO PUT IT.

3. Cross country data shows pretty consistently that on average happiness increases with income, but at a certain point diminishing returns set in. In the developed world, people are not on average happier than they were in the 1960s. YEP

4. In the short run, increasing income makes people happier, but the effect is short lasting for two reasons. First, we become quickly habituated to improved material circumstances, and their happiness returns to its original level. Second, we are hard-wired to be status conscious, so an increase in income only makes us happier until everyone else catches up. YEP

5. Some variables have at least as large an impact on happiness but a more durable one than income: in particular, health, family relationships, employment, the level of trust in the community, and the degree of personal freedom. YEP

6. In pursuit of the short term payoff we get from higher income, we tend to sacrifice health, family relationships and community building, and in doing so fail to maximise happiness in the long run. NOT SURE - I’M SURE SOME DO. SOME HAVE THE OPPOSITE PROBLEM - THE WHOLE ISSUE MIGHT BE RETHOUGHT AS A PLEASURE GRATIFICATION PROBLEM IN VARIOUS DIMENSIONS AND THEN I’M NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENS.

7. Happiness is a self-evident good. YEP Other things that are good, like freedom, morality or affluence, are ultimately justified in terms of their ability to make us happier. STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH HOW STRONGLY YOU PUT IT - BUT i THINK IT IS THE CASE THAT GOOD THINGS OFTEN GO TOGETHER - IT’S CALLED POSITIVE FEEDBACK - AND SO TO THIS EXTENT THE CASE FOR EACH IS STRENGTHENED. ADAM SMITH ARGUED THAT FREEDOM WAS VALUABLE IN ITSELF AND CONTRIBUTED TO HAPPINESS. But happiness is an end in itself, and can’t be justified in terms of anything else. I GUESS.

8. The highest goal of government policies should be to make us happier on aggregate, and therefore some index of happiness rather than one of material production should be the benchmark of national performance. TOO STRONG. BUT IN SO FAR AS ECONOMIC POLICY IS CONCERNED UTILITARIANISM IS USUALLY A GOOD FOUNDATION. BUT THERE ARE OTHER VALUES AND THE WAY YOU’VE PUT THIS DOESN’T ADMIT OF THEM. I AGREE WITH KEN’S CONCERNS ON THIS - BUT IT’S ALL ABOUT HOW THE VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS ARE COMMUNICATED - THE WAY YOU’VE SET THEM OUT HERE THEY’RE VERY ‘ALL OR NOTHING’ AND THAT DOESN’T WORK WITH MY TINY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BRAIN. MODERATION IN ALL THINGS!

A. Self-rated happiness is not a reliable indicator at all, and useless for comparing happiness between times, people and societies. TOO STRONGLY WORDED BUT HAS TRUTH TO IT. People might say they are not happier than they were forty years ago, but perhaps they simply don’t remember correctly. Or in any case their expectations might be higher. That is, happiness itself may be subject to habituation in the same way that material comforts allegedly are; and in that case happiness is no more useful as a gauge of progress than the material comforts themselves are.

B. Where government actions produce winners and losers, there is no satisfactory way to determine the net benefit, because the happiness of two or more individuals cannot be aggregated. STRONGLY DISAGREE. THIS IS TOO FASTIDIOUS A CRITERION TO APPLY TO A DISCIPLINE WHICH IS DESIGNED TO HELP US MAKE DECISIONS BETWEEN DIFFERENT COURSES OF ECONOMIC ACTION. Society might arrive at a consensus as to who was most deserving - the poor more than the rich, the old more than the young, and so on - and devise a set of weights. But these would always be arbitrary, and certainly not self evident. TOO STRONG - THEY WOULD BE CULTURE BOUND. BUT VIRTUALLY ALL ETHICAL SYSTEMS HAVE SOMETHING IN THEM ABOUT WHAT IS OWED TO THE WEAK BY THE STRONG.

C. Even if the promotion of happiness is an important objective in the development of moral principles, legislation and public policy, it may conflict with other basic principles like truth, honesty, property rights, contractual obligations, and so on. Attempts to resolve this through a concept of rule utilitarianism are doomed to failure. I BROADLY AGREE, BUT AGAIN, IT’S HARD TO SAY MORE EXCEPT WITH CONCRETE EXAMPLES.

D. Freedom is more important than happiness. Each individual should judge what’s best for himself, and governments have to govern as if people were competent to pursue their own happiness, regardless of what the experts think. Paternalistic measures that modify people’s behaviour for their own good, can only be justified in the cases of children, convicted criminals, and the intellectually handicapped. VERY STARK WAY OF PUTTING IT. I THINK SUPPORT FOR THE ARTS, THE ABC, EDUCATION EVEN HOSPITALS IS BASED IN LARGE PART ON WHAT ECONOMISTS CALL (AND MANY ECONOMISTS POOH POOH) AS ‘MERIT GOODS’. I ACTUALLY THINK IT’S IMPORTANT THAT A SOCIETY HAS SOME CONCEPTION OF MERIT GOODS - IT’S HARD TO THINK OF A COMMUNITY WITHOUT SUCH A CONCEPTION. PATRIOTISM AND FIGHTING FOR ONE’S COUNTRY IS SOLD AS A MERIT GOOD TOO. IN THIS SENSE I’M BROADLY OK WITH THIS - THOUGH OF COURSE I MIGHT FIND MYSELF DISAGREEING WITH THE COMMUNITY AS TO WHAT ONE IS. NOW THERE IS SOMETHING ‘PATERNALISTIC’ ABOUT MERIT GOODS AND SPENDING ON THE ABC OR EVEN TAX DEDUCTIBILITY FOR CHARITY IS ‘PATERNALISTIC’. I ALSO THINK IT’S CONDUCIVE TO HAPPINESS AS A SOCIETY IS HAPPIER FOR THE SENSE OF ALTRUISM AND DECENCY PRESENT IN IT AND PEOPLE ARE HAPPIER WHEN THEY CONNECT WITH THINGS LARGER THAN THEMSELVES - AND IN SOCIETIES WHERE THAT IS ACKNOWLEDGED AND CELEBRATED. BUT THIS IS QUITE DIFFERENT FROM THE KIND OF THINGS THAT (I THINK) KEN HAS A PROBLEM WITH WHERE ONE MIGHT DECIDE THAT THE LITERATURE SAYS THAT PEOPLE ARE HAPPIER IN GROUPS AND THEN ONE RUNS ROUND HERDING EVERYONE INTO SPORTING GROUPS AND MAKING VARIOUS DECISIONS FOR THEM ON THE BASIS OF REGRESSIONS IN THE LATEST JOURNAL - IF YOU GET MY DRIFT.

E. The empirical studies claiming to show that happiness doesn’t rise permanently with income are contradicted by others showing that it does. NO COMMENT - AN EMPIRICAL QUESTION ABOUT THE LITERATURE.

F. Even if it’s true that our happiness is affected by other people’s income, this is not a healthy or noble motivation. Envy should never be a basis for public policy. IT NEEDN’T BE ENVY AND I THINK YOU’RE FALLING INTO A RECENT TRICK FROM THE RIGHT TO SAY THAT IT’S ENVY. NO DOUBT THERE IS ENVY IN THE COMMUNITY - LIKE ALL OTHER VICES. BUT J.M KEYNES, ADAM SMITH, JS MILL, ALFRED MARSHALL, A.C. PIGOU WERE NOT IN FAVOUR OF TAXING THE RICH TO FEED THE POOR BECAUSE THEY WERE ENVIOUS OF THE RICH. THEY SUPPORTED IT BECAUSE IT PRESENTS A CONJUNCTION OF VIRTUES. IT:
- IS ATTRACTIVE ACCORDING TO CHRISTIAN AND OTHER ETHICAL PRINCIPLES
- ENHANCES UTILITY AND SO IMPROVES THE EFFICIENCY WITH WHICH ECONOMIC INPUTS ARE CONVERTED TO OUTPUTS (UTILITY OR USEFULNESS)
- IT IS CONSISTENT WITH A CERTAIN DISDAIN FOR MATERIALISM WHICH ALL THESE PEOPLE SHARED. AFTER YOU’VE GOT A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF WEALTH, IT IS UNHEALTHY FOR WEALTH NOT TO MATTER LESS TO YOU.
G. You only ever hear these arguments from people like Clive Hamilton and Ross Gittens who already have everything they want. The whole thing is just about rich, aging yuppy down-shifters projecting their own priorities onto everyone else. A FAIR POINT TO SOME EXTENT. BUT IT’S VALID TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY’RE NOT PROJECTED ONTO OTHERS. I DON’T REALLY WANT TO LECTURE ANYONE ABOUT WHAT THEY SHOULD DO WITH THEIR WEALTH AS CLIVE HAMILTON APPEARS TO WANT TO DO. BUT I BRING MY KIDS UP THE WAY I WAS BROUGHT UP WHICH IS TO SAY THAT I ENCOURAGE THEM TO THINK THAT THE GREAT BLESSING OF HAVING MONEY IS THAT YOU CAN LET IT GET YOU ANYTHING YOU NEED THAT’S USEFUL AND THEN IGNORE IT. THE FACT THAT I SUPPORT HIGHER TAXES FOR THE RICH IS BASED ON MY OWN DISDAIN FOR WEALTH ABOVE A CERTAIN LEVEL. I DON’T CARE FOR IT PERSONALLY (THOUGH I WOULDN’T GIVE IT AWAY IF SOMEONE GAVE IT TO ME) AND SO I’M HARDLY GOING TO GO OUT OF MY WAY TO POLITICALLY SUPPORT THE WEALTHY GETTING HOLD OF MORE DOSH - THEY’VE GOT PLENTY AND SO HAVE I.

THERE !

A purist libertarian would deny the legitimacy of laws prohibiting adults from using whatever drugs they want. I’m not a purist libertarian, nevertheless IMO harm minimisation and education are more effective than prohibition and criminalisation of “victimless crime” behaviour like drug-taking.

Moreover, even if we accept that some regulatory restriction of opiate and other medically harmful drugs is desirable (as I do), a classical liberal approach (which is how I classify myself - a fairly mainstream position I would have thought, not “far fringe”) suggests that heavy-handed government regulatory intervention should generally only be utilised sparingly and in the clearest possible cases. While that may well apply to drugs (and food and health and safety standards), it manifestly doesn’t apply to the enforcement of particular prima facie harmless, generally accepted behavioural choices over other such choices.

“The state can and does force us to join the army …”

In Australia at least, military conscription has generally been regarded as unacceptable in any but situations of the most extreme threat. Look what happened to the Coalition government in 1972. If anything, this is a point in favour of my position: coercive government action is only acceptable in situations where there is (almost) universal acceptance that the targetted behavioural change is sufficiently critically important to the society as to warrant interference with adults’ freedom of choice to engage in activities which prima facie don’t harm others.

Finally, regulation of food and health and safety standards is qualitatively different from imposition of particular forms of behaviour that governments believe is likely to make citizens happier (like making divorce more difficult, or imposing religious instruction in schools, or restricting TV broadcasting to 4 hours per day - each of which have been advocated by assorted wowsers in purported reliance on happiness research). Generally speaking, people don’t knowingly choose to subject themselves to dangerous workplace conditions or unsafe foodstuffs. These sorts of laws are designed to protect people from hazards against which they are not in a position to protect themselves, and as such they are broadly accepted as necessary and desirable legislative impositions. Moreover, employers who provide unsafe workplaces and merchants who sell unsafe foods are not engaging in “victimless” behaviour: their conduct imposes hazards on others without their informed consent. However, we ARE all in a position to make our own reasonably informed choices about work/leisure tradeoffs, whether to be conspicuous consumers or “sea-changers”, how much TV we watch, whether we marry or divorce etc. Very few people want governments interfering in their choices in such areas, and the choices involved are “victimless” ones in that they don’t directly affect anyone but the person making the choice. Your analogies are therefore false ones.

“No government has any legitimate role in spending my tax dollars or using its regulatory power to promote activities that I don’t find pleasurable or deterring activities that I DO find pleasurable and want to pursue. Government’s role is to ensure policy settings that promote stability, economic efficiency and free choice so that citizens can make their own decisions about what makes them happy and have the capacity to pursue those activities. ”

Great slogans, but do you really believe them? The government on a whole range of issues acts on the premise it knows better. This includes education which is compulsory and is explicitly meant to socialise individuals into becoming something ‘we’ desire them to be. It includes policies on drugs, where ‘we’ decide ‘you’ should not consume this or that because it is supposedly bad for you. The state can and does force us to join the army whether it makes us happy or not. The state engages actively in changing people’s perception on a whole range of issues. And the state behind the scenes chooses for us what things are risky and dangerous, such as via its food standards agency or health and safety regulations. All this is strongly supported by populations in election booths. In this light, I do not believe that Ken is being honest when he says ‘The government doesn’t know what’s best for us, and anyone who thinks otherwise should never be allowed within cooee of any form of political power.’? If he seriously means this and thinks through its consequences he has disqualified just about every politician who ever had office and places himself on the far fringes of politics now.

In the meantime, I’d be very grateful if commenters could state their position with respect to my contentions 1-8 and refutations A-F. If your refutations are not covered in my catalogue, you are welcome to add new ones, but be explicit in doing so. If you are elaborating on one of them, again be explicit: Ken’s last comment was a perfect example of this.

The request is partly in the interests of economy and focus. For people who want to argue about growth fetish, Paul’s original thread would a great place to do it.

Thanks very much to everyone who has contributed so far.

I just want to add, re ‘growth fetishes‘: this is a silly phrase. It simply describes human nature. The only issue you can actually identify as a ‘growth fetish‘ is that capitalism enables everyone to grow, mutually, whereas pretty much every other form of human organisation gives unbridled rein to the ‘growth fetish‘ of the lucky few, who can be presumed to report themselves very happy, at the tragic expense of all the others.

The ‘growth fetish‘ you deplore is intrinsic in the conception, which I believe we share, that no one human is worth intrinsically more than any other, and accordingly each should have his or her chance at self-fulfillment.

Where we diverge is that I want to give her her chance to be ‘happy‘, and most likely make others ‘happy‘/better off along the way, whereas you want to make her ‘happy‘, and, as KP points out, damned if she don’t.

I disagree fundamentally with this statement by Paul, and it has nothing to do with being uncaring about other people’s happiness:

If you would on the other hand take the utilirian philosophy of economists and state bureaucracies seriously then you would want your fellow man and woman to achieve their goals and if those goals are to be happy, you’d want as best as possible to measure and improve that happiness and you would simply live with all the imperfections that come with it.

No doubt there are numerous differences of values, perception and misunderstanding that contribute to this disconnect. But I suspect the central one is the fact that IMO you simply can’t sensibly extrapolate from research which shows what on average makes people happy (family, friends, marriage, religion etc) and what (again on average) only makes most people fleetingly happy (material possessions), and conclude from this that governments should devise and enforce policies that promote the things that make people happy and deter the things that don’t. The most obvious reason, which Paul seems to ignore, is that these are only averages. There are lots of people who DON’T find that family, religion etc are things that make them deeply happy. Introverts (a class which I suspect includes most bloggers) have much less desire for intense and continuous face-to-face intimate interaction with friends etc than extroverts, for example. Should governments promote and fund jolly social clubs for extroverts in preference to facilities that allow introverts like me to interact feely online?

And on possessions, what about collectors (of old cars, blues LPs, stamps, coins, antique furniture or whatever)? These people get deep and ongoing happiness out of their collections. And lots of people (including me) get considerable and ongoing pleasure out of driving a car that handles well and precisely and has a good positive gear-change etc.

Essentially the above is James Farrell’s argument D, with the additional point that I doubt that the happiness research (at least what I’ve read) sufficiently identifies the individual variations in depth and intensity of enjoyment of the things that make people happy.

No government has any legitimate role in spending my tax dollars or using its regulatory power to promote activities that I don’t find pleasurable or deterring activities that I DO find pleasurable and want to pursue. Government’s role is to ensure policy settings that promote stability, economic efficiency and free choice so that citizens can make their own decisions about what makes them happy and have the capacity to pursue those activities. Governments cannot and should not “pick winners” in the lifestyle arena any more than (it is now fairly unversally accepted) they should do so in the economic sphere, and for very similar reasons.

I don’t have any massive problem with governments spending a certain amount of money on advertising campaigns giving people information about what research says makes people happy and what doesn’t, and urging us to concentrate on leisure, friends, family etc rather than obsessive acquisitiveness. It might help to counteract the ubiquitous messages of the corporate sector which has a vested interest in promoting conspicuous consumption. Similarly, I don’t have any problem with family law rules that require lawyers and others to draw clients’ attention to the possibility/desirability of marriage/family relations counselling before proceeding to divorce. But anything more coercive than that is totally unacceptable IMO. The government doesn’t know what’s best for us, and anyone who thinks otherwise should never be allowed within cooee of any form of political power.

Amongst other things, I think that ‘happiness‘ is inherently, as seems to be widely acknowledged if not understood, rival in nature. For better or for worse many people seem to derive their happiness only relatively (for my part I agree with Jason Soon). The error that the opium-fans here promulgate is that of attributing this to capitalism, or libertarianism, or name your evil toxic poison of the month.

After all, when was the word ‘schadenfreude‘ coined?

If you must, you could return to ‘fulfillment’, with its overtones of eudamonia, but then you would have to accept that most people understand that to relate to hard work and individual liberty to make choices, for good or for bad. At which point, return to square one (essentially the psycho-liberty-freak-property-rightsism one, with the qualification of giving people the means to achieve).

What did you expect, Marxist/Maoist objections?

A. I dismiss your subjective metrics, only objective ones, like $, are acceptable.

Subjective measurements are fine so long as you are not trying to avoid accountability. I have no doubt that self-polling of happiness can be qualitatively analysed, what I object to is quantitative analysis of such metrics across time and space. What makes an African in a war torn nation happy is not the same as what makes a middle class Australian happy, nor an Australian from the 1950s.

B. Hold on, I see where this is going! Government intervention, right? Caught you. Well I’ve got standard arguments against that!

Explain how government can actively govern and make everyone happier. It can only promote happiness for some at the expense of others. The state must subjectively decide who’s happiness is more important.

C. Who are you to pick happiness as a goal, eh? Let me change the subject and talk about my goals. Property rights!

Not precisely. Government can target things that produce happiness in some people, but unless they are going to hand out some sort of mood enhancer that produces the feeling of happiness (whatever that is, happiness is quite a personal experience), then happiness is not a measurable goal because not everyone are motivated by the same things.

Property rights aren’t a goal. Libertarians don’t have goals for society, I don’t have a utopia, but I do wish to unleash the massive potential of humanity. Secure property rights is a way to facilitate this. You can pursue anything you like, so long as you don’t try to force me to comply with your goals.

D. Did I mention freedom? That is a noble goal. Let’s talk about that.

Freedom to pursue happiness anyone?

E. Let me manufacture some uncertainty about your statistics.

So your argument is not up to peer review?

F. I see you trying to discuss a positive emotion, well I deny it your really talking about a negative one - i.e. envy.

If lack of happiness can be driven by envy, why should this not be debated? What is your solution for envy?

G. This sounds like populism to me, so before we get into that who made you king?

I don’t really hold with this argument either, there are plenty of ways to shoot down this argument, and attacking personality and economic background is not one of them.

The Christmas (Dec 19) 2006 issue of The Economist has a marvellous set of articles on happiness. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available for free viewing on the web. The discussed the difficulties of measuring happiness, and made significant comment about the US which, (as Kath and Kim observed about Australia), happiness comes from having something others don’t have. The Economist then raises the Law of Diminishing Returns. But then, The Economist is just another journal of the latte-sipping left (according to Hobbesian free-marketeers), and only useful because their figures are so darn accurate. Even though free market radicals demonstrate that intangibles are worth three times as much as hard assets (tangibles accounting for only 25% of the market capitalization of listed companies), they discount intangibles as valid objects of economic and social policy.

On Growth:

Growth, as measured by a rising GDP so often held up (in isolation) as proof of economic management by Australian (and US) governments is actually a poor measure of economic health, and easily skewed by dollars pointlessly chasing each other’s tails without actually producing anything of real value. Too often “growth” (especially as mere GDP) can actually be bad for the economy, as well as for human happiness. I argue in Not all GDP growth is good that an increasing GDP is like measuring the growth of a child in kilograms (flab rather than muscle): sometimes increases are bad, falls are good.

A. I dismiss your subjective metrics, only objective ones, like $, are acceptable.
B. Hold on, I see where this is going! Government intervention, right? Caught you. Well I’ve got standard arguments against that!
C. Who are you to pick happiness as a goal, eh? Let me change the subject and talk about my goals. Property rights!
D. Did I mention freedom? That is a noble goal. Let’s talk about that.
E. Let me manufacture some uncertainty about your statistics.
F. I see you trying to discuss a positive emotion, well I deny it your really talking about a negative one - i.e. envy.
G. This sounds like populism to me, so before we get into that who made you king?

The highest goal of government should be to enable people to pursue their own goals with minimal interference from others (including government) and within the limitations of their ability and access to resources. Government policy cannot actively promote happiness without defining what happiness is. Unless there is a universal quantifiable agreement with what happiness is, then even the best, most efficient government policy will fail because the objective is unacheivable.

1. Happiness is a tangible component of human experience, and can be measured, reliably if not very precisely, by self-rated scores.

Happiness is such a subjective, personal idea, that no one can possibly know what will lead to happiness for other people. The whole concept of a scale of happiness is laughable if it is being used to compare between nations and across time.