World Happiness report
Explanation Up to now the science of happiness has focused mainly on the role of a person’s current circumstances in determining their happiness. We have reported some of the results in Chapter 3. But, as the diagram at the beginning of that chapter shows, these features are in many cases experiences in a person’s life (and their genes as well as their environment). A new frontier for happiness research will be a more developmental approach, using very long birth-cohort panels to identify factors affecting happiness over the life-course. There is also a pressing need for more controlled experiments to find the effects of different interventions. From multiple sources, we need quantitative results, which show us how much different factors really matter in determining happiness as variously measured. Policy-making using happiness as a criterion As knowledge increases, societies will have a growing basis for a new type of policy-making aimed at increasing happiness and reducing misery. This would involve a change of perspective and a change in the techniques of policy analysis. At present many countries use a traditional form of cost-effectiveness analysis, in which benefits are measured in money units on the basis of what citizens would be willing to pay for those benefits.10 This works quite well when the primary benefits are indeed financial or can be readily transferred into monetary equivalents. This is often true for policies on industry, transport, education and employment. However expenditure in these areas is often no more than a quarter or so of public expenditure. The bulk of public expenditure is on health, social care, law and order, the environment, child welfare, and income support. In none of these cases does willingness to pay provide adequate guidance to the benefits that arise. Happiness would be an excellent added criterion for evaluating these expenditures. So we can well envisage a parallel system of evaluation taking shape over time where policies are judged by the changes in happiness that they produce per unit of net public expenditure.11 Developing such systems should be a goal, at least provisionally. To make them fully operational will of course require more information and much more verification, but here the chicken-and-the-egg issue must be confronted. We should get started in serious thinking about the links of policies to produce subjective well-being, just as Bhutan is doing with Gross National Happiness. More knowledge is needed before such methods can be used, but the knowledge is more likely to be produced if there is an adequate demand. It is therefore important for governments to foresee their own requirements for knowledge about the well-being of the population, and to set in motion the relevant sequence of data collection and research to develop that knowledge. If this is done, there will be then an ever-growing understanding of what things matter most to people and in which ways. This growing understanding may well provide a new basis for policy-making in the age of sustainable development. Philosophical issues Of course most governments will have many other aims besides increasing the self-reported happiness of their population. Leaving aside the desire to be re-elected (which is generally helped if the population are happy), governments will surely care about health, freedom, honor, the realization of human potential, social justice, and the well-being of future generations. These are all important aims to society. What then is the special role of happiness? In Ancient Greece, Aristotle argued that happiness was the only good that was “good in itself.” This argument still has relevance.12 If we ask why health matters, we can give reasons: people feel bad when they are sick. Similarly people feel bad when they are not free. And so on. But if we ask, “Why does it matter if people feel good or bad?” we often end up with the proposition that people’s feelings – their happiness – is the ultimate standard for judging the importance of health or some other objective.
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