There is the pursuit of real happiness – and then there is the economics of happiness, a Brave New World of artificial well-being to which many deluded scientists have chosen to pin their hopes.
In Aldous Huxley’s masterpiece, soma was the perfect fake happiness drug; it infamously had “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”. In the dystopia envisaged by the so-called happiness economists, officials armed with clipboards and regression models would know what makes us happy – a poorer but more egalitarian society.
The seminal article on happiness economics was published by Richard Easterlin, a professor at the University of Southern California, as long ago as 1974. He claimed that average happiness in the US had remained at the same level between 1946 and 1970, despite a doubling of income per head over this period.
More recently, a flood of papers in learned journals have argued the same central thesis: economic growth and increases in income per head do not affect well-being; governments should therefore cease trying to maximise growth in favour of explicitly targeting happiness.
Not to be outdone, David Cameron, the Tory leader, has thrown his weight behind this fad, saying recently: “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP (gross domestic product), but on GWB – general well-being.”
One of the key pieces of evidence that happiness economists rely upon are statistics spanning several decades in various countries showing increasing GDP but happiness flatlining. The reason for this, given by Lord Layard from the London School of Economics, and others, is the persistence of income inequality, which they claim offsets any happiness gained from a larger economy.
Critics put a rather different gloss on the theory, explaining it as follows: people are jealous of the possessions of others, and strive to catch up by taking better jobs or working harder, in turn triggering a commensurate reaction from their rivals. We are all constantly striving to be better than the Joneses; we all are made unhappy as a result; so we should all be forced into greater equality for our own good, with the help of punitive tax rates and red tape.
