Against Happiness: A Critical Appraisal of the Use of Measures of Happiness for Evaluating Progress in Development

Abstract

The idea that measures of happiness, or subjective well-being, should be used as the sole (or dominant) measure of country progress has gained considerable support. This paper traces the origins of the approach in the works of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century utilitarians, whose thinking ultimately provided the foundations for income as the measure of progress, equating income and utility. In contrast, the recent approach of neo-utilitarians intends to replace income as the objective by measures of happiness derived from surveys. This paper assesses happiness as the objective of development and a measure of progress, contrasting it with human rights and capabilities approaches and the promotion of justice, which each also challenge the income measure. The paper considers problems with the happiness approach arising from difficulties in measurement, people's tendency to adapt to their circumstances, and its inability to capture the well-being of future generations, while also providing a weak basis for distributional judgements. The author argues that human progress involves promoting human fulfilment or flourishing (including meeting agency goals), securing a just distribution, and ensuring that this is sustained over generations. Cross-country surveys of human well-being can go nowhere near to measuring this extensive array of objectives.

Keywords:

• Capabilities
• Human development
• Well-being
• Measurement
• Human rights
• Inequality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments from participants at the annual meeting of the Human Development and Capability Association for comments, especially David Crocker; and to participants at a seminar in Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, UK.

About the Author

Frances Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at the University of Oxford, UK. She has been President of the Human Development and Capability Association and the British and Irish Development Studies Association, and Chair of the United Nations Development Policy Committee. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex, UK. She received the Mahbub ul Haq award from the United Nations, and the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought from the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. Her books include Technology and Underdevelopment, Planning to Meet Basic Needs, and (as co-author) Adjustment with a Human Face, War and Underdevelopment and Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies.

Notes

1. Precursors include hedonists such as Aristippus and Epicurus.

2. In 1731, Gay argued that: “happiness, private happiness, is the proper or ultimate end of all our actions … ”.

3. According to Pigou: “it is evident that any transference of income from a relatively rich man to a relatively poor man of similar temperament, since it enables more intense wants, to be satisfied at the expense of less intense wants, must increase the aggregate sum of satisfaction. The old ‘law of diminishing utility’ thus leads securely to the proposition: Any cause which increases the absolute share of real income in the hands of the poor, provided that it does not lead to a contraction in the size of the national dividend from any point of view, will, in general, increase economic welfare” (1932, Part 1, Chapter VIII, para. 3).

4. Research shows correlations of approximately 0.5 between answers to the second and third questions (Blanchflower and Oswald 2004).

5. ; and , where LS is a measure of life satisfaction, HDI is the Human Development Index, GNI is national income per head and G is the Gini coefficient, all for 2011 or the latest available year for the Gini. ***Significant at the 1% level.

6. The US Constitution, of course, famously includes the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', but it is notable that the right is to the pursuit of happiness, not to happiness as such, and its achievement would be measured by people's freedoms rather than their levels of happiness.

7. See Stewart (2013), for a summary of some views on distributional justice.

8. Helliwell and Wang (2013) also find that income per capita and life expectancy at birth are significantly positively related to levels of happiness; they also find a positive relationship with country levels of social support, freedom to make life choices and generosity, and a negative one with perceptions of corruption with a cross-country regression of 149 countries for 2012.

9. About one-half of the variation in happiness across individuals is due to genetics (Lykken and Tellegen 1996).

10. I am grateful to Nandini Gooptu for ideas for this section.

11. “Among those who regard poverty as a major social problem, the conventional view is that we should respond by declaring a new ‘war on poverty,’ then introduce initiatives that would lower the poverty rate, and thereby reduce the poverty rate in the U.S. However sensible such an approach may seem, there are real political hurdles that in the U.S. context make it difficult to take on poverty in any concerted way, and one might therefore focus additionally on measures that reduce the negative effects of poverty among those experiencing it. The purpose of the stress reduction lab, then, is to explore strategies for breaking the strong link between poverty and the stress that poverty generates (as revealed by, for example, cortisol levels)” (Collaboration for Poverty Research, Stanford and Harvard Kennedy School. Accessed October 2 2013. http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cpr/cpr_lab_poverty_and_stress.html

12. UN(DESA)–WHO Policy Analysis, Mental Health and Development: Integrating Mental Health into All Development Efforts including MDGs, 12 September 2010. Accessed October 2 2013. http://www.who.int/mental_health/policy/mhtargeting/mh_policyanalysis_who_undesa.pdf

13. There is also the question of whose subjective well-being should be included: the participants (children in this case); their families; others indirectly affected—for example, living near a new school; and the broader community.

14. In a contribution to a seminar.