I just learned from the Heritage Foundation that the Obama Administration has created a panel to discuss establishing a measure to assess our national happiness.
The good people at Heritage have more than a few misgivings about this undertaking, and not just about our ability to assess happiness by means of social science. I applaud the recognition that there’s more to life than economic prosperity, that GDP is a deeply flawed measure of political health and success, but want no part of this undertaking.
Yes, the Declaration of Independence does assert that human beings by nature have a right to pursue happiness, but that surely doesn’t give our government the responsibility to assure our happiness. And you can be certain that anything the government starts to assess will sooner or later become an explicit object of public policy. We need to remember one of the things Alexis de Tocqueville feared the most: a government that “willingly works for [our] happiness; but…wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that.”
I’d rather remind people that their happiness depends upon many things other than those that can be affected by public policy, some of which depend upon their own efforts and relationships, and others of which depend upon–speaking without any great theological sophistication here–divine providence. Properly understood, our pursuit of happiness is a limit on government, not a claim on it.
None of this is to say that government has nothing to do with our happiness. To take an obvious example, policies that excessively burden our liberty or depress private sector job creation might well affect our happiness. But we already have a way to register our response to those aspects of our happiness that can be affected by government. It’s called voting.
April 3rd, 2012 | 3:27 pm
The ambition to create a linear scale on which we can measure the nation’s happiness, and thus the utility fo various legislative proposals, is another example of the mathematical ignorance of government officials. What scientific research shows that a descriptor like “happiness” can be described accurately by any single number rather than a complex of numbers or a function with many inputs, or that is on a linear scale rather than, say a logarithmic one? The assumption of bureaucrats is that all sorts of barely quantifiable values can be simply added up and then divided to find an average; the use of “medians” rather than “means” is too sophisticated for them.
Why should “happiness” be the delimiter of what we want to advance, as opposed to “contentment” or “satisfaction” or “hope” or “a sense of justice” or “feeling reconciled to God”?
We all know how it works: The things that cannot be easily quantified will be ignored, and the few that can will be given disproportionate importance, distorting our lives and our views of life.
April 3rd, 2012 | 3:40 pm
How could the federal government even begin to measure what makes each individual American happy?
April 3rd, 2012 | 8:32 pm
Raymond Takashi Swenson
April 3rd, 2012 | 3:27 pm
“The ambition to create a linear scale on which we can measure the nation’s happiness, and thus the utility fo various legislative proposals, is another example of the mathematical ignorance of government officials. What scientific research shows that a descriptor like “happiness” can be described accurately by any single number rather than a complex of numbers or a function with many inputs, or that is on a linear scale rather than, say a logarithmic one?”
Please inform every Personnel Department (HR)of this fact.
April 4th, 2012 | 10:32 am
Doctor Who authors know better:
Kathy Nightingale: What did you come here for anyway?
Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What’s good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It’s happy for deep people.
April 5th, 2012 | 1:27 pm
The ambition to create a linear scale on which we can measure the nation’s happiness, and thus the utility fo various legislative proposals, is another example of the mathematical ignorance of government officials.
Assuming they’re arguing in good faith.
It so happens that if responsibility for well-being and happiness is transferred from the individual to the government, the people at the top of the government stand to gain a lot of power. (But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.)
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