‘The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy – I mean that if you are happy you will be good.’

Bertrand Russell

THE development philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH) expounded by His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan has had a profound impact on development dialogue in recent years. Economists, psychologists and policy-makers are paying greater attention to happiness than ever before. The good news is that happiness seems to be triumphing over sorrow and unhappiness, at least in the virtual world!¹ And we know that more of happiness is almost always better than less of it (which cannot be said of income or goods and services). No one can guarantee human happiness, least of all the state. And yet, there are many things the state can and should do to ensure that people are happy. The inclusion of happiness indicators for evaluating development performance and outcomes can vastly improve the functioning of governments and the practice of democracy.

Happiness has meant different things to different people. For Aristotle, happiness was ‘the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.’ For His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, ‘The very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.’ For Mahatma Gandhi, happiness is ‘when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ According to Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German novelist and poet, ‘Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.’ Buddha declared that ‘happiness never decreases by being shared.’ On the contrary, ‘happiness adds and multiplies as we divide it with others.’ Not insignificantly, Marie-Henri Beyle, the 19th century French writer better known as Stendhal remarked: ‘To describe happiness is to diminish it.’

If defining and describing happiness is tough, finding happiness is even more difficult. The Rock Band ‘Our Lady Peace’ rightly named their very popular album, ‘Happiness... is not a fish that you can catch.’ ‘Learn to let go,’ said Buddha, ‘that is the key to happiness.’ Bertrand Russell had a different take on happiness: ‘If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others,’ he wrote, ‘we could have a paradise in a few years.’ We should also not forget Mill’s famous statement: ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.’ In other words, Mill felt that only those who have experienced both the higher and lower forms of happiness are qualified to judge a pleasure’s quality.

 

Regardless of what happiness means, if development has to do with an enhancement of human capabilities and an expansion of people’s freedoms, then happiness needs very little justification. If people-centred development is what we care about, then people’s state of happiness is obviously important. One could confidently assert that people who enjoy greater freedoms – economic, social, cultural and political – would generally be a happier lot than those whose lives are severely restrained. Life would be quite miserable for a political prisoner, a bonded labourer, a starving child or a woman who is denied the opportunity to pursue what she wants to do in life. Those who have greater freedom from fear, hunger and want would tend to be ‘happier’ than those who do not. Similarly, to paraphrase Marx, those who are able to dominate chance and circumstances would be ‘happier’ than those whose lives are dominated by chance and circumstances.

 

Happiness is an assessment of both external and internal qualities – emotional reactions and cognitive judgments of how life is being led. The key question then is: what can the state do to promote happiness? Many things. The state may have only a minor role in influencing the internal quality of life, but it can certainly play a major role in influencing the external quality of life by creating the conditions for happiness. How?

One, the state can do much to eliminate misery and suffering – and thereby promote happiness. Poverty, deprivation and denial of freedoms are terrible for happiness. There can be no two views. People who do not get enough food to eat, or who fall sick frequently, or feel discriminated against can never be really happy. Two, people feel happy when they lead secure lives. The state can do much to ensure protection from downside risks. The more secure a nation’s people, the happier they are likely to be.

It is not that the poor alone lead insecure lives. Even the non-poor feel insecure about many things. Parents often feel stressed about finding the right child care. Many feel stressed about finding decent health care that is affordable and of good quality. Even those in decent jobs may be living under the constant threat of unemployment. Those in debt may feel particularly insecure about rising prices that may be eroding incomes. Families belonging to minority communities may be living in fear of retaliation or discrimination by the majority. The old may feel insecure after their retirement. Clearly, the state can do much to offer social protection and social security to its citizens.

Three, people feel happy when they are treated well, with respect and dignity. The state can surely make public services more responsive to people’s expectations. This in turn would enhance satisfaction and happiness. And many measures to promote satisfaction may cost very little, and the benefits could be enormous.

For instance, in-patients in hospitals feel happy when they are treated well. And studies show that happy patients also get discharged sooner. It doesn’t cost much for a care giver to be polite and kind to the in-patient. The savings and benefits from being discharged early could be significant to the individual and the hospital. Children in schools tend to learn better when they are happy with their teachers. They learn much less when their teachers terrorize and frighten them. It doesn’t cost much for a teacher to be kind and affectionate towards the students.

Workers (and especially working women) are often stressed, not so much by their jobs but by the difficulties associated with commuting to work. Surely, easing the pain of commuting is something the state and employer can jointly do something about. As a matter of fact, when the government places a premium on consumer satisfaction, it is in effect placing a premium on human dignity.

 

An obvious implication is that governments should include both objective as well as subjective measures of performance while evaluating service delivery or any other programme. This has also been underscored by the recent Report of the Commission on Economic Performance and Social Progress (referred to as the Sarkozy Commission): ‘Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own survey…Subjective well-being encompasses different aspects (cognitive evaluations of one’s life, happiness, satisfaction, positive emotions such as joy and pride, and negative emotions such as pain and worry): each of them should be measured separately to derive a more comprehensive appreciation of people’s lives. Quantitative measures of these subjective aspects hold the promise of delivering not just a good measure of quality of life per se, but also a better understanding of its determinants, reaching beyond people’s income and material conditions.’²

 

It is however important to emphasize that even after accepting its validity and usefulness, happiness, which is subjective, needs to be measured with caution. Two types of research methods are commonly used for measuring happiness. The first simply asks individuals to report how happy they are with their lives. Respondents are typically given a few choices: very happy, pretty happy, and not too happy. Some studies offer a wider choice using a seven-point scale (1-7) with four being the mid-point between maximum satisfaction (7) and maximum dissatisfaction (1). The response offers a composite assessment of the individual’s life experience taking into consideration a variety of factors including marriage, professional life, and even performance of the government.

The second approach called the ‘experience sampling’ method, asks individuals how they felt while undertaking different activities at different times of a normal day – while at work, playing with their children, exercising, praying, watching TV, cooking and so on. Responses are likely to capture the more immediate feeling of happiness. One could expect responses under the two approaches to both converge and diverge depending upon the state of the respondent. For example, in a life satisfaction survey, divorced women could report feeling less satisfied than married ones, whereas in an experience sampling survey, they may actually feel somewhat happier that they have gotten out of difficult marriages.

 

Subjective measures of happiness have their limitations. There are issues of reliability and accuracy. Some psychologists take the position that individuals never know how happy they really are. It is therefore not possible for anyone to say how happy he or she really is. Those who answer such questions are merely fooling themselves. At the same time, we could also ask how much thought do individuals give to such questions before answering them. How well informed are they to make a reasonable judgement? How deeply influenced are people by the media?

Responses to subjective questions of happiness are affected by immediate events affecting the respondent as well as the community she lives in. For example, catching a respondent soon after he gets a hefty salary raise may yield very different answers than asking him the same question after he has lost his job. Similarly, group responses to happiness questions soon after a drought or a flood would be very different from responses elicited after a bumper crop. And to top it all, we know that chemical imbalances can distort perceptions and reporting on happiness.

What makes one happy? This is not an easy question to answer. The direction of causality is difficult to tease out. Is it that happy people are better at their work and therefore earn more incomes, or is it that a higher income lets you to buy and do the things you enjoy and this in turn makes you happy? Are healthy people generally happy or do happy people tend to be healthier? Are happy people more sociable or does being more sociable contribute to happiness?

 

There are problems with comparisons of happiness scores across cultures and over time. How do we interpret an overall happiness score of eight for the United States and six for India? Can we conclude that Indians are, by and large, less happy than Americans? Or could it simply be the case that Americans cheerfully give ratings of 10 out of 10 much more often than Indians who (in my experience and that of others as well) tend to be more miserly and stingy in the ratings? Do assessments of happiness vary by age?

Blanchflower and Oswald, for instance, examined happiness and life-satisfaction data for half a million Americans and Europeans and reached two conclusions. First, psychological well-being moves along a U-shaped curve as we age. Happiness among American men and women reaches its estimated minimum at approximately ages 49 and 45 respectively. Among European men and women, life satisfaction levels are at their minimum at ages 44 at 43 respectively. Second, there are important differences in the reported happiness levels of different age groups. Why is this so? How can we interpret trend data on happiness over time especially when they do not necessarily relate to the same cohort over time?’

Finally, even if the responses are reasonably accurate and reliable, it is very difficult to say anything about the condition of two individuals who give the same answer. A slave could just be as ‘happy’ with his master as a school teacher is with her life. Amartya Sen cautions against the reliance on such self-reported measures of well-being: ‘The hopeless beggar, the precarious landless labourer, the dominated housewife, the hardened unemployed or the over-exhausted coolie may all take pleasures in small mercies, and manage to suppress intense suffering for the necessity of continuing survival, but it would be ethically deeply mistaken to attach a correspondingly small value to the loss of their well-being because of their survival strategy.’

 

Nevertheless, problems with the measurement can never be sufficient reason to reject the measure itself. If this was to be the case, then we would probably be left with no measure. All measures of well-being need to be taken with a pinch of salt – some indeed like the GDP with a fistful of salt. There are too many flaws with the use of GDP as a measure of well-being. By definition, GDP which is the total market value of final goods and services produced in a country excludes non-market activities. This is grossly unfair.

Much of women’s work in and around the household remains largely undervalued or not valued at all. Child care services provided by the mother are typically not included in the computation of official income. But when the same child care services are purchased and paid for, it becomes part of income and GDP expands. It is difficult to say whether this shift from unpaid to paid child care amounts to an improvement in the standards of living or offers a better quality of life.

Others have pointed out that more GDP may not necessarily be a good thing as it includes the production of ‘bads’ as well – not simply goods. For instance, a country’s GDP grows even with an expansion in production of cigarettes and small arms that might be used in crime. Environmentalists have pointed out that more GDP may not necessarily be good especially if it is at the expense of nature. Higher incomes may not go hand-in-hand with many of the things we cherish in life. Very often, more crime, insecurity, air pollution, traffic congestion and so on are associated with large cities which also report higher standards of living when measured in terms of per capita incomes.

The flaws and problems with the measurement of GDP are, however, not sufficient reason to argue for the rejection of GDP or denounce the importance of the instrumental significance of GDP growth. On the other hand, the drawbacks of GDP as a measure of well-being underscore the importance of relying on other indicators to fill the informational gaps. The Human Development Index (HDI) is one such indicator but it too has its sets of problems.

 

While the focus on longevity, educational attainments and command over resources needed for a decent living make the HDI richer in its informational content than GDP per capita, it is by no means a comprehensive measure. The HDI, for instance, fails to capture the degree of discrimination in society, the extent or absence of political freedoms, and many other features of decent life that people cherish and value. Despite these flaws, the HDI has served us well in terms of drawing attention to many crucial dimensions of development.

In short, it would be unreasonable to argue for rejecting happiness indicators just because there are defects in measurement. On the contrary, combining happiness indicators with objective measures can add richness to evaluation and prove very useful.

 

What contributes to happiness has been a subject of intense study in recent years. It is certainly not more income. Layard points to ‘a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income and strive for it. Yet as western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier... This devastating fact should be the starting point for all discussion on how to improve our lot.’ Easterlin examined the links between income and happiness and found that while individuals with higher incomes were happier than those with lower incomes at a particular point in time, the happiness of a particular cohort did not increase over time. Happiness levels actually appeared to remain constant even when incomes rose substantially.

What explains the Easterlin paradox? Is it because people over-estimated the additional happiness they get from extra income? Could it be that people are on a ‘hedonic treadmill’ – so that aspirations increase with income and, after the fulfilment of basic needs, relative rather than absolute levels of income matter to well-being? Is it possible that a person’s happiness is negatively affected by the incomes of others?

In other words, if others become richer, this reduces our satisfaction with what we have. Or is it simply the case that the happiness we get has nothing to do with income but is biologically, genetically and culturally determined? Answers to these questions can offer useful insights into the effectiveness of policy.

Happiness measures add a human face to an assessment of development outcomes. A happiness index could throw light on the levels of happiness of different groups in society – old people, children and women. Observing levels and trends over time could be useful. Answers could potentially draw attention to gaps in service provisioning or care of these groups. At the same time, like with other indicators, an aggregate or composite happiness indicator for a country can be disaggregated. And disaggregation can raise some important questions.

Why are people happier in some states than in others, why are women less happy than men, or why are minority communities less happy than the rest? For instance, Stevenson and Wolfers discuss the paradox of declining female happiness in the United States. Despite the marked improvements along objective measures in the lives of women in the United States over the past 35 years, measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. What explains this phenomenon?

Finally, tracking happiness can improve both the performance of government and the practice of democracy. Chances of winning an election are better if the candidates know about the levels of happiness or satisfaction in their constituency. Similarly, the chances of any policy succeeding will be better if, in general, people are satisfied and happy with the particular policy or intervention. This makes it important for political leaders and public officials in positions of authority to have knowledge about the levels of happiness.

 

There are several things a government can do to improve the conditions surrounding our lives: eliminate hunger, reduce malnutrition, promote equity, empower families, encourage leisure, enhance security, improve health, extend care, strengthen education, protect the environment, end discrimination, and promote justice. These and many of the essentials of good living should become priorities of every government and the shared values of every society. Happiness can follow.

 

Footnotes:

1. There has been a virtual information explosion on happiness. Fortunately, a Google search using the word ‘happiness’ yields over 86 million entries; sorrow only some 35 million and unhappiness even fewer – 16.6 million.

2. The report has been authored under the direction of Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi.

 

References

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, Is Well-being U-Shaped Over the Life Cycle? NBER Working Paper No. 12935, 2007, accessible at http://www.nber.org/papers/w12935

Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Governments Can Learn From the Research on Well-being. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2010.

Ed Dienar, Richard Lucas, Ulrich Schimmack and John Helliwell, Well-being for Public Policy. Series in Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2009.

R.A. Easterlin, Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence in P.A. David and W.R. Melvin (eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, Ca, 1974, 98-125, accessible at http://graphics8.nytimes. com/images/2008/04/16/business/Easterlin 1974.pdf

Mark McGillivray and Mathew Clarke, Understanding Human Well-being. United Nations University Press, UNU-WIDER, 2006.

Mark McGillivray (ed.), Human Well-being: Concept and Measurement. Palgrave MacMillan, United Nations University, 2007.

Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress prepared by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, 2009, accessible at http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf

Richard Layard,. Happiness: Lessons From a New Science. The Penguin Press, New York, 2005.

Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1987.

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, ‘The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness’, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2009, 1(2), 2009, 190–225 accessible at http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/ papers/Paradox%20of%20declining% 20 female%20 happiness.pdf

Ruut Veenhoven, Subjective Measures of Well-being, in Mark McGillivray (ed.), Human Well-being: Concept and Measurement. Palgrave MacMillan, United Nations University, 2007.