Should Government Produce Happiness?

Martin Wolf writes economics commentary for the Financial Times. Apparently, this makes him an authority on happiness. It also seems to make him believe that he is an expert in philosophy.

Put it all together and you read Wolf on the proper role for government. It is, to produce happiness. Or well being. After all, he explains, Thomas Jefferson said so, and who are we to dispute Thomas Jefferson.

In March 1809, Thomas Jefferson wrote, on his departure from the US presidency, that “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government”. It is hard to disagree. The question is how this idea might be turned into policy. How might one measure “happiness”? What promotes it?

As an amusing sidelight, a young Harvard graduate, by name of Theodore Roosevelt, declared, in his book, The Naval War of 1812, that the second term of the Jefferson administration was an unmitigated calamity. This suggests that TJ was not a rousing success as president; apparently, his administration did not produce gales of happiness.

For his column Wolf begins with and challenges the word of Richard Layard a London School of Economics professor, who wrote a book called The Origins of Happiness.

The answer, this book suggests, is self-reported “life satisfaction”, which rests on people’s own preferences and judgments. But does this objective give robust findings on the relevant inputs? The argument is that it definitely does.

Income explains a small part of variations in happiness, partly because relative income matters so much. Human relationships, especially partnerships, matter. Unemployment is very harmful. But mental health is the most important determinant of life satisfaction. The best predictor of happiness in adult life is emotional wellbeing as a child. That, in turn, is determined by the parents, especially their mental wellbeing (above all, of mothers). Conflict between parents is damaging. Given such conflict, separation may not add to the harm. Schooling is also important.

Given what we already know, argues the book, policy appraisal based on wellbeing “will eventually become totally accepted as the standard way to evaluate social policies . . . And hopefully experimentation will become the standard prelude to policy change.”

There is truth and nonsense in this compendium. True enough, children who grow up in intact families tend to do better than do those who do not. True enough, the mother is the most important person in that equation.

And yet, if mental health is the most important determinant of happiness, why bother with economic policy at all? Why not just give everyone therapy? To be fair, very few people would ever claim that therapy produces happiness. Heck, it has enough trouble curing mental illness.

And besides, the notion that we should rely on self-reported happiness fails almost any test you can devise. Keep in mind, young people who graduate from college and move into their parents’ basements to play video games report a high degree of happiness. Besides, if we found a pill that could produce happy feelings, would we really want to say that everyone had become happy.

Wolf believes that the proper course of governmental action should begin with eliminating harms. But then, he adds that we must spend more money treating mental illness… as though today’s treatments have ever been shown to be really effective, anyway. And then, he suggests that we spend more money on education. This means that the proper role of government is to coddle and to mother people:

I have doubts. It will be extremely hard to relate many policy choices to the wellbeing of the population in any precise way, but we can identify relatively clearly the determinants of “ill-being”. We can also identify policies that are likely to alleviate ill-being relatively effectively. We should eliminate harms.

The UK’s all-party parliamentary group on wellbeing economics recently drafted a report on how this underlying concept could be applied to the forthcoming government spending review. It argued for a package of additional spending amounting to £8bn (0.4 per cent of GDP). The top priority would be increased resources for the treatment of mental illness. Furthermore, it argues, the budget for physical and mental healthcare should be separated, to protect the latter from encroachment by the former. The second priority would be investing in the wellbeing of children in schools. The third priority would be skilled employment. This requires a much higher resource priority for non-university-based further education, which is being squeezed by the explosion in the number of university students. That is also precisely what the Augar Review of post-18 education and funding recommends. A fourth priority is funding social care for children, the disabled and the old, as well as centres for children, youth and old people. The last priority is a shift in prison policy towards promoting rehabilitation, skill acquisition and mental health....

This suggested new approach to wellbeing can thus be viewed in two different ways. The broader path is to reconsider all government policy against its contribution to social wellbeing, as New Zealand is trying to do. The narrower is to shift resources, at the margin, towards areas of spending most likely to reduce the causes of great harm, such as mental ill health and loneliness. One does not have to buy all of the broader package to accept this shift in priorities toward alleviating the biggest harms. All parties should agree on this as the minimum goal for policy in a civilised and prosperous society.

And precisely how is spending government resources on mothering people going to produce prosperity? That, after all, is the rub.

After all, Aristotle first philosophized the notion of happiness, called eudemonia, well before utilitarian philosophers. To his mind, happiness was the feeling accompanying accomplishment and achievement. When people are allowed to compete and to succeed in the marketplace, in the arena or even on the battlefield, they might win and they might lose. If they succeed, they will gain a sense of accomplishment, but this is certainly not what is meant by the notion that we will all be happy if only the government takes care of us in order to produce a therapy-induced stupor that we mistake for well-being.