The notion that states should seek to increase the happiness of their citizens dates back to before the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) told us that: “The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness … [it] is the necessary foundation of our liberty” (“An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”).
The early utilitarians Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806 -1873) believed that generally mankind seeks to avoid pain and maximise pleasure and introduced the “greatest happiness principle”, which claims that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain: by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure” (John Mill’s “Utilitarianism.”)
The growing dissatisfaction with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the main measure of wellbeing has resulted in it being supplemented by various other indices. As examples: notwithstanding our general poverty, out of a ranking of some 150 countries in 2012, the UNDP Happy Planet Index, which goes beyond GDP and looks at life expectancy, education and income, etc., ranked us 31st while the countries to which our people continue to flock fell below us, with Canada, the USA and the UK ranking 65th, 105th and 41st respectively. Of course, the UNDP index is as concerned with the happiness of the planet as it is with the people upon it and seeks to encourage us to live good ecologically sustainable lives. Only two weeks ago, Australia was ranked the happiest country in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development by that body. These two examples serve to indicate the subjective nature of these kinds of indices.
The idea that states should seek to increase their peoples’ happiness is a compelling one and as I have read Pro. Bruno Frey (“Should Governments Maximize Happiness?” at the Warwick Business School) he believes that while governments should not use these indexes to directly attempt to maximise happiness, they should seek to use the insights from them to provide the enabling environment wherein we can seek to maximise our own happiness. He provided three types of reasons why we should discourage governments from getting directly involved in the maximisation of happiness.
Firstly, there is the difficulty involved in the nature of the happiness we are seeking to maximise. Humans are prone to “hedonic adaptation” or the tendency to quickly return to previous levels of happiness despite having experienced a positive or negative life event. For example, at some point in our lives most of us must have experienced a heightened feeling of happiness upon receiving an increase in income only to become quite indifferent to it a few months later.
Further, the research indicates that in contrast to idealists, materialists become very unhappy when their income is reduced. What then should be the taxation policy of a government bent upon increasing happiness? Logic would appear to suggest that a good policy would be to place the heavier tax burden on the idealist and a lighter one, or none at all, on the materialist! A similar kind of situation occurs in the area of employment/unemployment. Unemployment causes unhappiness but since we live by comparing ourselves with others, in areas where there is high employment people are less unhappy because many are unemployed. However, in places where only a few are unemployed, the unemployed are very unhappy. What then should government policy be? Perhaps it should focus its efforts upon finding employment for those in the areas with low unemployment!
What the above suggests is that happiness is but one of the important factors that governments have to consider when making social decisions. Governments, particularly those in divided societies such as ours, need to consider issues of fairness, equality and solidarity without which no society can properly progress.
Secondly, as we have seen, happiness indices are highly subjective and reliance on them to make public policy will provide incentives for both politicians and citizens to attempt to distort the outcomes. Guyanese do not need to be warned of this. For decades we have lived in a society in which no one takes the official numbers seriously and even private opinion surveys are extensively questioned. As Professor Frey said, governments are not very innovative except when it comes to the manipulation of data.
Once citizens come to realise that the government uses some specific indicators to make policy, their answers to survey questions become strategic and so make the survey unreliable. Here again, Guyanese need no convincing. Ask any set of Indo-Guyanese what they think of a particular policy of the present government and the answer is likely to be more positive than if you ask a set of Afro-Guyanese.
Finally, governments should not become directly involved in maximizing happiness because politicians are really not interested in making the population happy! According to Professor Frey, they are primarily interested in power, recognition, ideology and improving their income. Again, this is not hard for us Guyanese to believe. Given the subjective manipulable nature of happiness surveys, we might well come to live in some sort of “technocratic benevolent dictatorship” in which there could be serious consequences for those who do not wish to be happy in the manner the majority has chosen.
Nonetheless, the insights of the indices can still be utilised as part of a discourse with citizens as to the nature and content of happiness, and as in any game if the rules are properly set, the outcome can more or less be determined. Governments should therefore restrict themselves to providing the constitutional elements that will make for a happy society.
Research indicates that people living in decentralised political systems that give them meaningful control over their lives are happier than those living in centralised bureaucratic systems. The task of governments should be to decentralise decision-making to the fullest and enable a free and open media. Governments should also have specific policies to enable citizens to get a decent education and good employment. They should foster an active and independent civil society consisting of varying organisations that will enable citizens to make their own happiness choices. Rather than trying to get directly involved in happiness provision, governments should set the conditions and leave the choices to individuals.