State of happiness

This week, the Economist is hosting a debate on happiness.

I can’t say I’m a fan of the new happiness economics (although it does raise some useful issues, as I suggested couple of days ago), nor is this debate the most enlightening exchange I’ve ever read (how is it possible to question the usefulness of GDP as a measure of well-being without invoking seminal contributions, such as those of Marx and Veblen, or without raising issues like economic and social justice?).

However, I do have to comment on Paul Ormerod’s opening statement, in which he rebuts the motion of using a happiness index. Ormerod expresses a worry that taking happiness as the goal of public policy (instead of just measuring it) will lead to authoritarian measures—akin to ethnic cleansing and sending people to labor camps. What Ormerod seems not to understand is that, when the state measures and seeks to promote development defined as GDP, it is enforcing a particular set of policies. When it does so, it endeavors to create the conditions within which more commodities can be produced, and to bar the introduction of measures that would hamper the production of more commodities. It thus becomes a state that promotes the happiness of those who benefit from the surplus performed in producing those commodities, and imposes the burden of actually producing the commodities on everyone else.

It’s a state of the happiness of a few that, under democratic conditions, rules by the consent of the majority—or, if that fails, by force.