Happiness and Happiness Researchers

Questions of happiness and unhappiness are at the centre of discussion in national accounts and statistics. Can happiness be measured? It is about the connection between prosperity and personal satisfaction. Both the adequate measurement of human welfare and that of an economy have long been the focus of discussion. Happiness researchers have noted a seldom-seen contradiction. Most people want more money and do a great deal to achieve this goal. But although people in industrialised countries have been getting richer for decades, they have by no means become happier. Amartya K. Sen argued that although income per capita was important, it was not as complete a measure of people’s welfare as their “capabilities”. Capabilities in that sense are the abilities and opportunities of a person to “realise” himself. This would include income or command over resources but also variables such as health, education, women’s freedom, and access to key technologies such as electricity and roads. Inequality and living standards can now be related in a new way to the concept of capabilities instead of only to that of the utility of possessed goods. Poverty is thus a lack of opportunities for realisation. Sen assigned a central role for the economy to the question of values, which take the place of “utility functions”. Sen proposed constructing indicators that also include non-economic aspects such as abilities and opportunities for realisation as is the case with the Human Development Index (HDI) instead of indicators that only take economic aspects into account (as is the case of the GDP). The HDI was developed by the United Nations to measure the various countries’ levels of social and economic developments. Other measures of economic welfare are also described like the Measure of Economic Welfare proposed by William Nordhaus and James Tobin. Politicians had taken note of these developments—and in 2008, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed a commission, peppered with Nobel Prize winners, to supplement gross domestic product with gross national happiness under the motto “Beyond SNA - a broader approach to well-being?” The report of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (SSFC), published in Paris in September 2009, contained various recommendations, with a focus not only on GDP but also on the disposable income of private households, the distribution of income, consumption and wealth, and the services that are to be supplemented by unpaid household activities. The publication of the report triggered a global discussion on how to measure social progress more comprehensively and how to advance the development of welfare indicators. Important contributions to the development of indicator systems were the OECD’s “How’s Life” initiative and Eurostat’s set of indicators on quality of life. Is it possible to measure the development of the prosperity or quality of life of an individual private household or an economy based on a bundle of indicators? Is there some kind of structural relationship within this bundle of indicators? No such structural relationship is evident in the indicator systems proposed over the years. Rather, they are a combination of indicators of different types—some based on qualitative characteristics. This leads to the danger that only the results of individual indicators, such as the assessment of life satisfaction, are discussed in public. Particularly problematic, however, is the weighting and merging of the individual indicators into a single variable. The dream of measuring the happiness of an individual or even an entire nation with the help of a single indicator always fails miserably.