What makes you happy? Photo credit: InfoMofo, http://flic.kr/p/eFP8Z
Money can buy you happiness, according to a new report from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) that slams the UK government’s wellbeing policies. The report, published on the day traditionally considered “the most depressing day of the year”, found that there is a strong relationship between an increase in wealth and increase in happiness. Other key factors include religious belief and marriage.
The report, entitled …and the Pursuit of Happiness: Wellbeing and the Role of Government, is unlikely to make Prime Minister David Cameron particularly happy: according to the IEA, the PM’s insistence that the government should focus on “general wellbeing” over gross domestic product (GDP) is deeply flawed. In 2010, Cameron announced the launch of a new “wellbeing index” to assess the British public’s happiness in new ways: “We will start measuring our progress as a country not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life,” he said, reported The Guardian. The IEA branded such measures “short-term, transient and shallow “.
So are government plans to promote happiness doomed to failure?
Yes. “It would seem that if the government wants to help us be happy the best thing they can do is to reduce their interference in our lives,” wrote Ruth Porter in The Telegraph. Porter highlighted the fact that the report indentified a strong correlation between employment and happiness, arguing that the PM’s plans to improve wellbeing at work through legislation on parental leave and working hours could lead to higher unemployment, thus reducing wellbeing. Aside from practicalities, Porter said that government should leave the concept of happiness alone for ethical reasons: “What if these government surveys reveal something terrible such as the notion that torturing cats turns out to be what makes us happy? Ethics requires that happiness is not in itself the be all and end all.”
“There is no evidence that equality is related to happiness,” said the report from the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Absolutely yes. Writing in The Daily Mail, Mark Littlewood dismissed the government’s wellbeing index as “a squadron of clipboard-wielding bureaucrats” and welcomed the IEA findings: “We each need to be left alone to pursue our own concept of the good life. And our best chance of getting there is for the government to get out of our way.”
According to the IEA report, “Increasing government spending by about a third would cause a direct reduction in happiness of about 5 to 6 per cent. Centralising government decision-making is likely to lead to more intrusive government and lower wellbeing.”
Government plans based on flawed premise. Dominic Lawson in The Independent flagged up the report’s insistence that Cameron is wrong to say previous governments have only focused on GDP: “If that were the case, we would have had much more liberal planning laws,” said Philip Booth of the IEA. What’s more, Lawson said, GDP is in fact a valuable measure of society’s achievement precisely because it is measurable: “The measurement of happiness is a doomed venture: what we call happiness – itself a challenge – is not something that can be converted into numbers or units,” he wrote.
Money doesn’t buy happiness. Matthew Syed took issue with the report’s conflation of wealth and happiness, instead proposing his own 5-point plan for wellbeing in The Times (£). Syed suggested that the most important thing is not to try to be happy: “Happiness is a bit like an erection. You cannot get it when you are thinking about it; you can only get it when you are thinking about something else,” he wrote.