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How happy are you?

TAVIA GRANT
Monday, April 02, 2007
Is happiness measurable? If so, how should it help shape public policy?

A group of economists, sociologists and policy wonks are gathering in Rome Monday to discuss these questions. It comes as happiness has blossomed into a growing field of study, with hundreds of journal articles published in the past seven years alone.

The conference will focus on whether life satisfaction can be quantified and integrated into policy.

“We are, it seems, much closer to measuring how happy people are, as well as understanding more clearly other aspects of their subjective well-being,” noted the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, one of the conference's organizers, on its website.

“These advances, so some would argue, open the door to different paradigms for policy-making...which see people's happiness, rather than national income, as the goal that policy-makers seek to maximize.”

The ideas may be interesting, but many skeptics remain, it added.

Topics at the conference include whether one can construct meaningful statistical indicators of happiness, what factors determine satisfaction, how education and other areas of government policy contribute to happiness and whether subjective well-being indicators help shape policy.

One contentious issue is whether the traditional measure of wealth — the gross domestic product — presents the best picture of how a nation is faring.

Ruut Veenhoven, a conference presenter and sociologist at Rotterdam University, argues that happiness is defined as a “subjective enjoyment of one's life as-a-whole” and this can be measured using self-reports.

In a 2006 study, he found that the Swiss score the highest in terms of “average happiness,” followed by Swedes and Americans. The lowest score was in Zimbabwe, while former Soviet states also tended to fare poorly.

In terms of public planning, the most gains in happiness come from policies that focus on freedom and justice, he concluded. In rich countries, economic growth doesn't add much to happiness and neither does reduction of income differences or greater social security, he said.

Economists are increasingly scrutinizing measures of well-being because they can help with forecasting, one presenter said.

“Although it is probably fair to say that there is no unanimity on the usefulness of subjective well-being information in economics, there is probably greater willingness to pay attention to such measures now than there has been in the past,” said Andrew Clark, research professor at Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques, in prepared notes.

“There is now quite a mini-industry of validation studies of ‘what people say,' including work showing that what people say today is a strong predictor of what they will do in the future: life expectancy, morbidity, productivity, quits, absenteeism, unemployment duration, and marriage duration.”

The two-day global conference is organized by the OECD, the Bank of Italy, the Centre for Economic and International Studies of the University of Rome and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.