The incursion of Economics into turfs traditionally held by (parts of) psychology and sociology. But then, maybe a convergence of social sciences in general?
Of course, this is not a novel concept. One can go back, way back to Gautam Buddha at least, to find the elusive idea of pursuit of non-material happiness. But happiness is a very coarse term. What is it? It is measurable? If it is not measurable, how do we make sense of it and use iit? How do we say things like, I am better off than you because I am happier? More generally, how can we say doing this or that will maximize happiness?
Alright, I agree that explicit measurement might not be really necessary. You could even say that to want such a weighing scale is an artefact of my "enlightenment"-polluted, think-in-the-box mind. Then, let's start with something more basic: comparability. A thought experiment - Say there are two choices:
1) You have five apples
2) You have five oranges
Notice that there is no implicit assumption about income levels in the two situations. For all I care about here, incomes could be the same across the two choices - even on a per person basis, if such is your inclination. So, 1) and 2) are no different in the GDP sense. Can the idea of happiness be used to compare the two?
Take a society whose population is 10. Let's pretend that we go around and ask people the following questions:
A) Would you say you would be happier in situation 1) than in 2)?
B) Would you say you would be happier in situation 2) than in 1)?
C) Would you say you would be equally happy in either situation?
D) If you could, which situation would you choose for yourself?
Ok, ignoring the nit-picky detail, let's say that we will agree 1) has a higher happiness content (thus, is more desirable) if we get 10 "yes" votes for question A. That seems like a decent enough assumption. However, I contend that anything short of that will not make sense.
- For starters, let's say we get 5 "yes" each for A and B. Then what? Is this situation the same as getting 10 "yes" for C? How about when A, B and C get 3, 3, and 4 "yes"
votes respectively?
- Now we come to the great concept of participatory democracy. We will decide which between 1) and 2) has a higher happiness content, then we will choose either 1) or 2) for the entire population based on majority rule. So, 6 "yes" for B (and 4 for A) will seal the deal and all 10 people end up with five oranges. Have we maximized happiness? Think again. Say 2 people in the population have a strong allergic reaction to oranges that its mere sight is lethal. So, eventually we end up with 8 people, four of whom prefer oranges and have oranges and four who don't really care for what they have. We really aren't in any different situation than if we had distributed apples instead in the first place, even without counting the dis-happiness of killing two people. Some happiness maximization!
- Oh, and what about the case when we have 10 votes for C? Which one do we choose?
- We haven't even considered the different weights we can/should assign to each yes vote. If the vote for A is louder (say because it is your child's), would that just cancel out or more than cancel out your vote for B? Man, all of this is just messed up!
- Wait a minute. We are talking about 2 choices here. Life, as we know, is more than just apples and oranges. What if we have to choose out of 3, 4, 5...infinite situations?
Ok then, bear with me - just a little more. :)
Let's do away with the idea of measuring happiness alogether. Let's just go with the stripped down, bare-bones notion of empathy. Let's ask question D. Again, in the aggregate level, it is just about impossible to choose between 1) and 2) - innit? Even without using the propaganda called "Gross Happiness".
So, where does that leave us? I am not trying to argue here that the notion of Well-Being is useless. I think it is very important, especially when we are talking about the less-well-to-do among us. It leads and guides the very important principles of equitable growth/development, and is perhaps THE issue in all of development economics. Its the implementation that kills. But beyond that, the use of the notion is severly limited in scope, say as a basis for comparison between two relatively well-to-do people.
And what about the term "happiness" itself? Let's just say that I think OverLord Jigme's use of G.N.H. is pure hokum - he doesn't give a hoot about the happiness of his people. Just ask the 100,000+ Bhutani people in the seven camps in Eastern Nepal.
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