The End of Government

There has recently been a surge of interest in the economics of happiness. Wellbeing is important but it would be better to focus on freedom

When the crisis in the public finances is over, should the Government buy everyone a garden? Or an allotment, at least? There is a close correlation between having a garden and being happy. By asking two Nobel laureates, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, to think about how to encode well-being in policy, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, has raised this fundamental question: what is the end of government? Precisely, is it a function of the State to promote the happiness of its citizens? The politicians, philosophers and clerics who assembled in Rennes yesterday to discuss the idea certainly think so.

They are not alone. There has been a surge in the economics of happiness in the United States and Britain too ever since, in 1974, Richard Easterlin pointed out that people in advanced capitalist societies were getting richer but no happier. In Britain, Richard Layard and Andrew Oswald have written in a similar vein and the psychologist Oliver James has gone one step farther by claiming that getting rich is liable to make us ill.

The implication for policy is that, once basic needs are met, governments should abandon a narrow focus on economic growth or gross domestic product (GDP). They should, instead, define collective wellbeing and seek policies that promote happiness. The Department for Children, Schools and Families recently introduced wellbeing classes. David Cameron has expressed some interest in GWB (gross wellbeing).

It is not silly to enrich the dry arithmetic of GDP with a concern for the satisfaction of human lives. The World Bank has succesfully pioneered the human development index, which ranks nations according to their social as well as economic achievements. Freedom, in other words, is an important part of development.

But that does not mean that it makes sense for governments to set up happiness as their sovereign objective. Happiness is notoriously elusive. No felicific calculus has yet been devised, and nor will it ever be, that captures the subtlety of human wellbeing. If one man gains a wealth of happiness at the expense of the violation of the rights of another, this counts as fine by the standard of the strict happiness utilitarian. Besides, most of the things that make people happy are either beyond the control of government (a happy marriage) or politically dubious (living in homogenous communities). The most recent data shows, in fact, that people do tend to get happier as they get richer, so perhaps the traditional objective of economic growth is not so narrow and dry after all.

There is a more fundamental reason why government policy ought not to be directed at happiness. There is more to life than that. There are many forms of life - monastic devotion, public service, freedom fighter - in which the pursuit of happiness is a subsidiary value, if it appears at all. The realms of art and literature would be hugely impoverished if nobody were ever miserable. "Happiness," as Montherlant wrote, "writes white."

Precisely because human life is prolifically diverse, the history of Utopian politics is littered with offences against freedom by people who thought they knew what the people really wanted. The economics of happiness invariably leads to the politics of paternalism. The happiness gurus would be better off starting with Aristotle's generous account of flourishing, an idea that implies people choosing their own life course. If politicians need a single objective - and it is not obvious that they do - then setting the people free is a lot better than forcing them to be happy.