Can and should happiness be a policy goal?
This article summarizes policy-relevant happiness research and demonstrates that self-reported happiness could be used to evaluate public policies. Self-reported well-being tracks objective societal and economic conditions fairly well and helps quantify people’s suffering. Evidence also demonstrates that some liberal policies, such as generous unemployment benefits, progressive taxation, and income equality are positively associated with citizens’ self-reported well-being, whereas others (e.g. larger government spending per Gross Domestic Product) are not. Just as the regular recording of economic activities helps gauge the effectiveness of specific policies and the general economic well-being of individuals and society at large, the regular recording of citizens’ self-reporting well-being gauge the effectiveness of specific policies as well as the psychological well-being of individuals and society at large.