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- Title
Happiness and public policy: a procedural perspective.
- Authors
STUTZER, ALOIS
- Abstract
This article comments on the role of empirical subjective wellbeing research in public policy within a constitutional, procedural perspective of government and state. It rejects the idea that, based on the promises of the measurement, we should adopt a new policy perspective that is oriented toward a decision rule maximizing some aggregate measure of subjective wellbeing. This social engineering perspective, implicit in much reasoning about wellbeing policy, neglects: (1) important motivation problems on the part of government actors, such as incentives to manipulate indicators, but also on the part of citizens to truthfully report their wellbeing; and (2) procedural utility as a source of wellbeing. Instead, wellbeing research should be oriented toward gaining insights that improve the diagnoses of societal problems and help us to evaluate alternative institutional arrangements in order to address them, both as inputs into the democratic process.
- Subjects
HAPPINESS; SUBJECTIVE well-being (Psychology); SOCIAL engineering (Political science)
- Publication
Behavioural Public Policy, 2020, Vol 4, Issue 2, p210
- ISSN
2398-063X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/bpp.2019.44