In Martin Seligman’s Flourish, the founding father of positive psychology suggests that we need a broader understanding of human well-being as a guide to how we lead our lives and how we shape our societies. Rather than an exclusive focus on happiness or subjective well-being, Seligman calls for a renewed emphasis on a sense of purpose, fulfilling relationships, accomplishment, etc. In a review, the economist Richard Layard, who has drawn attention by calling for a happiness-focused approach to public policy, advances the following critique:

Rational public policy requires a single criterion for comparing the benefits of different types of expenditure—and for comparing the costs of different cuts. So Seligman will have to come up with a system of weights for combining his different objectives, and where will they come from? I dare guess that, in the end, the weights he chooses will in fact depend on how far positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment each affect human happiness.

Will Wilkinson proceeds to julienne Layard:

If rational public policy really requires a single criterion, there can be no rational public policy. Reasonable public policy is a matter of taking moral diversity seriously, of acknowledging that we differ in our conceptions of the good life, and that none among us has the authority to use the violence of the state to impose his or her conception upon the rest of us. The disagreement between Messrs Seligman and Layard, two eminent enthusiasts for happiness-based public policy, is a perfect miniature illustration of the general fact of ineradicable society-wide diversity and disagreement about the nature of the best life and the proper aim of politics. Almost all of us care deeply about happiness, whatever it is, and thus happiness should get considerable weight in public deliberation about policy. But happiness isn’t the only thing we care about and it’s not the only consideration worth according weight to in our deliberations. To make it the one and only consideration that counts—to use happiness the way Mr Layard wants to use it—would require the abolition of democracy. But the happiness data clearly show that the happiest places on earth are democracies. Thus it would seem that Mr Layard is bound by reason to abandon either his dreams of “rational public policy” determined by “a single criterion” or his allegiance to happiness as the single criterion.

I’ll admit that I have Benthamite tendencies, but Will makes a convincing case.

I also recommend reading Will’s mini-essay on public preferences across social classes, and how to understand the notional threat of plutocracy. I was particularly struck by this passage:

In their book “Degrees of Democracy: Politics, Public Opinion, and Policy,” Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, political scientists at McGill and Temple, find that policy tends to track public opinion fairly closely, and that there is generally little difference between the preferences of voters in the lower, middle, and upper third of the income distribution. Income-based differences in policy preference are greatest, however, on issues clearly related to inequality, such as welfare spending and taxation. But on these issues, for which there is a relatively large gap in preference between lower- and upper-income voters, there is practically no gap between middle- and upper-income voters. And, of course, the middle-class is where most voters are. If the wealthy want what the middle class wants, a tendency among policymakers to cater to the wealthy will look a lot like a tendency to cater to the median voter. If it turns out the similarity between the preferences of high- and middle-income voters is merely coincidental, we might reasonably worry that this happy confluence will diverge down the road. But if these similarities reflect a further similarity in, say, level of educational attainment, the overlap in high- and middle-income preferences may be relatively robust. This may be cold comfort to low-income voters who disagree with the middle-upper consensus, but that’s democracy. The minority does not prevail.

I’m particularly interested in the question of who articulates public policy grievances, and how this behind-the-scenes normative theorizing, and bureaucratic projects of making a messy world “legible,” defines the solution set.