EC EI

Both. First, the claim made by happiness scientists that happiness is a self-evident good, as well as the most crucial goal for any society to pursue, is posited rather than proven, a purely ideological and utilitarian assumption rather than a scientific fact. There is no way to prove such affirmation, so you just have to believe it. It is also necessary to take for granted that happiness is a subjective, psychological issue independent from other social and economic indexes. That is a very individualistic way to conceptualize happiness, and that is precisely the framework under which happiness is “measured.”

Not surprisingly, happiness experts recurrently find that despite other socioeconomic and political factors, individualism is the variable that most strongly relates to happiness. But what is happiness? They never define it. Apparently, happiness is what happiness questionnaires measure ― and the items of these happiness questionnaires are only concerned with feelings, attitudes, and perceptions, not with social or economic conditions.

As for their methods, happiness scientists mainly rely on self-reports to measure happiness — that is, asking people how happy they feel. These self-reports present several problems. For instance, it is not clear that happiness measurements are comparable between individuals, between nations, or even between the same individual in different periods. How can we know that someone’s score of 7 out of 10 in a happiness questionnaire is equivalent to someone else’s 7 out 10? How can we know that a score of 7 from someone in Ireland is higher or lower than someone else’s score of 6 or 8 in Cambodia or China? How much happier is someone with a score of 5 compared to someone with a score of 3? What does a score of 10 in happiness mean? Another concern is that this methodology severely limits the range of informative responses that people can provide when assessing their happiness. This is important because closed-form responses might not only favor a self-confirmatory bias by researchers but also to disregard important information when it comes to using these happiness indexes to make political decisions.

Happiness indexes are also ideological in the way they are used. As we show in the book, quite often these indexes have worked as smoke screens to conceal important and structural political and economic deficiencies ― i.e., to sideline and deflect attention from more objective and complex socioeconomic indicators of welfare such as redistribution of income, material inequalities, social segregation, gender inequity, democratic health, corruption and transparency, objective vs perceived opportunities, social aids, or unemployment rates. We illustrate this point with the case examples of the United Kingdom, Chile, India, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this last instance, it is very telling that a country characterized by widespread poverty, constant human rights violations, and high rates of malnutrition, infant mortality, and suicide adopted “happiness measures” as a prominent political initiative, to assess the impact of its national policies. Perhaps that’s because the UAE does much better in happiness rankings than in any other of the aforementioned factors — according to the World Happiness Report, it is among the twenty happiest countries in the world. If happiness were conceptualized and measured differently, a very different result would come up.

These indexes have also been used in order to settle delicate political and economic issues in an allegedly non-ideological manner. Inequality is one of the latest and most striking examples — some happiness advocates claim that income inequality might be more beneficial for people’s happiness than previously thought. It is stated that inequality is accompanied not by diminishing opportunities but by a “hope factor” according to which the poor supposedly perceive the success of the rich as a harbinger of opportunity. This allegedly raises their hope and happiness, here related to the higher motivation for poorer people to thrive. How is that not an ideological claim based on ideological assumptions? Apparently, they support these claims in data. However, as Stevenson and Wolfers showed regarding the relationship of happiness to income, the same corpus of data has many different interpretations and can lead to even opposite outcomes.

In the end, the main problem with happiness indexes is not that they are ideological ― to be sure, every index aimed at measuring progress is ideological, starting with the very notion of progress itself; the main problem is that happiness indexes attempt to act as objective and neutral criteria devoid of moral, political, or ideological content. As we show in the book, this alleged neutrality should be rejected.