Monday, September 28, 2015

When the science of happiness meets public policy, can freedom increase?

When the science of happiness meets public policy, two things tend to happen. First, some people in the room get excited about the opportunity for our policy goals to extend beyond traditional economic indicators (e.g., income, employment), and better capture elements of the good life that cannot be explained in dollar terms (e.g., social trust, individual happiness). Second (but probably simultaneously), other people in the room begin to worry that the whole point of government policy and of the reasonable limits on what governments can legislate appear to have been forgotten (freedom anyone?). How should this scenario pan out? 

Some elements deserve more explanation before the story continues, and I conclude that, contrary to the main worries, the science of happiness can be successfully incorporated into policies in a way that increases freedom.

The science of happiness can be described as the amalgamation of the current scientific knowledge related to happiness. Happiness science is not just about measuring levels of happiness, and happiness-like concepts; it’s also in the business of explaining and predicting levels of those concepts in various contexts.

Several academics have suggested that, since we now know how to measure these aspects of the good life, and they are generally held to be important, then we should include the most accepted of them (e.g. satisfaction with life) among the explicit goals of public policy (see a review here). In some ways, this suggestion is exciting, because traditional economic indicators are often acknowledged as inadequate for guiding public policy; they are far from useless, but they don’t capture everything that is important to us. The deficiencies of focusing on only traditional economic indicators were eloquently discussed by Robert F. Kennedy in his speech at the University of Kansas in 1968:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product—if we judge the United States of America by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. … It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. … Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. … It measures neither our wit nor our courage, … ; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. (Kennedy, 1968).

GNP was never intended to be a measure of the success of a nation, it was intended to be a measure of national production (England, 1998). Nevertheless, measures like GNP became the goals of many policy advisors. But, the people want to measure more. In a 2005 BBC opinion poll, 1001 participants were asked whether the government's main objective should be the "greatest happiness" or the "greatest wealth", and 81% replied, “happiness” (Easton, 2006).

Measuring is one thing, but implementing specific policies in order to increase people’s happiness is another. Many of us don’t have a lot of faith in government institutions (Stevenson & Wolfers, 2011). So, it’s no surprise some people don’t want the government “making them happy”. Shouldn’t the government just do its best to stay out of the way, and let us pursue our own vision of the good life (as long as we don’t harm others)?

For Friedrich Hayek (1960) the point of government policies is to increase freedom. We all have different interests and views of the good life. So, the government should provide us with freedom to pursue those different ends, rather than create interventionist policies that privilege (if not enforce) specific versions of the good life. Surely there is wisdom here. Policies aimed at happiness, or any other specific view of the good life, should not be coercive because some will not share the relevant view of the good life, and assuming the dominant view of the good life is correct opens the door for widespread abuses, or at least the oppression of minorities.

So, how can we use the science of happiness to inform policies that are not coercive, that do not reduce freedom, but increase it? I think policies that implement “nudges” focused on helping people overcome episodes of depression can do all this.

I’d need the following premises:
1. When a set of options exists, a policy that changes how those options are presented is not prima facie coercive. (Unless, e.g., some options are completely hidden). 
2. Policies that cost a lot of taxpayer dollars to implement are coercive unless the vast majority of those who stand to gain AND those who do not stand to gain from the policy consent to it. 
3. People with depression sometimes experience difficulty doing the things that they know they should do in order to achieve their own version of the good life. So, depressives might suffer from a temporary loss of subjective freedom during a bout of depression. 
4. Decreasing depressive symptoms, or helping people overcome a bout of depression, increases depressives’ happiness and freedom. 
5. A cheap and widely supported policy that brings about a better presentation of helpful options to people with depression would be non-coercive and would increase happiness and freedom.

And an example:

What about online adverts on relevant websites (e.g.) that take the person to a portal hosted by an AI chat bot that “listens” to them and encourages them to use helpful resources, e.g., “here is the number you need to call: …”). The initial outlay could be crowdsourced, or taxpayer funded on the understanding that depression costs “the economy” more than $210b per year (which no longer “trickles down” to the masses). There is no coercion, just better presentation of the options. We might even save enough, as a nation, to build a huge wall (if we really want to do that!).


Easton, M. (2006). Britain’s happiness in decline, BBC News, 2 May 2006. Retrieved October 9, 2013, from:

England, R. W. (1998). Alternatives to Gross Domestic Product: A critical survey. In F. Ackerman, D. Kiron, N. Goodwin, J. Harris & K. P. Gallagher (Eds.), Human wellbeing and economic goals (vol. 3) (pp. 373–402). Washington, DC: Island Press.

Hayek, F. A. (1960). The constitution of liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago

Kennedy, R. F. (1968). Speech at University of Kansas, March 18. Transcript available from:

Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2011). Trust in public institutions over the business cycle (No. w16891). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Weijers, Dan & Jarden, Aaron (2013). The Science of Happiness for Policymakers: An Overview, Journal of Social Research and Policy, 4(2). The free official version

Dan Weijers
Department of Philosophy
Sacramento State


  1. Dan, thanks for this interesting piece. Are you just accepting Hayek's perspective for the sake of argument or do you think it is right? It is not at all clear to me that he is right. I think we value liberty for its contribution to happiness and not the other way around. So, for me, the reason that we can go wrong when we try to increase happiness by decreasing liberty is just that people aren't typically made happy that way; they want liberty and get pretty unhappy when its taken away from them. But society just is the reduction of individual liberty to achieve gains related to happiness, and it just is coercive in that way. That's why we constrain the economic freedom of the minority rich, very much against their will and contrary to their happines as is always made clear during Republican primaries.

  2. I agree that the value of freedom lies in our ability to use it to gain happiness, and that we feel unhappy when our freedoms are reduced. But, even if freedom is not intrinsically good on my theoretical view, I still want to treat it as an important good in reality because I don't really trust governments to manage my happiness better than I can manage it myself.

  3. I don't think Hayek's view was that governments should increase freedom. There's a basic distinction between thinking that the appropriate stance to take with respect to some value is that of increasing/promoting/maximizing it or respecting/honoring it. I think Hayek thought the latter thing about freedom. The mere fact that interfering with someone's freedom would result in a net gain in freedom doesn't justify the interference.

    But it probably doesn't matter because you make your argument in terms of consent in premise 2.

    1. Right, thanks Kyle. I agree about Hayek not arguing for maximizing freedom. I read Hayek as saying that government interferences bestow privileges on some and costs on others (at least relative or opportunity costs?), and that, as you say, interference resulting in a net gain of freedom should not necessarily be pursued. Indeed, it should only be pursued if a majority of those who will, and those who will NOT, be privileged by the interference agree to it.

      I was clumsily trying to express a slightly different idea: Hayek also argues in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) that the right system of laws enables and cultivates freedom, by allowing people to better pursue their own ends: "The law tells him what facts he may count on and thereby extends the range within which he can predict the consequences of his actions."

    2. Right. Actually, that part of Hayek's argument sometimes gets him into trouble with (other?) libertarians. Hayek's argument here is for the rule of law (rather than the arbitrary rule of people). At the limit, so long as a law is abstract, simple, general and consistent in a way that facilitates individual planning for pursuing their goals (rather than governing by way of narrow, bureaucratic, discretionary tinkering that hinders effective planning by making the 'rules of the game' difficult to predict) anything goes policy-wise!

  4. Dan, do you think you might be equivocating on two different senses of freedom here? You initially seem to characterize it in terms of the government staying out of the way, and which you appeal to in 1 and 2. But your example of providing greater freedom to depressives is more like Berlin's concept of positive liberty, which in my opinion is not liberty at all but empowerment. People who have a strong distrust of government tend to couch their understanding of the role of government in terms of negative liberty, whereas so-called positive liberty is what is often appealed to by liberals in an attempt to justify programs that aim at greater equality. I don't think it vitiates your point in any way, but maybe it is not so important to characterize the aim of the policy as that of increasing freedom as it is to show that its implementation wouldn't reduce it.

    1. I certainly did gloss over that generally important difference. I did that because I think both positive and negative freedoms can help someone pursue their own view of the good life. Furthermore, if the policy provides any kind of freedom that helps with pursuing individual conceptions of the good life while not limiting the same for others (e.g. by interfering with markets in a way that makes them less efficient, and thereby less informative, or by coercing people out of tax dollars, or coercing them into a specific view of the good life that is not their own), then I think Hayek and many other freedom-lovers who might usually object to a union between the science of happiness and public policy will be alright with my suggestion.

      Nevertheless, I could probably achieve un- excited acceptance from most of them without increasing freedom (just so long as I don't decrease it for any unwilling person).

  5. There are people who you do not wrong by interfering with them, like young children. They're not full-fledged agents with the relevant capacities for deliberation and choice, and so interfering with them is easier to justify. To what extent do you think you could say the same thing about depressives for something like the same reason?

    1. I'd be hesitant to make that claim about people with depression. They still seem far enough above the bar for sufficient agency for me to think they should not be coerced for their own good.

  6. Dan, I did not see the adverts you mentioned when I clicked on your link. But I did see 21 or so comic strips that portray what it might be like to be depressed, and thus, in a roundabout way, try to help those who are depressed to realize that other people understand how awful it can be.

    Oh, wait a minute…maybe your link was not to much to the "adverts" but to the "relevant websites"? So…there are no current "adverts" like this?

    Now I get it…And I read all 21...

    1. Right, the e.g. was of the kinds of website people with depression might frequent.