greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’ He maintained that the purpose or ‘utility’ of every government action should be ‘to add to the happiness of the community’. It was a vision that borrowed heavily on the ideas of ancient Greece, but the problem remained as it had for thousands of years: how to measure such progress?
Bentham defined happiness as the excess of pleasure over pain or the difference between well-being and ill- being. ‘Taking the whole of mankind together,’ he mused, ‘on which side of the account does the balance lie, on the well-being or ill-being side?’ Despite extensive lists of pleasures and pains, Bentham never found a convincing way to measure social well-being. Nor did other utilitarian thinkers. Happiness appeared to be a candyfloss concept, attractive but ultimately fluffy and insubstantial — hardly the handy ready reckoner that government needed to decide its priorities.
So it was that another yardstick for progress came to be accepted: money. Economists, not social scientists, were invited to sit closest to the seat of power. Tangible wealth, rather than ethereal well-being, became the fundamental political goal.
Even finding a single accepted measure of affluence proved tricky, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that Russian-born economist Simon Kuznets came up with the concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For industrialised countries such as Britain, trying to recover from the deprivations of the Second World War in the 1940s and 50s, GDP was embraced as the best way to monitor material and social development. Despite Kuznets’ own warning that his measure should not be used as a surrogate for well-being, those three letters became the focus of UK government activity, recited mantra-like as an incantation for a better life. National advancement and greater GDP became almost indistinguishable.
However, not everyone was content with this state of affairs. In 1960, a paper published by the United Nations warned that ‘one of the greatest dangers in development policy lies in the tendency to give to the more material aspects of growth an overriding and disproportionate emphasis.’ Poorer nations, particularly those looking to break free of a colonial yoke, argued there was more to progress than money. ‘The end may be forgotten in preoccupation of the means,’ the UN report added.
Eight years later, Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the US Presidency in Kansas, gave an impassioned speech arguing the same point:
Our Gross National Product… counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… and the television programmes which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. 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 does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
The following year the UN General Assembly issued a declaration stating ‘each government has the primary role and ultimate responsibility of ensuring the social progress and well-being of its people.’ It might almost have said ‘happiness’. The Assembly stressed it should be the objective of every state to raise not just material, but spiritual standards of living. The list of goals included the elimination of hunger and poverty, the eradication of illiteracy, adequate housing, and the highest standards of health. But the UN went much further, demanding nations strive for ‘a just and equitable distribution of income’, ‘the encouragement of creative initiative under conditions of enlightened public opinion’ and an ‘integrated society’. Getting rich was not enough — progress was about human rights and social justice.
This was 1969, and I was watching Neil Armstrong and thinking of everlasting gobstoppers, the UN was watching anti-Vietnam protests and thinking of world peace, and thousands of hippies were heading for Woodstock and thinking of free love. But none of these visions of progress was embraced by political leaders around the world who, for decades to come, would still stick doggedly to the idea that increasing GDP should be the basis for deciding policy.
Then something changed. Perhaps it was the impending millennium that prompted a reflective mood. Or maybe it was environmental concerns about the state of the planet. It might simply have been that, in the developed world at least, enormous new wealth was not really making people any happier. With the imminent arrival of the twenty-first century, old questions began to be asked once again.
In 1998, for instance, an article appeared in the magazine
The article was to gain prominence because, three years before 9/11, it contained within it a prediction of a terrorist attack on New York, ‘the psychological centre of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard- shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance’. But, for me, the anxiety that drove the essay was an almost visceral fear that the richest nations on the planet might have missed the point, that the West had got its priorities wrong, was so busy making money it had lost the plot. ‘Does family life spill over into work life? No. Work life spills over into family life,’ Noonan argued. ‘This is not progress.’
At almost the same moment, three eminent American professors completed a book that would, ultimately, transform British politics. Entitled
It was a damp November afternoon in 2002 when, over tea and biscuits at Her Majesty’s Treasury in Whitehall, a cell of British new utilitarians plotted their opening gambit. A pamphlet entitled
The apparently innocuous conclusion of the 2002 tract was that ‘there is a case for state intervention to boost life satisfaction.’ Who could argue with that? But it implied a redefinition of political purpose. ‘This is a revolution in how we think about everything,’ argued the economist Professor Richard Layard, one of those gathered in Room 2/18 that day. ‘Government has got to rethink its priorities,’ he insisted. ‘I am hoping that each department will review its objectives and see how closely they are in line with the idea of promoting the happiness of the people.’
What lay behind the challenge was the claim that it was now possible to measure well-being at least as well as economists measure wealth. The hedonic psychologists had produced good evidence that happiness was an objective phenomenon and that there were ways of counting it.
At around this time, I paid a visit to Daniel Kahneman — author of one of the gospels in the happiness bible. ‘It turns out,’ he told me, ‘something like fifteen per cent of the overall time that people spend is bad time, unpleasant time. Now that gives you something to get your teeth into. If you manage to reduce that number from fifteen per cent to fourteen per cent, you would be doing a great service to humankind!’ Kahneman was aware that the pursuit of happiness, although enshrined in America’s constitution, was too easily dismissed as a nebulous and naive ambition by hard-nosed policy advisors in Washington. Reducing unhappiness, however, was accepted as a legitimate and noble aim.
In Britain, the new utilitarians were beginning to grow in confidence: the government was pledged to evidence-based policy and they hoped the science of happiness could become a driving force in determining the political direction of travel. Within Number Ten itself, Tony Blair’s strategy team included enthusiastic advocates of
