1 / 7

Measuring Happiness and Making Policy

Measuring Happiness and Making Policy. Professor Paul Dolan Tanaka Business School Imperial College London. Income versus happiness. A. B. Commute > 1hr/day Over 70 Has children Has degree. C. D. How do we decide?. Is the measure conceptually appropriate?

ronda
Download Presentation

Measuring Happiness and Making Policy

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Measuring Happiness and Making Policy Professor Paul Dolan Tanaka Business School Imperial College London

  2. Income versus happiness A B Commute > 1hr/day Over 70 Has children Has degree C D

  3. How do we decide? • Is the measure conceptually appropriate? • Is the measure normatively relevant? • Is the measure empirically useful?

  4. Is the measure conceptually appropriate? • Distinguish between good life and good for the individual • Prudential value is suitable for most policy applications • Both measures mostly contain prudential concerns • The measure should be a complete account of well-being • There is more to life than income (and happiness?) • The measure should measure what it purports to • Allows us to make intra and inter-personal comparisons • There is no gold standard but there is ‘validity’ • Both measures converge with and predicts health etc.

  5. Is the measure normatively relevant? • The measure must be acceptable to policy makers and to the general public, at least in time • Income is attractive because the individual judges what will be in his best interests • But may be questioned if it does not lead to LS • And if preferences are misguided, myopic etc. • Support for LS may depend on language used • LS may be better than happiness, and misery better still?

  6. Is the measure empirically useful? • Is it intra- and interpersonally comparable? • Both shaped by expectations, shaped by circumstances • Brain imaging and physiological measures may help LS • Is it cardinal? • LS performs better than income here • Is measurement error low? • Both measures reasonably stable for most sub-groups • Is it sensitive? • Income changes may not be meaningful but global LS may not pick up small effects of policy • Is it practical? • Both relatively easy to collect

  7. Conclusion • Using different measures may result in different policies • No single measure is ever likely to satisfy all criteria • But well-being measures are used in policy as if they do • Choice really depends on which criteria matter most • Some criteria may be more important in some contexts • And there may be various trade-offs between the criteria • We need more conceptual clarity and empirical evidence • But subjective evaluations may well be the way forward

More Related