The Origins of HappinessPolicy Evaluation
The purpose of all these numbers (not too many we hope) is
to guide decisions— by individuals or by policy makers. Our
hope is that policy makers worldwide will in due course
adopt the happiness of the people as their overarching pol-
icy objective. For this purpose they would be constantly
looking for policy changes that would advance that objec-
tive. This would be true in the largest Ministry of Finance
but also in the smallest NGO.
In each case they would use the science of happiness to
select areas for policy development. New policies would
then be designed and tested. These new policies could be
based on hunch (good or bad), or on previous trials, or on
inference from existing science— from all sorts of places.
But, wherever they come from, the new policies must be
subjected to the acid test of cost- effectiveness, based on a
proper controlled trial.
The assumption lying behind any cost- effectiveness anal-
ysis is that there is a limited amount of money to be spent. If
this money is to produce the greatest amount of happiness,
it should be spent on those policies that produce the most
happiness- years per dollar spent. So there would be some
critical cost/benefit ratio, below which new policies pass
the test and above which they fail.
Britain’s National Health Service has been operating
such a system for the last fifteen years. Any new treatment
must produce enough extra Quality- Adjusted Life Years
(QALYs) per dollar spent to be recommended for use in the
service. At present, at least one extra QALY must result from
every $35,000 spent.