Happiness & Public Policy

Nice column in the Times Online from James Whyte. Highlight:

it is clear that happiness is not everyone’s ultimate value either.
I know academics who have sacrificed happiness for discovery. And I
know bankers who work very hard and earn a lot of money. They know that
more wealth will not increase their happiness as much as more leisure
would. Nevertheless, they keep working. They prefer money to happiness.

Some will say my greedy friends are making a mistake. Professor
Layard, for example, says they are in the grip of an addiction from
which it is the Government’s duty to save them through punitive income
taxes. It is, of course, tempting to think that those who do not share
your values are crazy. But it is also an alarming pretext for state
intervention. Free men should fear the happy brigade.

To have been born British is to have won first prize in the
lottery of life. This is almost as true now as it was when Cecil Rhodes
said it. But not because the British are or ever were the happiest
people on earth. It is because, unlike those happy Nigerians, we are
prosperous and free. Which means we have just about as much happiness
as we want.