| |
|
Wealth of nations or a happy population?
Money doesn’t bring happiness, the old saying goes, chanted forty years ago by hippies and now by the new generation of anti-globalisation activists. Now, the debate about the uncertain relationship between material well-being and happiness has lost its connotations of revolt against consumer society and moved to academic ground. Ancient intuition has transformed itself into empirical investigations and theories in order to seize upon any links between GDP and satisfaction, between consumer trends and quality of life. Economists, clutching the data, show us that our consumer goods have become surrogates for the lack of reciprocity or solitude. Consumer hypertrophy leaves us dissatisfied.
Traditionally, only what is measurable or quantifiable is what has counted in economics, and of course by its very nature one’s state of mind is not thus. What’s more, according to neoclassical economics, man is a rational being who aims towards increasing what is necessary, without considering emotions. However, certain scholars are now re-evaluating the emotional side of things by re-reading economic behaviour in a psychological key. In particular, the Swiss economist Ernst Fehr has identified the location of a ‘natural’ need for justice and equality within one particular area of the brain that puts a brake on primary individualistic impulses.
Some people push further still and try to bring economics closer to new areas of study and reflection, even though every economist uses the concept in his own way; there are those who talk of fulfilment, others of well-being, others still of quality of life, or some who talk about satisfaction. Nevertheless, the importance of happiness as a tool for reading social and economic behaviour has finally been recognised.
A consecration that has pushed happiness beyond the borders of psychological or philosophical disciplines, to even become the object of study of two recent Nobel Economics laureates Daniel Kahneman and Amartya Sen.
(16/06/2006)
print
|
|
|
|
|
