MARCH 20 is International Day of Happiness. In the spirit of the occasion, Eagle Watch devotes a column to this thing called “happiness.”
Two kinds of happiness
HAPPINESS in the first instance is “emotional happiness”—that is, it is about positive and negative feelings. This can be measured as the number of times that people felt cheerful, inspired, etc., (i.e., positive feelings) and the number of times they felt upset, afraid, etc. (i.e., negative feelings) in a specified period like yesterday or today. The item to ask could be “Did you feel excited today?” or “Did you smile a lot yesterday?” for positive feelings; and, correspondingly, “Did you feel upset today?” or “Did you feel worried a lot yesterday?” for negative feelings.
Why take the trouble of measuring positive and negative feelings? One reason is that emotions convey useful information about the people’s state of being. Researchers can thus look at the net value of the positive and negative feelings as a proxy measure of their short-term well-being: higher amounts mean the people are happier. Another reason, and perhaps a more important one, is that positive and negative feelings are not exactly mathematical inverses of each other.
As such, decreases in negative feelings do not lead to increases in positive feelings. In an extreme case, the absence of negative feelings does not mean the situation is all right—this condition is, in fact, a psychopathological marker. The point is this: society is not necessarily better off when fewer people say that they are miserable. Happiness in another instance is “evaluative happiness”—that is, it is a cognitive evaluation of how people’s lives are going. The evaluation can be about life in general or about life domains in particular.
For life, in general, the query could be “How happy are you with your life as a whole?” For life domains, say, financial domain, the query could be “How happy are you with the financial situation of your family?” Researchers can then use the responses as proxy measures of the people’s long-term well-being: higher values mean the people are happier.
Note that the cognition-based and the feeling-based responses entail different and distinct process. As such, it is possible that people exhibit positive dispositions but they disapprove of how their lives are proceeding. For example, people in poverty may be smiling at you but deep inside they really want a better life.
Happiness and public policy
THERE are at least three reasons happiness is useful for public policy.
First, the measurement of happiness presents information about the state of being in a society that cannot be inferred from the standard indicators. For instance, the inflation rate is an indicator of whether goods and services are affordable, but the people’s happiness on the inflation rate is an indicator of whether they find the goods and services affordable. Happiness data can therefore augment the information presented by standard indicators.
Second, the happiness methodology helps clarify the impact of public policy on people’s lives. If so, happiness can serve as a criterion on which to benchmark such an evaluation. A high economic growth rate, for instance, is no longer ipso facto desirable because the happiness approach requires that one also look at how such achievement enables the people to pursue the “good life.” That is, a robust economic growth rate must be viewed in terms of how it affects the aspects of life that are most important to the people.
A third, but related to the second, reason concerns the introduction of the happiness methodology as an alternative framework for analyzing resource allocation and valuation of non-marketed goods. In brief, the happiness approach discards market prices but, instead looks at the tradeoff between a good and a numeraire in the context of what people hold dear as indicated by their well-being. In so doing, the happiness approach presents a way out of the problem about the people being not effective or not relevant when corporate power, political expediency, and elite interest control the resource allocation and valuation in society.
Prospects
STUDYING happiness leads to new insights about societies and provides fresh inputs for the design of public policy. The key challenge of course is mainstreaming happiness.
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Dr. Edsel L. Beja Jr. is a research faculty at Ateneo de Manila University.