Semple (2021) on Life‑Evaluation and Public Policy

Noel Semple, “Good Enough for Government Work? Life‑Evaluation and Public Policy.” Journal of Happiness Studies 22: 1119–1140, 2021.

• We collect happiness data via "life-evaluation" measures such as the Cantril ladder. But a leading strain of public policy thinking is "welfare-consequentialist," where individual utility or welfare is at the center of judging the desirability of different social states. 

• Happiness is not the same as welfare. But can we use life-satisfaction data anyway in evaluating welfare?

• The approach examined by Semple – life-evaluationist welfare-consequentialism (LEWC) – argues that the government should seek to maximize aggregate subjective well-being – and life satisfaction is sufficiently measurable to be implementable. In some circumstances. happiness data are informative of the success of public policy (even when there is no consensus on what actually constitutes welfare). That is, maximizing welfare can often be implemented by maximizing happiness, as measured by subjective wellbeing.

• Practicality is an important argument for the LEWC approach: we have broad, long-term data on subjective wellbeing. Further, where happiness is an imperfect proxy for welfare, it still tends to indicate the sorts of things that make people better off. 

• Happiness research has revealed that mental health problems detract markedly from subjective wellbeing; further, people do not adapt over time to some negative mental health conditions. [Look at the advantage of happiness over willingness-to-pay: "The average person who has not experienced clinical depression simply cannot say, in a reliable way, how much they would be willing to pay to avoid it. By contrast, notwithstanding the problems identified above, those who are clinically depressed, and those who are not, are able to give reasonably consistent evaluations of their own lives [p. 1133]."]

• Targeting mental health with policies that make treatment more available also helps to target those who are worse off, those whose subjective wellbeing is at the bottom of the distribution. And better mental health for parents holds positive second-order impacts for the happiness of their children.

• Approaches to human welfare are all over the map, including preference satisfaction and hedonism and...  But LEWC is grounded in data, it looks at the evidence on what produces happiness. We do not need to agree on what constitutes human welfare to implement LEWC. 

• The LEWC approach, then, offers a form of robustness; it can advance welfare without presuming what constitutes welfare.

• Much public policy is too small or abstract for its effects to be measured by happiness; further, people do adapt over time to many changes in their life circumstances. So, it is sensible to sometimes supplement SWB with preference fulfillment in serving as a proxy for welfare. Preferences for longevity can be used, for instance, to overcome some of the "moment in time" issues connected to happiness measures.