Happiness is ... higher taxes: is one man's productivity another man's pollution?

• Author: Wilkinson, Will
• Position: Happiness: Lessons From a New Science - Book Review

Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, by Richard Layard, New York: Penguin Press, 310 pages, $55.95

IF YOU'D LIKE TO pay your respects to Jeremy Bentham, the ur-utilitarian and social reformer, head to the campus of University College London, where his dessicated, wax-headed corpse rests inside a glass cabinet. Legend has it that Bentham-in-a-box is wheeled into faculty meetings, where he is noted in the minutes as "present but not voting."

Bentham's moldering London presence is not limited to displays of human taxidermy. It also can be found in the fond thoughts of Richard Layard--member of the House of Lords, director of the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and author of Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, a manifesto that embraces one of Bentham's core ideas: that nothing has value--not excellence, not knowledge, not self-creation, not dignity, not community with God--unless it produces the warm glow of happy feelings.

Layard, Lord of Highgate, aims to tear down modern welfare economics and policy analysis, which do not presume to pass judgment on individual preferences and projects, and replace them with a data-driven Benthamism, according to which you get to do what you like as long as the collective likes what you do. The political moral of Layard's story is that we are duty-bound to contrive a more Swedish America (and Britain), a point the prescient Labour Party economist was pressing years before he chanced upon the exciting "new science" of happiness.

Layard is no isolated crackpot. Like public health activists of the mind, a new wave of paternalists, including a spate of prominent psychologists and economists, draw on the latest research on happiness to argue that the state must "encourage" us to buy smaller houses, travel by train, and get out of the office--for our own good. Swedophiles should think twice before rejoicing, though, for casual examination reveals more holes in Layard's argument than in Bentham's beetle-eaten breeches.

Psychologists and social scientists have been combing the world gathering data on happiness--what they call "subjective well-being,' or SWB for short--by asking people questions such as "Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, or not very happy?" This might seem to be a pretty, well, subjective way of getting at how happy people really are, but it turns out that self-reports of SWB generally line up with third-party estimates...