The Illusion of Well-Being: Economic Policymaking Based on Respect and Responsiveness.

• Author: Moseley, Daniel D.
• Position: Book review

* The Illusion of Well-Being: Economic Policymaking Based on Respect and Responsiveness

By Mark D. White

New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.

Pp. ix, 206. $35 paperback.

The central arguments in Mark White's book will be familiar and attractive to those inspired by the work of Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. White argues that policy makers are too keen to appeal to metrics of happiness or well-being to justify their policy recommendations. White holds that policy makers pretend that they are in the business of improving the well-being of everyone and that they appeal to poorly designed empirical studies to support their policy recommendations. He argues that much of the current empirical research on happiness and well-being has yielded results that are arbitrary, inaccurate, and oversimplified and, thus policy recommendations that rely on empirical studies of happiness and well-being are not sound. He contends that the true interests of individuals should be the policy makers' concern, but those interests are too complex and subjective to be accurately described with the results of surveys by positive psychologists and the quantitative methods used by behavioral economics. According to White, policy makers and happiness researchers are guilty of value substitution: they paternalistically impose their own values onto the values of the people whose well-being they purport to be investigating. He advocates an approach to policy making that focuses on enhancing the choices available to individuals in a society and responding to the concerns that people actually express via democratic processes.

The Illusion of Well-Being; consists of four chapters. The first two chapters present White's arguments that the current research in psychology and economics on happiness and well-being does not track the true interests of the individuals whose interests are being studied. The third chapter presents his argument that those researchers are guilty of value substitution and that many theorists who advocate the ethics of care also embrace an approach to caring that is overly paternalistic. The fourth chapter presents White's own proposal for how policy making ought to be conducted: policy makers should make rules and laws that are based on respect and responsiveness. He maintains that policy makers should focus on constitutional economics instead of on welfare economics. That is, he contends, they ought to focus on creating rules that maximize the degree...