When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1980s, Jeff Sachs was a relatively new assistant professor in the department, and although I never studied with him, he was an amiable and friendly figure around the Littauer Center. I’ve always had a soft spot for him as a result, while being reasonably sceptical about his recent work on development. Still, I would have read his latest book, [amazon_link id=”1847920926″ target=”_blank” ]The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics after the Fall[/amazon_link], without any hesitation were it not for a review of it by Robert Skidelsky. Actually, it’s a very favourable review. Skidelsky describes it as ‘one of the best’ books on the economic crisis. But he ends with a couple of criticisms. One concerns Sachs’s advocacy of a Gross Domestic Happiness target, and his praise for the Kingdom of Bhutan for introducing one.

Noooooooo!!!! Not again! Why do intelligent people insist on seeing as a policy model one of the world’s lowest Human Development Index and most authoritarian countries? The King of Bhutan has discovered in the pursuit of happiness policies a massively effective PR tool that distracts attention away from his failure to improve the lot of his subjects at all.

And besides, it just isn’t true that happiness isn’t related to economic growth. People are happier when they’re richer and have more to spend. Any claim to the contrary is based on a statistical error. See Chapter One of [amazon_link id=”0691145180″ target=”_blank” ]The Economics of Enough[/amazon_link] for more detail. We should hold politicians and central bankers to account for whether or not the GDP increases – they’re not doing all that well at the moment. It’s because GDP is no increasing that many of us are feeling pretty unhappy at the moment.

There are other problems with the fashion for ‘happiness’ as an economic guideline. As Skidelsky says: “[T]here are two problems with making happiness the ultimate goal of economic activity. First of all, we don’t actually know enough about what makes people happy. Perhaps everyone living to 90 will increase the sum of “life satisfaction”, perhaps not. Second, happiness is not the same as “wellbeing”, still less is it the same as “goodness”. The ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia, loosely translated as “happiness”, is an admirable and desirable state of being, not a subjective state of mind. So “clinical economics” cannot tell you either how to be happy, or why being happy is good. For the latter one needs a philosophy of the good life.”

Rant over, maybe I will still read Jeff’s book. Nonsense on happiness aside, there’s certainly a need for alternative policy ideas.

[amazon_image id=”1847920926″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics After the Fall[/amazon_image]