SHOULD NATIONAL HAPPINESS BE MAXIMIZED?

‘Happiness Research ’ has attracted a great deal of attention in the social sciences as well as in the general public. This is reflected by a massive increase in the amount of scholarly work on people’s subjective well-being1 and the frequent featuring of happiness research in the media. The next logical step would seem to be to construct a National Happiness Indicator (in consonance with Gross National Income) for governments to be able to maximize National Happiness. The United Kingdom and Australia, as well as certain other countries, are committed to producing national measures of well-being and, already back in the 1970s, the Kingdom of Bhutan proclaimed that it wanted to maximize Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Income. On the scientific side, a group of fifty well-known scholars is promoting the idea of “National Indicators of Subjective Well-Being and Ill-Being ” (Diener 2005, Kahneman et al. 2004). It has been argued that “Gross National Happiness ” is the answer to the paradox that, in cross-sections, happiness is positively correlated with individual income, but over time, average happiness is essentially constant, despite a shar