Money can’t buy me love,” sang The Beatles, although it is doubtful that this was a rigorous empirical claim. Still, nobody disputes that there’s more to life than money and a new book, The Origins of Happiness , argues that happiness should be a guide to government policy.
Two years ago this would have been part of the zeitgeist: one of Barack Obama’s senior advisers, the economist Alan Krueger, was a noted expert in “subjective wellbeing” (happiness to you and me), while former UK prime minister David Cameron also championed the idea. It now seems strangely out of step with the times: whatever you think is driving Britain’s current PM Theresa May or US president Donald Trump, it seems unlikely to be surveys of life satisfaction.
Still, it is easy to sympathise with Thomas Jefferson’s remark, shortly after he stepped down as US president, that “The care of human life & happiness, & not their destruction, is the first & only legitimate object of good government.”