Happiness, capability and the welfare state

Swedish libertarian Johann Norberg has written a very interesting critique of the use of happiness research to support the welfare state. Norberg argues that "subjective well-being"/happiness research supports a more libertarian interpretation, that economic growth and personal economic responsibility make people happier than the welfare state.

Here's why I think its an important argument:

1) I use some of Ruut Veenhoven's earlier research that this article critiques as part of my utilitarian justification for the welfare state in Citizen Cyborg. I haven't read Richard Layard's new Happiness: Lessons from a New Science yet, but it also sounds fascinating.

2) The conclusion that people are happier when they have a subjective sense of self-determination is just as congenial for the libertarian leftist as it is for the libertarian rightist. There is a libertarian left argument for increased choice through vouchers, for instance, and a lib-left critique of the welfare state. Clearly personal empowerment is as central to transhumanist values as access to enhancement tech. The sense of empowerment through labor is one of the principal critiques of basic income guarantees and in favor of full employment.

3) I think its important for technoprogs and dem-trannies to explore the Sen/Nussbaum "capabilities approach" as a measure of social utility as opposed to simple subjective well-being. It may be, in other words, that increased choice and intelligence may make people anxious and unhappy even while their objective health, longevity and abilities increase. Of course, eventually we will have direct control of our subjective well-being, and the anxieties that choice, dependency and so on engender, which will raise other questions.

4) Given the research on the happiness set-point, a simple utilitarian approach to social policy would seem to lead more in the direction of an Hedonic Imperative pharmaceutical approach, rather than these indirect and marginal effects achievable through social policy. In other words, give them soma and not individual empowerment. Not an attractive conclusion, and one that we can avoid by developing a more sophisticated argument for what we consider a "Good Life" to be, and how social policy can encourage it.