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Journal of Happiness Studies
Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies 3/2021

12-05-2020 | Research Paper

Good Enough for Government Work? Life-Evaluation and Public Policy

Author: Noel Semple

Published in: Journal of Happiness Studies | Issue 3/2021

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Abstract

A life-evaluation question asks a person to quantify his or her overall satisfaction with life, at the time when the question is asked. If public policy seeks to make individuals’ lives better, does it follow that changes in aggregate life-evaluations track policy success? This paper argues that life-evaluation is a practical and philosophically sound way to measure and predict welfare for the purpose of analyzing policy options. This is illustrated by the successful argument for expanding state-funded mental health services in the United Kingdom. However, life-evaluations sometimes fail to adequately measure individual welfare. Policy analysts therefore must sometimes inquire into the extent to which individuals’ preferences would be fulfilled, if different policies were to be adopted. This article proposes synthesizing life-evaluation and preference-fulfilment data about individual welfare, as a basis for welfare-consequentialist policy analysis.
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Footnotes
1
An alternative is to ask respondents how “happy” they are with their lives overall. Because such questions also solicit a global evaluation of one’s life, they are essentially life-evaluation as well. See e.g. Clark (2016) and Helliwell et al. (2018), Chapter 2. Life-evaluation is one variety of subjective well-being question. Others ask respondents about their feelings, or about how fulfilling or meaningful their lives are for them.
 
2
However, strong welfare-consequentialism might still be reconciled with obedience to pre-established decision procedures on epistemic grounds. Because the ability of humans to accurately predict the consequences of policy options is sharply limited, it can be argued that welfare is more likely to actually be maximized if some decisions are made in deference to rules or traditions, rather than through efforts to predict and account for every welfare effect. See Goodin (1995) and Weinzierl (2019).
 
3
At 325. This claim has been criticized on the grounds that the simple regression modelling used in this volume fails to capture the true relationship between poverty, inequality, and mental health. See Alexandrova and Singh (2018) and Psychologists for Social Change (2020).
 
4
Some argue that welfare-consequentialist analysis should discount, or disregard completely, the welfare of animals, and/or foreigners, and/or the unborn. This could be because including them is too morally demanding: Miklós and Tanyi (2020), or because a government has special obligations to its own citizens: Goodin (1995) and Miller (2005). Another live question in welfare-consequentialism, beyond the scope of this paper, is whether and how to account for individuals who will only be born if one policy option is implemented.
 
5
Preference can also be defined in other ways, for example as a “comparative evaluation.” (Hausman 2011 at 3). The choice-based definition is adopted here because a wide range of individuals (including non-human animals) can have dispositions to choose, even if they cannot necessarily conduct comparative evaluations. Using this definition makes preferentism a broad and capacious constitutive theory of welfare.
 
6
The Origins of Happiness uses a child’s emotional health (measured through a series of questions to child and parent) to represent the child’s well-being (Clark et al 2018 at 153).
 
7
Note that Bronsteen et al are not pure life-evaluationists, as they would include hedonic elements in their measurement of individual welfare.
 
8
Regarding the question of whether and how those other than living human constituents of the government should be counted, see Sect. 2.3, and accompanying note.
 
9
Mathematically, it is expressed as follows:
$$\sum\limits_{i = 1}^{N} {w(a)}$$
where N = all individuals who count. w(a) means the list of individuals’ predicted well-being numbers if policy a is adopted. The Greek letter sigma (Σ) means summation. Here, the notation means “sum the lifetime welfare numbers for all of the individuals who count, starting with the number for the first individual and ending with the number for the Nth individual”.
 
10
The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for identifying the possibility of consulting meta-preferences.
 
11
For example, respondents could be asked: “Suppose I offer you two alternatives. Under Option A, you live to age 70, and have a life that you evaluate as 9 out of 10 every year. Under Option B, you live to age 90, and have a life that you evaluate as 7 out of 10 every year. Which would you choose?” People of different ages would be asked this question, with a series of different numbers used for the life-evaluations and the ages.
 
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Metadata
Title
Good Enough for Government Work? Life-Evaluation and Public Policy
Author
Noel Semple
Publication date
12-05-2020
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Happiness Studies / Issue 3/2021
Print ISSN: 1389-4978
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7780
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00266-0

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