Category: I. Happiness
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Chapter Four of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility examines the determinants of welfare –the causal factors behind changes in levels of health and violence worldwide. Global average life expectancy was 24 years in 1000 AD, 31 years in 1900 and reached 66 years in 1999. It is widely assumed that, because at any…
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Chapter Five of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses the components of dignity. To possess dignity you must have a degree of choice and control over your life, the life that you lead must be a worthwhile one, and it must carry with it a degree of prestige. To preserve choice, key elements…
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Chapter Six of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility explores the role that income plays in dignity but also about the broader relationship between economic development and dignity. Over the long term, for example, measures of civil and political rights have gone up on average worldwide. So has income. This has led some to…
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Chapter Seven of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility asks "do people know if they are happy?": If the most important elements in happiness are welfare and dignity, then individuals are not necessarily the best authorities on their own condition. We may be mistaken about the state of our bodily health,and our acquiescence in…
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Chapter Eight of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility explores subjective wellbeing polls ("taking your life as a whole, would you rate yourself very happy, somewhat happy, or not happy at all?"). Those who say they are happy smile more than the average person, appear happier to friends and family, have higher self-esteem, are…
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Chapter Nine of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility suggests that there are three elements essential to a moral system. There must be a moral community, a set of moral values, and a moral code. Just as philosophers have disagreed about the nature of happiness, so they have disagreed about each of these elements…
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Chapter Ten of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses policies at the national and international level that might increase welfare, dignity and contentment. The chapter suggests that: The ‘self evident truth’ contained in the US Declaration of Independence that all men have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…
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Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable? was published in Kyklos 59, 2, 2006. Standard economic theory would suggest close linkages between income, broader measures of the quality of life and ‘utility’. When we look at broader measures of objective and subjective wellbeing in both rich and poor countries today, however, the relationship to…
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Does Development Make You Happy? Subjective Wellbeing and Economic Growth in Developing Countries was published in Social Indicators Research, 73, 2, 2005. The evidence for any relationship between GDP/capita growth and growth in subjective wellbeing (SWB) in wealthier countries is disputed, at best. However, there are a number of reasons commonly articulated for thinking the…
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Does Growth Cause Happiness, or Does Happiness Cause Growth? was published by Kyklos 52, 1999. Taking lessons from a conception of the nature and causes of happiness that harks back to Adam Smith and the original Utilitarians, this paper argues that increases in absolute income should have little effect on happiness in rich countries and…
Charles Kenny 