Economist Richard Layard is a champion of the government's new national wellbeing index. Philosopher Julian Baggini thinks the attempt to measure happiness is totalitarian. With the first set of results out next week, Susanna Rustin meets them.
Richard Layard: I expect the data to show huge variations in happiness and that is the point of doing this – to see who is miserable and who is happy, and then to see if policies are making any difference.
Julian Baggini: One thing I'm sure we agree on is that gross domestic product (GDP) is not the be-all and end-all, although I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who claimed it was. But I'm suspicious of a national wellbeing index. It's not just that wellbeing isn't rocket science. It isn't science at all! Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.
RL: My belief is that the best state of society is the one where there is the most happiness and the least misery. And if we think happiness is what policymakers should aim for, it is critical to measure it. If you go back 30 or 40 years, people said you couldn't measure depression. But eventually the measurement of depression became uncontroversial. I think the same will happen with happiness. We're at an early stage, but I don't see how you can argue this isn't a scientific project.
JB: You agree there has to be a philosophical basis and say this is a form of utilitarianism, but it's not straightforwardly the case that what people want to maximise above all else is happiness. It's complicated to know what's best for people, and if we can't specify the things that constitute wellbeing, then measuring it will be misleading, no matter how well you do it.
RL: Feeling good or bad is a dimension of our experience of life from minute to minute that most of us can recognise. It's very interesting that when these questions are asked on questionnaires they get the highest response rate of almost any question.
Susanna Rustin: Are you glad the subject is being opened up for discussion?
JB: I agree these are important areas of research. It would be helpful if government ministers were told the latest research on what makes people feel good. But I think the project risks losing whatever value it has when it tries to encapsulate this in an index.
RL: These measurements are credible in a given population because of the way answers correlate with physical markers such as cortisol levels. You seem to be more interested in raising problems than in thinking of ways round them.
JB: But if this is a science in its infancy then it's too soon to be trying to wheel it in as an authoritative measurement. You can't create an index that government policy is going to be framed around on the basis of embryonic, tentative, incomplete works in progress.
RL: Policy is not going to be framed around this for decades, but unless you have the index you'll never get to a point where you can influence things.
SR: We already have measures of health and other inequalities. Why do we need to measure happiness as well?
JB: We don't. If you look at the countries that do best in surveys of wellbeing, they haven't got there by having these indices. They've got there by agreeing what priorities should be. In Scandinavia they prioritised good healthcare and education.
RL: But not everybody agrees that the same things are important. We went through the 1990s behaving as if we didn't think health was important, but reducing taxes was. These are open questions, and unless you have a single metric you cannot have a rational debate about priorities.
JB: I'm glad you mentioned the single metric because I think that is the problem. It defines wellbeing in a singular way and that's something government should never do.
RL: I would say the opposite. You have a list of things that are good for people. I'm saying that in the end I accept the individual's own judgment about what is good for them, and that seems to me the most democratic way.
JB: Happiness research shows people are happier if they are married and if they are religious. Do you not worry that a government with a particular agenda might latch on to findings such as these as a means of promoting certain ideas?
RL: Unless people have the feeling they are making their own way through life, they can't be happy. This is not a formula for a totalitarian system, which we know empirically produces the most miserable societies. But I suspect you agree that the state does have a role in establishing norms. Let's talk about parents, because we know the quality of parenting is enormously important. I think at around the time of childbirth, when parents are at their most open, we ought to be offering parenting classes that would cover emotional as well as physical aspects.
JB: You make a good case for that kind of intervention. I don't see any need for a wellbeing index to facilitate it.
SR: Is the ultimate goal an international index to replace GDP?
JB: That idea crystallises what is problematic, because you could only have an international index if it were constructed around one specific idea. That is the fundamental danger of this. It is not credible that there could be a single understanding of wellbeing that all people at all times would settle on. There are ways of measuring whether societies have in place things that are necessary for their citizens to flourish. But the moment you try to create this single wellbeing index, you're trying to nail down wellbeing to one conception, and I think that is in a way totalitarian.
RL: I come back to the primacy of feeling. People use the word "wellbeing" in thousands of ways, and the Office of National Statistics is not just focusing on subjective wellbeing; it's one of many indicators, most of which are objective. But our system of doing things has left something out, and what it has left out is the inner person.
SR: If lifting people's mood becomes a policy goal, is there a danger we will be tempted to cheer ourselves up by, say, turning off the news?
RL: The fundamental principle of moral philosophy is to create as much happiness in the world as you can, and most of the people in the world aren't you! It's unclear to many young people what the goal of their lives should be, and this philosophy of happiness is the answer.
JB: The danger is the numbers on the index become an end in themselves.
RL: If you think something matters you should try to measure it.
JB: There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
