Governments Should Maximize the Happiness of the Population

Abstract

The perspective of social welfare maximization in traditional economics is often perceived as a mandate of the state to maximize happiness. Modern happiness research, which develops informative empirical measures of subjective well-being, might be seen as an emerging science that has the capacity to finally facilitate the realization of this idea. I am convinced that it has great potential to contribute to the realization of happiness for individuals. However, a government decision rule, which aims at maximizing some empirical indicator of subjective well-being, is not the vision to pursue.