‘Happiness Research’ has attracted a great deal of attention in the social sciences as well as inthe general public. This is reflected by a massive increase in the amount of scholarly work onpeople’s subjective well-being1 and the frequent featuring of happiness research in the media.The next logical step would seem to be to construct a National Happiness Indicator (inconsonance with Gross National Income) for governments to be able to maximize NationalHappiness. The United Kingdom and Australia, as well as certain other countries, arecommitted to producing national measures of well-being and, already back in the 1970s, theKingdom of Bhutan proclaimed that it wanted to maximize Gross National Happiness ratherthan Gross National Income. On the scientific side, a group of fifty well-known scholars ispromoting the idea of “National Indicators of Subjective Well-Being and Ill-Being” (Diener2005, Kahneman et al. 2004). It has been argued that “Gross National Happiness” is theanswer to the paradox that, in cross-sections, happiness is positively correlated withindividual income, but over time, average happiness is essentially constant, despite a sharp increase in average income levels (Di Tella and MacCulloch 2005). The use of NationalHappiness Indicators has also been suggested by “libertarian paternalists” (e.g. Sunstein 2007:22) to overcome the problem that individuals are not always able to maximize their ownutility.
