Public policy is about imperfect choices, and it can be hard to analyze the impact of those choices on people’s lives. Disaggregating the data, controlling for the right variables, knowing the causal direction, or even properly understanding when a given public policy choice might have made a meaningful difference (often many years down the line) can become a fool’s errand.
Successful policymakers must have a broader measure in mind when they conceive of how to have a positive impact. An orientation towards creating the conditions for happiness is the right one.
Maybe that seems obvious, but to our current government, it’s far from it. The Trudeau government has undertaken a series of policy blunders, informed by an incoherent mix of blunt economic measures, disordered libertarianism, and trendy academic social policy—each of which has led them off the path of a holistic view of creating the conditions for human flourishing, away from long-term thinking and common sense, and toward a kind of technocratic disengagement from reality. They’re far from the only ones. It’s a common story for long-serving governments and a warning to aspiring leaders.
As Sean Speer and Taylor Jackson note in their recent DeepDive, blunt economic measures often fail as proxies for the success of a given political programme. Gross domestic product and the government’s simplistic focus on boosting it as an end in itself is an obvious example. Other analysts, particularly in the U.S., have pointed to young people’s rising incomes to make the argument that young people ought not to be so unhappy.
But this simplistic analysis (and policy orientation) misses regional disparities and personal preferences, rising inflation, and low housing supply. In North America, it fails to account for the difference between income and wealth, as well as the meaning humans derive from owning a home, starting a family, and providing for it. A government looking only at GDP and forgetting about happiness will increase immigration where there aren’t enough houses or family doctors, roll out one-size-fits-all-childcare to drive more women into the workforce full-time (even if that’s not what makes many of them happy), and try to pressure pension plans to invest domestically, even if it flies in the face of their responsibility to Canadian seniors.
In sum, economic measures are important data points, but they’re weak as singular measures of public policy effectiveness and ultimate success.
Working back from aggregate data points doesn’t work for public policy development, but neither does working forward from public opinion, consumer behaviour, or completely disaggregated individual preference. While the Liberals seem comfortable limiting choice to try to increase GDP, they have been intent on taking a hands-off libertarian approach to such serious matters as euthanasia, illicit drug use, and children’s mental health.
When governments, Left and Right, lose sight of the goal of long-term happiness, particularly as they grapple with new technologies and the tough question of developing public policies to mitigate their potential harms, they revert to a faulty definition of liberty, one which puts pure individual freedom before human dignity. In Canada, losing the happiness lens has led to a 27-year-old with autism pursuing MAID, the funded legal supply of dangerous drugs to addicts in cities across the country, and an unwillingness to limit teenage access to social media and pornography that we know is causing them greater long-term unhappiness.
Finally, and more recently, government decision-makers and others have been taken with faddish academic theories that, when applied to real-life policymaking, lead them so far away from enabling long-term happiness that they can’t find their way back on a map. Whether it’s DEI-driven university research funding creating the conditions for rampant antisemitism on campus or foolhardy bail policy leading to the catch and release of repeat violent offenders, senior politicians and public servants in Canada and elsewhere have allowed themselves to be captured by trendy social justice initiatives which seem only to serve the interests of the elites who espouse their philosophical underpinnings.
And worse, it is increasingly clear these are actually producing harm, especially for working-class people who feel the full effects of their consequences. In other words, these policies aren’t just neutral when it comes to happiness—they’re deleterious.
It’s not easy to aim for happiness. Political leaders need to think of it as a lens and a measurement and work back from first principles, lest they be tempted to appoint a Happiness Czar, or something equally silly, aping the pursuit of happiness instead of creating the conditions for it. But just as the elusiveness of happiness ought not to deter individuals from pursuing it, its intangibility ought not to deter government from trying to create the conditions to enable it.
Maybe I’m biased. After all, setting happiness as the barometer for success kind of rigs the game for my preferred approach. Indeed, as I see it, working back from creating the conditions of happiness lends itself well to a traditionally conservative worldview. One which advances a culture of laws, rules, and norms that protect against harm and guard against vice, and which pursues economic policy that creates the conditions for people to find dignifying work, upward mobility, home ownership, and the pride in providing those same things for their families.
But that doesn’t mean conservatives are immune to looking to the same false gauges that the Liberals have chosen. It’s not at all hard to imagine a future Conservative government fixating on one blunt economic measure, defaulting to simplistic libertarianism, or being taken with impractical ideological theories. To avoid this, I think we ought to take a page from leaders past and aim for a kind of ordered liberty if we want to create the conditions for happier citizens.
But of course, there may be a better way. And if there is, I would certainly encourage my political opponents to try it. After all, if we want to compare notes, we can always check in on a future World Happiness Report.
