“Public policies can improve collective happiness, provided we know how to measure it with the right tools” | EUROtoday

Lhe educational world has misplaced one in every of its biggest iconoclasts. Richard Easterlin, founding father of the economics of happiness, died on December 16, 2024, on the age of 98, abandoning an mental legacy that continues to shake up our certainties about financial progress.

His central discovery, which grew to become the “Easterlin paradox”, challenges a longtime perception: surprisingly, rising the common revenue of a rustic doesn’t improve the happiness of its inhabitants in the long run. A revelation all of the extra disturbing as it’s primarily based on the research of the affluent post-war years, a interval of unparalleled prosperity within the United States and Japan.

By asking residents about their stage of satisfaction utilizing the Cantril scale (“On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 represents the worst possible life for you and 10 represents the best possible life for you, where are you currently? »), Easterlin makes a surprising observation: the spectacular economic growth of this era did not increase the happiness index. He thus responds in the negative to the questions ironically posed by the titles of his articles. : “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? » (“Does economic growth improve the lot of man?”), in 1974, or “Will Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All?” » (“Will increasing everyone’s income increase everyone’s happiness?”), in 1995.

Social comparability and adaptation

This is all of the extra intriguing because the wealthy declare themselves happier than the poor at any given second. How then can we clarify that this correlation disappears over time? Richard Easterlin identifies two mechanisms: social comparability and adaptation. It is above all this phenomenon of adaptation which destroys the good thing about progress. Like a treadmill, it pushes our happiness backwards whereas our materials consolation advances: every thing we acquire rapidly turns into acquired, pushing us to need ever extra.

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