Can Policy Make Us Happier?

Around the world, governments have begun trying to measure wellbeing. Not only income. Not only the economy. Actual, felt, day-to-day quality of life. Some governments have created official wellbeing frameworks, national happiness surveys, wellbeing budgets, and ministerial roles focused on happiness or quality of life.

On the surface, this sounds like unambiguous progress. Finally, a government that cares how you feel.

Sit with it a moment longer, and it becomes stranger. A government. Measuring your happiness. Setting targets for it.

Having spent a career inside the machinery of policy, I find the idea more unsettling than comforting — not because caring about people is wrong, but because I think the project is aimed at the wrong target. And aiming a government at the wrong target is how you build the wrong world.

So the question worth asking is not the one in the title. It is the one underneath it: what happens to a whole society, depending on what it decides happiness even is?

The Blind Spot in the Number We Already Use

The happiness movement began from a genuinely sound instinct.

For most of modern history we have judged nations by one number above all others: GDP. It is an important measure of economic activity, but it was not designed to capture every dimension of welfare, distribution, health, belonging, environmental quality, or social connection. A country can grow richer every year while its people become lonelier, sicker, and more anxious. The number rises; the lives do not improve.

What is less widely known is that Simon Kuznets, one of the principal architects of modern United States national-income accounting, warned against treating national income as a direct measure of national welfare. In his 1934 report to the United States Congress, he wrote that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income."

The warning was there from the beginning. We used the number that way regardless.

The Countries That Tried Something Else

So some governments attempted an alternative.

Bhutan developed Gross National Happiness as a multidimensional approach to national progress. Its index is commonly organized across nine domains and thirty-three indicators covering areas such as psychological wellbeing, health, education, time use, culture, governance, community vitality, ecology, and living standards. Bhutan's 2008 Constitution directs the state to promote conditions that support the pursuit of Gross National Happiness.

In 2019, New Zealand delivered what its Treasury described as the country's first Wellbeing Budget. The budget used broader priorities covering mental health, child wellbeing, Māori and Pacific aspirations, productivity, and environmental transition. Funding proposals were required to include wellbeing analysis rather than relying only on conventional economic indicators. Scotland and Wales built frameworks of their own. For a moment, it appeared the world was turning a corner.

The political durability of the branding proved limited. After a change of government, later budgets shifted priorities and no longer used the Wellbeing Budget label. That did not mean every wellbeing tool disappeared: New Zealand's Treasury continued to maintain its Living Standards Framework, wellbeing dashboard, and broader work on measuring living standards.

The honest position, then, is this: the movement to measure wellbeing is real, it is serious, and in several places the political framing has shifted — while the underlying measurement work continues.

A Metric Is a Steering Wheel

Why does any of this matter so much? Because of one thing that is obvious from inside government and nearly invisible from outside it.

A metric is not a description. A metric is a steering wheel.

From outside a system, measurements appear to describe reality — here is the unemployment rate, here is the test score, neutral as a thermometer. From inside, the opposite is true. Whatever you decide to measure becomes the thing everyone is judged against. And the moment people are judged against a number, they begin to chase it. Budgets bend toward it. Programmes are designed around it. Careers rise and fall on it. The metric ceases to describe the world and begins to bend it.

When test scores dominate accountability systems, schools can face pressure to narrow instruction toward what is tested. When arrest counts become a dominant performance target, enforcement priorities can become distorted. This is not cynicism; it is simply what happens when a number becomes a target.

So when a government announces it will measure happiness, that is not a soft, feel-good gesture. It is among the most consequential decisions a state can make — because that number will become a steering wheel, silently redirecting enormous sums and countless decisions toward producing more of whatever it counts as happiness.

Which means everything depends on what, exactly, we are counting.

"A metric is not a description. A metric is a steering wheel."

What Fifty Years of Research Found

Here the story becomes genuinely fascinating, because the science of happiness has been arguing with itself for half a century.

In 1974, economist Richard Easterlin identified a pattern that became known as the Easterlin paradox: although people with higher incomes within a society often report greater wellbeing, long-term economic growth does not always produce corresponding increases in average reported happiness. The interpretation and universality of this pattern have remained contested.

In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton analyzed survey responses from the United States and reported that emotional wellbeing rose with household income up to approximately $75,000 in 2008 dollars, after which the relationship flattened in their data. Their measure of life evaluation, however, continued to rise with income.

Then in 2021, Matthew Killingsworth analyzed repeated real-time wellbeing reports from employed adults in the United States and found that both experienced wellbeing and life evaluation continued to rise with income across the range observed in the study, without the earlier $75,000 plateau. Two substantial findings, in apparent tension.

What happened next is rare in science. Rather than feud, Kahneman and Killingsworth undertook an adversarial collaboration — working together specifically to reconcile their earlier results. In 2023, Kahneman, Killingsworth, and Barbara Mellers used this adversarial collaboration and found that higher income was associated with higher emotional wellbeing for most participants. Among the least-happy portion of the sample, however, the relationship appeared to flatten above a certain income range.

The finding does not mean that income is irrelevant to people experiencing low wellbeing. It suggests more narrowly that additional income alone may have limited emotional benefits for some people once particular material thresholds have been reached.

And an individual happiness score is blindest exactly where the need is greatest.

The Lonely, Well-Served Individual

Now consider what happens when a government is pointed at that number.

Many wellbeing systems combine subjective surveys with objective measures, but policymakers must still decide whether their frameworks adequately capture relationships, social trust, inequality, participation, and community connection.

Optimize purely for individual satisfaction scores, and you will build a society extremely good at serving individuals — convenient, comfortable, personalized, frictionless. And you can accomplish all of it while the bonds between people quietly rot. You end up with a nation of well-served, comfortable, profoundly isolated people, each reasonably content, each alone. Everyone reports a solid seven out of ten, and something underneath it dies.

Because the one thing an individual satisfaction score can struggle to see is us: the relationships, the web, the question of whether we still belong to one another.

You can raise the number and lose the us.

"You can raise the number and lose the us."

Flourishing, Not Happiness

Perhaps, then, the problem is not the answer. Perhaps the problem is the question.

There is an older question, one African thought has been asking for a very long time. It does not ask whether the individual is happy. It asks: is the community well? Can people meet their obligations to one another? Is anyone being abandoned?

That is Ubuntu at the scale of a society. Ubuntu is used here as one relational philosophical lens rather than as a single definition shared identically across all African peoples or traditions. In this framing, wellbeing is not a private score carried inside you; it is relational. I am well when we are well. You cannot truly flourish while the people around you are falling apart, because you are made of those people.

Point a government at that, and the choices change. Imagine two governments with identical budgets. The first aims at individual happiness: it spends on convenience, on personal services, on smoothing each separate life. Everyone becomes slightly more comfortable, alone. The second aims at collective flourishing: the same money goes toward what binds people — shared public space, support for families and elders, the connective tissue of a place.

Same budget. Two entirely different societies. One produces comfortable, satisfied, lonely individuals. The other produces a people — connected, obligated to each other, and far more resilient when conditions worsen.

Income and public spending can support the conditions around belonging, but money alone cannot guarantee meaningful relationships or community connection. That is precisely why the second government's choice of what to build and protect matters so much.

Can Policy Make Us Happier?

So — can policy guarantee happiness? No. And this deserves saying plainly.

Policy cannot manufacture or guarantee an individual's inner emotional state. Happiness lives in your relationships, your meaning, your inner life, the people you love. A government that promises to deliver happiness into you is overreaching — and a state confident it can engineer your inner feelings is one to regard with some suspicion.

But that was always the wrong job. Here is the right one.

Policy can help create or damage the social, economic, environmental, and institutional conditions in which people attempt to live well. Where you are not isolated. Where no one is abandoned. Where the bonds that actually make people well are protected rather than quietly eroded in the name of convenience.

Stop asking policy to hand happiness to individuals. Start asking it to protect the conditions in which a community can flourish together.

One is a vending machine. The other is a garden. A government cannot hand you the fruit — but it can absolutely tend the soil. Or poison it.

What Is Actually Worth Measuring

Return to the image we began with: a government measuring your happiness, setting a target for how you feel.

The discomfort was warranted. We were asking the state to hand us something it cannot give and should not attempt — to make us happy, one isolated individual at a time.

But the question was never whether policy can make you happy.

It is whether it lets us flourish.

A government cannot give you a good life. But it can decide whether you have to live it alone. That — not the happiness number — is the thing worth measuring.

"A government cannot give you a good life. But it can decide whether you have to live it alone."

This essay is part of Tamu Academy, an African-rooted learning platform exploring the mind, power, culture, public policy, economics, institutions, and the wider world. Watch the related episode through the Tamu Academy Videos page.