Abstract
In the quotation from David Hume in Chapter 3 of this book, when the man in his example is asked why he wants to earn more money he replies that it is a means by which he can procure more pleasure. In other words it had purely instrumental value to him. And this is no doubt the case for everybody except for a few fetishists who may worship money for its own sake. For many decades now it has been generally assumed that the intrinsic value to which money – or income or GDP – contributes is some wider concept such as ‘happiness’ or ‘well-being’. The implication of this is that ‘the benefits of a new policy should now be measured in terms of the impact of the change upon the happiness of the population.
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- 1.
These include the annual [since 2012] World Happiness Reports, edited by Helliwell, J.F., Layard, R., and Saches, J., for the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, New York; the OECD Guidelines.… O’Donnell et al. 2014.
- 2.
See Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004, and World Happiness Report, Special Report, 2016:18, Table 3.
- 3.
See Kenny, A. and Kenny, C., 2006, for an overview of ancient and modern concepts of happiness.
- 4.
Bentham, 1789:ch. I, para. 3.
- 5.
Bentham, ibid : ch. V, paras: 3 and 4.
- 6.
World Happiness Report, 2012:18.
- 7.
Cantril, 1985.
- 8.
Oswald, 2014.
- 9.
Proto and Oswald, forthcoming in the Economic Journal.
- 10.
Easterlin, 1974.
- 11.
Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004.
- 12.
- 13.
Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008.
- 14.
Kahneman and Deaton, 2010:15.
- 15.
Clark and Oswald, 1996:359–381.
- 16.
Frey and Stutzer, 2002:84.
- 17.
Kahneman and Deaton, op.cit.
- 18.
- 19.
In any case, it has even been argued that insofar as people have targets in terms of their post-tax incomes, an increase in tax rates makes them work more rather than less.
- 20.
Buiter, 2007.
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Beckerman, W. (2017). Well-Being and Happiness. In: Economics as Applied Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50319-6_12
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