Criticism
The most fundamental criticism of happiness economics lies in its dependence on the concept of cardinal utility—that is, that personal preferences are measurable and comparable in an objective fashion by an outside observer. Cardinal utility is, however, a discredited and largely discarded concept in economics.
Some have suggested that establishing happiness as a metric is only meant to serve political goals. Recently there has been concern that happiness research could be used to advance authoritarian aims. As a result, some participants at a happiness conference in Rome have suggested that happiness research should not be used as a matter of public policy but rather used to inform individuals.
In addition, survey findings can lead to subjective interpretations. For example, a happiness study conducted in Russia during the 1990s indicated that as unemployment grew, the well-being of both those employed and unemployed rose. The interpretation of this could be that it resulted from diminished expectations and respondents who were less critical of their own situation when many around them were unemployed, or it could be interpreted as being the result of everyone benefitting from the unpaid work that the unemployed were able to do for their families and communities with their increased time resource.
Read more about this topic: Happiness Economics
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)