Happiness: what's the use?

Abstract

There is a growing literature suggesting that economic analysis is not after all a dismal science, and that the discipline is capable of reinventing itself as an investigation of the nature and causes of human happiness. Reviewing two recent contributions to this genre, it is suggested that economists do have difficulties substituting ‘happiness’ for ‘utility’ as the touchstone for resource allocation, that the importance of ‘happiness’ in the evaluation of economic policy was well known in the eighteenth century but largely eradicated from the classical economics of the nineteenth and that the recent (re)discovery of ‘happiness’ by mainstream economics remains partial and unconvincing.