Happiness as an Evaluative Space for Development?

As we all know, "happiness" has been proposed by some of the Thai elites and academics to be our alternative goal of development. Gross National Happiness (GNH) has attracted wide range of interests, it has became a very fashionable term. Today I have Amartya Sen's reflection on this issue for you to read.

First of all, let me tell you that happiness is not a new concept in economics. It's actually always there, inherented in the term "utility", i.e. the mental satisfaction derived from something. So when you heard about happiness as an indicator of well-being, please don't say it's a new thing.

Ironically, as some country like Bhutan want to use Gross National Happiness as their goal of development, it also means that they want to use Gross National Utility as their development objective. And as economic theory normally argues that level of utility a person achieves depends on the amount of consumption (as constrainted by income) he or she gets, it doesn't really make a big different between using GNH or GDP. It's just the same thing.

Alright, let's now arrive at Sen's comment on the use of happiness (or utility) as an evalative space for development.

Sen has stated this in his book "Inequality Rexamined" (Page 6-7):

"This way of seeing individual advantage is particularly limiting in the presence of entrenced inequality. In situation of persisitent adversity or deprivation, the victims do not go on grieving and grumbing all the time, and may even lack the motivation to desire a radical change of circumstances. Indeed, in terms of a strategy for living, it may make a lot of sense to come to terms with an ineradicable adversity, to try to appreciate small breaks, and to resist pinning for the impossible or the improbable."

"Such a person, even though thoroughly deprived and confined to a very reduced life, may not appear to be quite so badly off in terms of the mental metric of desire and its fulfillment, and in terms of the pleasure-pain calculus. The extent a person's deprivation may be substantially muffled in the utility (happiness) matric, despite the fact that he or she may lack the opportunity even to be adequately nourished, decently clothed, minimally educated, or probably shletered."

Alright, in his book, Sen went from this to proposed "capability approach" as an evaluative space for development.

For those that have been attracted to the idea of GNH, I hope this quote might reflects on something. GNH, first of all, is a very bad evaluative space for inequality (as Sen argue above). Second, it's bad in the same way as using income or commodities (GDP) to evaluate development (since income or comodities reflect utility, which is the term for happiness).

Well, in the end, some other theory (a.k.a. sufficiency economy) that also relied on the argument of "development as happiness" will have to be reconsidered. Especially, since it try, not only to put happiness as an evaluative space (which, as explained, goes against idea of equality or justice), but also proposed that people have to adjust their calculus of happiness, to reach the point where they can be happy easily. It's more than "not caring on inequality", proposing instead the "rigid form of inequality".

Any development practitioners and academics in Thailand, please come out from this fantasy and face the truth. Don't you agree that inequality is a big problem for Thailand?