The Happiness of Nations

The Point of Life

Perhaps the most fundamental question we all confront is - what is the point of life?

My belief is that the point of life is the pursuit of happiness. Let me qualify that though. What I define as happiness is the emotional state that people aspire to achieve, which will inevitably mean different things to different people. For some it is joy, for others purpose, or for others achievement. For some it may not even be an emotion as such, but more fundamentally a state of being entirely in and absorbed by the present.

This framing of happiness does, to be transparent, make my statement true by definition – I am essentially saying that the point of life is, for any individual, whatever they want the point of it to be. It is, nonetheless, worthwhile making this statement because of the question that logically follows: how do we pursue happiness?

There are, at the broadest level, two frameworks for answering that question. The first is as individuals. Happiness is deeply personal, and each of us is on a journey of trying to find what brings happiness in our own life. The second framework is the pursuit of happiness as a society. This lens recognises that human life is intensely interdependent with others, and that individual happiness can only be achieved within the limits of our circumstances, that is, the social and economic systems we necessarily live within.

There seems to be no end to the advice available on how to best pursue the individual journey toward happiness, though the quality of much of it is highly questionable. When I started pondering the second framework, I assumed that there would be an equal abundance of advice on how to optimise social and economic systems to support happiness. I was wrong.

It would be unfair to suggest that there is a complete void in this space. Many of the world’s greatest philosophers, political theorists, and economists have grappled with the question of how social and economic systems should be structured. There is a meaningful number of governments, think tanks and academics actively working on wellbeing policies and programmes.The trouble is that, as best I can tell, the world is comprehensively failing to get it right. What seems to me to be missing is a convincing, comprehensive, and contemporary theory of what is required to create a social and economic system that maximises the potential for individuals to find happiness.

This is what has led me to create this project, The Happiness of Nations.

My intent is to search for that missing theory, and this project will be my way of documenting that journey.

While that is the goal, I can’t promise that the journey has a satisfying end-point. The reasons why nations fail to create happy, flourishing societies seem vast, deeply intertwined, and often intractable. So, there may not be a neat answer, or perhaps I just won’t be able to find it.

What I can promise is to document my thoughts as I wade through the theory and evidence on the subject. Perhaps more importantly, my ambition is to generate new ideas for innovations that would support the systematic pursuit by society of greater happiness for all, since this is, after all, the point – the world, as I see it, is in desperate need of fresh ideas.

The Happiness of Nations

I have called this project The Happiness of Nations, a deliberate riff on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith’s great work asked what makes nations economically prosperous — what produces the wealth of nations and how should it be organised. It remains, two and a half centuries later, one of the foundational texts of economics and of modern political thought.

This Happiness of Nations project takes Smith’s question and extends it. Wealth matters — it is a means to important ends. But the more fundamental question, the one Smith’s framework largely assumed rather than examined, is: what are those ends? What is national success actually for? If the purpose of an economy is not ultimately to produce happy, flourishing people — individually and collectively — it is hard to say what it is for.

This is not a new observation. The field of happiness economics has been asking it for decades. The World Happiness Report has been measuring it annually since 2012. Philosophers from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill to Amartya Sen have grappled with it from different angles. But there is a disturbing gap between the intellectual conversation and what governments actually do.

This points to a material difference between this project and Adam Smith’s work - The Wealth of Nations was an attempt to describe and explain what Smith saw: the stunning success of economic growth. In stark contrast, this project emerges from the opposite space, the evidence of a failure to achieve growth in human wellbeing. What it shares in common with Smith’s work is an attempt to describe and explain. Where it differs is in trying to find innovations and solutions.

The Purpose of Government

An observation that I find striking is that governments almost universally lack explicit clarity of purpose.

In corporate strategy — an environment I have spent a significant part of my career in — the most fundamental discipline is clarity about what you are trying to achieve. Before you can design an organisation, allocate resources, make decisions, or evaluate success, you need to know what success looks like. This seems obvious. Yet when you turn to the institutions that govern our societies — institutions that consume between a third and a half of economic output in most developed countries, and that shape nearly every aspect of daily life — the equivalent question goes almost entirely unanswered. Governments pursue a patchwork of goals, respond to immediate pressures, and manage competing interests, but they rarely state, plainly, what they are ultimately trying to achieve.

My argument, and it seems to me to be almost self-evident, is that the answer should be this: the objective of government is to maximise societal wellbeing.

Three qualifications are needed to make this objective precise.

The first is sustainability — it is really the discounted present value of wellbeing that should be maximised, not just its current level. You cannot purchase present wellbeing by destroying the conditions for future wellbeing through environmental degradation, through structural debt, or through the slow erosion of institutions.

The second is a floor of minimum human rights. Crude utilitarianism — the maximisation of aggregate welfare — permits the sacrifice of minorities if the aggregate gain to the majority is large enough. This is its most damaging flaw, the one that has made it politically toxic despite its intellectual elegance. A human rights floor treats certain protections as non-negotiable: not to be traded off against aggregate benefits, not suspended in emergencies, not revised by majority vote.

The third qualification is physical security. There is no sustainable wellbeing without the physical safety to pursue it. This is not a separate objective but a precondition — and it has implications that reach well beyond domestic governance, into the international architecture of how countries protect each other from coercion and aggression.

Taking Happiness Seriously

What follows from taking this objective seriously?

First, you need to understand what happiness and wellbeing actually are — philosophically and empirically. This turns out to be a rich and contested area, with genuine intellectual depth and considerable uncertainty. The ways that wellbeing is currently measured have structural limitations that destabilise their validity and appeal. And it is unclear whether the variables that claim to predict happiness are really adequate as a roadmap for how to achieve it. These are not academic footnotes. If you are trying to maximise something, understanding what it is and how to measure it is foundational.

Second, you need an honest account of where the world is currently failing to deliver on this objective. The feeling that the world is going backwards is not mere pessimism. The rules-based international order, which was supposed to provide the framework for peace and cooperation, is unravelling — and not only because of the increasing, narrowly conceived, self-interest and transactionalism of major powers. Supply chains designed for efficiency in a stable world have proved to be mechanisms of vulnerability in an unstable one. Wealth inequality, both within and between countries, has proven to be intractable to the point that it has almost fallen off the political agenda. Democracy is in recession, with younger generations increasingly flirting with discredited extremist ideologies of the past. And climate change, which could have rallied societies to a common purpose, has instead created endless disagreement and tension both within and between countries.

Third, having been clear about the symptoms, you need a diagnosis, to understand why the machinery of government keeps failing. The failures do not appear to be random. There are assumptions embedded in our political systems — about what sovereignty means, about the virtues of continuity and stability, about how Government should be structured, about what cultural judgements we are permitted to make — that seem to consistently prevent the kind of creative, adaptive response that the challenges require. These assumptions are not openly debated; they are treated as settled and they should not be.

And fourth — having worked through the first three — you arrive at the question of what reform might look like. This project is inherently one of optimism - I strongly believe in the capacity of society to continue to evolve and grow in sophistication. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but if nothing else I hope to be able to surface some ideas that hopefully make a positive contribution to that evolution.

Welcome

Finally, a note on what this project is and isn’t.

This series is not current affairs commentary. I am not going to tell you what yesterday’s news means, or what a government should have done differently this week. Current events will appear — they are the context in which this project lives, and they sometimes illustrate the arguments with striking clarity — but they are not the focus. The pursuit of understanding is the focus.

It is also not a sequential argument that must be read from beginning to end. The essays and episodes are structured as a tree, arranged in clusters, not as a series. Each one is intended to stand alone and make sense independently. You can begin wherever your interest takes you: with the question of what happiness is, with the state of the world order, or with ideas for institutional reform. The pieces connect to each other, are layered to offer progressively increasing levels of depth on a topic, and the connections are signposted, but there is no required path through the material.

The essays will also continue to evolve. As I said, this project is a journey. The essays are written on the basis of the best understanding and insight I can bring at the time. As new perspectives and ideas emerge, they will be incorporated into the narrative.

What this project is, at its core, is an attempt to apply careful but creative thinking to questions that are increasingly urgent in a form accessible to anyone who cares about them. Not just academics or policy professionals, but the educated reader who has noticed that the world seems harder to understand, and harder to believe in.

That last phrase is, I think, the deepest part of the problem. Not the specific crises — those, however severe, are manageable with sufficient institutional competence and collective will. The deeper problem is the erosion of belief that the institutions exist to deliver that competence and will. Once people stop believing the system can work, it cannot work. And what I see in the happiness data, and in the cultural mood that the data reflects, is that belief eroding, most precisely among the generation that will inherit the task of building whatever comes next.

That is what I am trying to address. Not by reassuring anyone that everything is fine — it isn’t — but by arguing that the situation is comprehensible, the causes are identifiable, and there must be a better system available than the one we currently have, and the ones we have previously discarded.

Welcome to my Happiness of Nations project.