Economics of happiness

For almost as long as I can remember, economics has been under fire both from within and outside. From within, as attempts were made by economists to record the peculiarities of human behaviour and document the various decision-making models that run in our heads, this subject eventually came to be known as behavioural economics. From outside, the attacks came from the users of economic models. Like angry users of defective cars, they castigated the economics establishment for presenting the wrong service to meet a specific need or for meeting the wrong need with the service that they have. So on the one hand, many economic models were flawed in their construction, and on the other hand, the economics objective of trying to 'maximise utility' had the wrong definition of utility. Utility started out as a measurable concept, an odd simplification of the concept of understanding and measuring human motivation. This was because of the rather odd obsession that economics had with being a 'higher' science. Hence, it was mathematical in its language. It looks comical today that anything that concerns itself with human behaviour would at all try to be mathematical, precise or even logical in construction, but the historical process of evolution takes us through strange pathways. One of the very interesting offshoots of this very interesting evolutionary pathway is the replacement of the concept of utility with a new definition of happiness. It is not mentioned much in the mainstream media because it is just an incipient trend, but if the objective changes, then the ramification of that will eventually be to change the entire body of underlying k

This article was originally published on August 09, 2017.