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David Cameron and his advisers want to make us feel better, but they don’t know how One of the best gauges of whether a statement actually means anything is to stick a not in its middle. If the opposite sounds ridiculous, then the chances are the original proposition is mush. Who would seriously argue that banks shouldn’t be well-regulated, that the starvation of African babies is perfectly OK, thanks, or that civil liberties aren’t worth a fig? Run the mush test over the launch of the campaign group Action for Happiness. “I’m up for more happiness!” was one slogan – as if anyone but a Dickensian villain, hobbling around Victorian London and sending ragged-trousered tots scattering in fear before him, would ever admit otherwise. The same combination of vagueness and grandiosity runs through the website . “Action for Happiness is a movement for positive social change” – other movements presumably go round calling for things to get worse. “We’re bringing together people from all walks of life who want to play a part in creating a happier society for everyone” – rather than recruiting from the narrowest demographic imaginable, in order to proselytise for misery. Big, baggy talk like this must be partly why the British debate on happiness has failed to get past the opening shots. Here is a big idea – that government ministers should make policy decisions with an eye to making us happier rather than ever-richer – that deserves a proper airing. What it has got instead is the policy equivalent of a Rorschach test, in which commentators and wonks talk about what makes them happy, which isn’t the same thing at all. Even when David Cameron says: “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing”, the statement gets treated as just another respray of the true blues rather than a yardstick against which to judge his policies. But one of the key findings of researchers is that unemployment is a surefire way of making people utterly miserable – which means that whatever else is wrong with the prime minister’s austerity economics, it also contradicts his goal of making voters happier. Seeking specifics, I went to the Action for Happiness launch. In a grand former church packed out with believers and activists, it felt like an inaugural love-in. One of the founders, LSE economist Richard Layard, described “the science of happiness”. Helping a stranger lights up the same part of your brain as eating a bar of chocolate, apparently – although the significance of that finding went unexplained, as did what would happen if you assisted a stranger in eating their Green & Black’s. A former Buddhist monk called Andy led the hall in meditation, battling the plaintive rings of an abandoned Nokia. “Help out a friend in need,” we were advised. “Make sure you get enough sleep.” Thanks, Mum. This is happiness in its banal and individualistic form: a kind of smile-high club. It also mis-sells the research it’s meant to be promoting – by both overstating its status as a science and understating its potential to affect the way governments set policy. At the moment, happiness is as much a science as that bit in the L’Oréal ads when a bunch of equations float across the screen. Action for Happiness claims : “If we could increase our levels of happiness to those in Denmark, Britain would have 2.5 million fewer people suffering from unhappiness.” Yet the best researchers in the field have no idea how we might do that. Between them, David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald practically invented happiness economics . They organised the world’s first ever economics of happiness conference at the LSE in 1993 (“We stuck up posters, we put out 100 chairs,” remembers Oswald. “About eight people turned up.”). In a paper produced this February for the Academy of Management Perspectives the two lay out the state of research. The most telling part comes when they discuss the mental wellbeing of the Danes and the Dutch – then remark: “We do not yet know why these countries are so perplexingly happy.” What they do know, however, is that the field could end up posing a major challenge to free-market orthodoxy. For a start, one thing that happiness research shows is that people aren’t as good at choosing for themselves as they like to think – a BMW, for instance, really doesn’t give us so much more pleasure than a Micra. And paying attention to happiness gives a whole different slant to economic policy-making than simply focusing on increasing income. Take air pollution, which is often seen as the necessary price paid for economic growth; research shows that dirty air makes people consistently and notably more upset. Where civil servants and politicians were once able to shrug off complaints about pollution as just so much whining nimbyism, in the future they might have costings that back up the anti-pollution campaigners. A few years ago, Layard wrote Happiness, the best starter book on the subject, and he knows the field might end up being revolutionary. When I asked him last week what Hayek, father of free-market thinking and another former LSE professor would make of his campaign, he replied: “God knows. The road to serfdom, no doubt” – a reference to the Austrian’s tract against big government. But in order to make their policies more attractive to Whitehall and Westminster, Layard and his colleagues have taken all the politics out and left nice-sounding aspirations about turning “the rising tide of excessive individualism”. You wouldn’t want to argue with it, let alone disagree. The problem is, you probably wouldn’t bother to engage, either. Economics Global economy Psychology David Cameron Aditya Chakrabortty guardian.co.uk