Open Access

Thirty years ago, the Fourth King of Bhutan famously proclaimed that ―Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product, thereby setting Bhutan on a holistic development path. Following this historic declaration, Bhutan developed a Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index and screening tool to evaluate all new policies, proclaiming that: ―Gross National Happiness measures the quality of a country in more holistic way [than GNP] and believes that the beneficial development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. In July 2011, 68 nations joined Bhutan in co-sponsoring its UN General Assembly resolution on ―Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development.

Despite decades of empirical happiness research, there is still little evidence for the positive effect of economic growth on life satisfaction. This poses a major challenge to welfare economic theory and to normative conceptions of socio-economic development. This book endeavours to explain these findings and to make sense of their ethical implications. While most of the existing literature on empirical happiness research is ultimately interested in understanding how to improve human lives and societal development, the ethical backdrop against which these findings are evaluated is rarely made explicit. In contrast to this, Professor Hirata focuses on the role happiness should play in an ethically founded conception of good development. Taking a development ethics perspective, this book proposes a nuanced conception of happiness that includes both its affective and its normative dimensions and embeds this in a comprehensive conception of good development. The argument is that happiness should not be regarded as the only thing that determines a good life and that good development cannot sensibly be thought of as a matter of maximizing happiness. Happiness should rather be seen as an important indicator for the presence or absence of those concerns that really matter to people: the reasons that give rise to happiness. This book should be of interest to students and researchers of economics, psychology and development studies.

Die moderne Glücksforschung ist über die vergangenen Jahre überaus produktiv gewesen und hat zweifellos einige wertvolle Erkenntnisse zutage gefördert. Dieser Produktivität steht jedoch eine gewisse Orientierungslosigkeit und Heterogenität gegenüber - als Beobachter weiß man gelegentlich nicht so recht, worin denn das übergeordnete Ziel der betriebenen Forschung und die Bedeutung der jeweiligen Forschungsergebnisse bestehen. Ausgehend von einer Untersuchung der Voraussetzungen und Methoden der modernen Glücksforschung werden einige grundlegende Fragen und die mögliche Bedeutung der Glücksforschung für die Ökonomik kritisch erörtert.