Governing.com:
Should governments measure people's happiness?
1 January 2018
This was about where things stood 30 years ago, when Richard Layard, a British economist now ennobled as Baron Layard of Highgate, began promoting a radical doctrine. Maybe, he posited, the time had come to take Bentham seriously again. Layard’s work stemmed from research that showed that rising incomes didn’t make people any happier. Follow this out, Layard said without embarrassment, and the road leads straight to Bentham. “I believe that Bentham’s idea was right,” Layard wrote in 2005, “and that we should fearlessly adopt it and apply it to our lives. The right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness in the world.”