Technocratic tendencies in happiness economics

Happiness science burst into visibility about three decades ago as a fresh humanistic alternative to traditional psychology focused on disfunction and traditional economics based on income indicators. No longer the new kid on the block, today this field has fairly established methods, measures, and an array of stylized facts. Researchers spend less time justifying themselves to skeptics and more time developing useful tools for other social sciences and for practical endeavours such as policy evaluation, human resource management, and self-help. However, in search of such influence some projects in happiness economics have turned technocratic in ways that runs counter to the initial humanistic impulse. They favour simplest measures of well-being, adopt exclusively quantitative methods, ignore contextual variation, and mistake moral questions for technical ones. The technocratic turn is to some extent inevitable, because the prevalent narrow conception of evidence-based policy force happiness scientists to fit their research to these demands. Nevertheless these demands and the technocratic turn can and should be resisted. If happiness economics is to retain its humanistic aspirations, it should be more pluralistic and participatory.