Trade-off entre Felicidade e Crescimento?

Assim pensa David Purdy: "So what does make us happy? At an individual level, according to the evidence, age, gender, looks, IQ and education make a negligible difference, other things being equal. The main factors, in descending order of importance, are family relationships, financial situation, participation in socially valued work, friendship, the quality of community life and personal health. Two further factors, the relative importance of which cannot yet be gauged, are personal freedom and one’s inner self and philosophy of life. Comparing one country with another, average happiness (along with the suicide rate) can largely be explained by the proportion of people who say that other people can be trusted, the proportion of people who belong to social organisations; the divorce rate; the unemployment rate; the quality of government; and religious belief.

The policy implications of the new science run directly counter to prevailing conventional wisdom. For example, instead of promoting the ‘work and spend’ culture, governments should be trying to curb the rat-race by taxing work-rich, time-poor lifestyles, just as we tax addictive and polluting expenditures on alcohol and tobacco. Similarly, whilst a child-friendly and non-gendered version of full employment should remain a top policy priority, the current vogue for flexible labour markets and geographical mobility should be resisted as being inimical to personal security, family relationships and community cohesion. The same goes for the cult of performance-related pay and the perpetual reorganisation of work, both of which undermine non-monetary work motivations and professional pride. More generally, the neo-liberal ideal in which all social interaction is based on voluntary exchange within a framework that permits ‘continuous re-optimisation’ and thereby precludes long-term commitment, should be condemned as a dystopian nightmare. Conversely, while some inequalities of reward are required as work incentives, there is now hard empirical support for the old progressive intuition that the poor gain more happiness from each additional dollar of income than the rich, providing a powerful argument for redistributing income in favour of the poor both within each state and across the world".