National and international efforts

But while there's been tremendous growth in our understanding of happiness, there's still a lot of work to do in order to facilitate greater levels of individual and collective happiness: the latter has remained constant over the past half-century. The amount that has been learnt in the past few decades has turned the topic on its head, but we have still not reached a consensus on the subjects and more importantly  on how we can use this knowledge for the greatest good. We need to redouble our efforts to explore how our national and international institutions can facilitate happiness.

However, as Barry Schwartz noted, these relationships are complex and there are a number of possible contradictions and alignments that need further study. How does the goal of increased happiness interact with desires for equality, economic growth and environmental sustainability? Is there an 'optimum point' where we are able to meet the fundamental needs of all, without moving through to unsustainable material consumption that brings its own set of problems? Happiness is becoming an issue at an international level, particularly in light of its relationship with sustainability; a high level UN level meeting took place in April 2012 on 'Happiness & Wellbeing: Defining an new economic paradigm' the outcome of which was fed into the Rio+20 summit of international leaders. The relationship between absolute and relative happiness and the limitations of measuring subjective well-being are being tackled by some governments already, but will be an ongoing task.

As reflected in this call for a new economic paradigm, the interest in happiness is closely bound to our other national and international goals. In light of our ongoing global economic difficulties there seem to be two opposing schools of thought. For some it has sparked a desire for greater meaning, a different way of doing things, as existing systems and processes fail us. For others the desire to focus on tackling unemployment, increasing GDP and reducing government deficits pushes happiness further down the agenda. The success of one side or the other will be tied up with whether we return to normal, or whether a 'new normal' emerges.