Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

194 R. Smith
of the final sentence of his reflections, with its telling double negative, directs us to
the thought that people’s use of the word ‘happy’ to describe or think of themselves
and their hopes may be a large part of their problem and not, as Layard supposes,
something in which we are required to follow them.
13.3 Homogenising Well-Being
To sum up, Layard’s project is committed to the measurement of happiness. The
online version of his article helpfully contains a hyperlink: ‘there has been a huge
increase in our ability to measure happiness and in our knowledge of its causes’.
The link is to a BBC webpage with the title ‘The science of happiness’. This tells
us, ‘scientists say they can actually measure happiness ...Neuroscientists are measuring
pleasure. They suggest that happiness is more than a vague concept or mood;
it is real. ...Social scientists measure happiness simply by asking people how happy
they are’. Yet, this scientific project, that will end in metrics and statistics, requires,
as we have seen, a good deal of specious argument and the support of rhetorical
trickery to make its opening moves. But it is, in a sense, worse than this. The problem
with assuming that we can measure happiness and unhappiness on a single scale
is that by thinking of all the complex forms of human delight as happiness, and all
forms of misery, loss of meaning, alienation, failure to flourish, absence of sense of
self-worth (etc.) as unhappiness, we risk missing the connections between individual
experience and the economic and social conditions that may lie behind it. The
hedonic dimension becomes all; the causes of unhappiness are seen as lying in the
way a person views the world rather than in the world itself, that is the world of
wealth distribution, economic and social class, etc. It is thus unsurprising to find
that Layard proposes that the solution to the crisis of unhappiness lies in a major
expansion of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), described – naturally – as an
‘evidence-based approach’ (Layard, 2005).
Layard’s response to the ‘crisis of unhappiness’ can be set out schematically as
follows. It shows
(i) a tendency to view the problem as about just one quality, happiness, ignoring
the complexities of human well-being and flourishing;
(ii) a tendency to look for a single cause for the general malaise, even when the
diversity of the kinds of unhappiness is acknowledged;
(iii) a faith that more and better metrics and statistics is what is required.
These points are interconnected. Points (i) and (ii) are similar, though clearly not
the same: Point (i) asserts that you have a problem with happiness, rather than, say,
with being underpaid and subjected to many forms of stress, while (ii) may accept
that happiness, like unhappy families, comes in many different forms, yet has at root
a single source or cause. The ambition to measure happiness and the lack of it will
be facilitated by the assumption that happiness can be measured on a single scale: