The Political Economy of Human Happiness

摘要

As is well known, a fundamental, long-running, and often sharp controversy that divides people, including politicians, policymakers and scholars, concerns the appropriate role of the state in democratic market societies. Those described as being on the Right favor allowing individuals to have the freedom to make choices in free markets and limiting the state to primarily maintaining individual liberties. Those on the Left favor a more activist state that intervenes in markets to promote the public interest. In the United States this divide currently plays out in the tussle between the Republican Party on the Right (the Tea Party being an extreme faction), and the Democratic Party on the Left, and is reflected in countless battles on fiscal, health care, social welfare, and labor market policies. This debate also rages on in Western Europe and in most other parts of the world, although the trenches dividing the opposed groups do not fall in the same place everywhere and go well beyond what are usually called democratic and market societies.