Staatliche Glücksförderung? Karl Popper, Richard Layard und das Rauchen / Should public policy pursue happiness? Karl Popper, Richard Layard and smoking

Bünger Björn and Prinz Aloys

ORDO. Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2010, vol. 61, issue 1, 169-190

Abstract: Even some economists supported recently the suggestion that happiness should become a major goal of public policy. The reason is that empirical research on happiness revealed several substantial flaws in people’s private pursuit of happiness. To shed some light on the question whether public policy should enhance citizen’s happiness, the opposing positions of Karl Popper and Richard Layard are presented first. After this, governmental paternalistic interventions to support or to suppress individual preferences are analyzed more thoroughly by considering the theory of internalities. This theory explains why individuals fail to pursuit happiness. As a case in point, smoking is examined as a potential source of illness and unhappiness. Supposing that smoking is harmful, it is analyzed whether public interventions to suppress smoking can be justified according to Karl Popper and the internalities theory.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ordo-2010-0112 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:ordojb:v:61:y:2010:i:1:p:169-190:n:12

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ordo/html

DOI: 10.1515/ordo-2010-0112

Access Statistics for this article

ORDO. Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft is currently edited by Christian Müller

More articles in ORDO. Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().