Can happiness be measured? Empirical findings from latin American countries

The intention of this paper is to examine and stimulate the discussion about alternatives and sensible ways of measuring human development and show some data on this. Moreover, the aim is to explore more deeply exactly what society values, reevaluate our notion of progress and transform the way we plan, deliver and evaluate public policies that aim to improve people’s life. Therefore, we start with the philosophical basis of Classical Utilitarianism, which discusses the idea that the highest function the government holds is to increase the happiness of the population. We explore the objective dimensions of happiness, a phenomenon which can possibly be measured in our concept, thanks to the latest attempts to discover what creates happiness and how to cultivate it, using the optics of new psychology, economics, neuroscience, sociology and philosophy. Faced with the possibility of aligning better public practices with happiness, we evaluate this change of priority by reflecting them on new indicators. Finally, we created the Index of Well-being (IWB) based on the discussions of Layard (2003), the Personal Security Index and the National Accounts of Well-being (NAW), modeled by the latter. It was divided into two sub-indices and their respective dimensions: the Index of Personal Well-being (IPWB - "life satisfaction", "financial situation", "health", "personal freedom", "personal values") and the Index of Social Well-being (ISWB - "community", "family relationships and friends"). We also calculate a satellite indicator – Well-being at work – as NAW. The database is the World Values Survey from 2005 and 2006 for nine Latin American countries. In the end, we evaluated the results by age, gender, country, scale of incomes, their dispersion, as well as comparing the IPWB with the ISWB and the IWB with the GDP per capita. Singulars scores are also emphasized and questioned freely.