Happiness vs utility
Defining utility as whatever it is that humans act to maximise is daft. You can't say what it is even after some careful thought, what are the chances that everyone else is defining it sensibly and acting to maximise it? Nil. And that's easy to prove because there are plenty of psycological experiments which show that people make contradictory and incoherent choices. "Thinking Fast and Slow" has loads of examples of this.
It seems far more reasonable to me that utility and happiness are the same thing and that people are just bad at maximising them. They move to Burnley for more money because they think that will make them happier. When the extra happiness doesn't materialise they either fail to notice, assume it is due to something else, or stay out of inertia and embarassement at having made a wrong decision.
Perhaps a focus on happiness economics at a national level will encourage people to take a more rigorous look at what is making them happy or unhappy and act to correct it. Even if it doesn't, it must be a sensible goal.
Of course the problem is that it's like communism, a lovely idea but really hard to implement without some difficult side effects (in this case the firebombing of Burnley).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
