In September 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations adopted the most ambitious collective agreement in the history of international development. The Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen targets to be achieved by 2030 — committed the world’s governments to ending extreme poverty, eliminating hunger, ensuring universal access to quality education, achieving gender equality, providing clean water and sanitation, and addressing climate change. The document that encoded these commitments runs to 35 pages. It contains 169 specific targets and 231 distinct indicators. It is, by any measure, a remarkable monument to what human beings are capable of when they decide, collectively, that a problem is important enough to solve.
There is no goal for happiness.
There is no target for the subjective wellbeing of the world’s population. There is no indicator tracking whether people experience their lives as meaningful, whether they feel genuine positive emotion on most days, whether they have the relationships and the sense of purpose that the science of happiness shows are the primary determinants of a flourishing human life. The SDGs track everything from maternal mortality to biodiversity loss to sustainable consumption patterns — but they do not track whether the people whose lives they are improving actually feel that their lives are good.
This is a strange omission, when you stop to look at it directly. The entire logic of development — the reason we care about reducing poverty and hunger and disease — is that these things make human lives worse. They produce suffering. They prevent flourishing. The implicit premise of every development goal ever written is that human wellbeing matters and that the world should be organised to protect and promote it. And yet the thing that all these goals are ultimately in service of — the actual, felt experience of living a good life — has never once been made the explicit object of a global commitment, a research programme of comparable scale, or a policy agenda of comparable ambition.
We have spent decades trying to create the conditions for happiness without ever asking, with any rigour, what happiness actually is, what produces it, and what would be required to address its absence at scale. It is as if we had built an elaborate water-delivery infrastructure for a city without ever measuring whether the residents were thirsty.
Before asking why we have not tried to solve unhappiness, it is worth establishing what the scale of unhappiness actually is — because the data, when examined directly, suggests a problem of dimensions that rival the ones we have decided to treat as emergencies.
The World Happiness Report, published annually since 2012 by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, draws on Gallup’s World Poll to measure life satisfaction across more than 150 countries. The instrument it uses — the Cantril ladder, which asks respondents to imagine a scale from the worst possible life to the best and to indicate where they currently stand — is not a perfect measure of human wellbeing. But it is a consistent, internationally comparable one. And the picture it paints is not comfortable.
In the 2024 World Happiness Report, the global average life evaluation sits at approximately 5.5 on the Cantril ladder’s 0-to-10 scale — a finding that, if translated into the language of other development metrics, would constitute a global emergency. Approximately 20 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries with average life evaluations below 4.5 — a level that the report’s researchers associate with a quality of subjective experience roughly equivalent to what individuals in wealthier countries report during periods of serious psychological difficulty. These are not people in acute crisis. They are people for whom the ordinary texture of daily life is persistently, chronically inadequate by their own evaluation.
The prevalence of clinical mental illness adds a further dimension. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than one billion people — approximately one in eight of the global population — currently live with a mental disorder. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Anxiety disorders affect an estimated 301 million people. Suicide claims more than 700,000 lives each year — more than malaria, more than HIV/AIDS in many populations — and is among the leading causes of death in young people between the ages of 15 and 29 globally. By any epidemiological standard, this is a pandemic. It has been a pandemic, quietly, for decades.
Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, who has spent much of his career arguing for the systematic inclusion of wellbeing in public policy, has calculated that if unhappiness were measured and addressed with the same seriousness that physical illness is, it would dwarf most of the other priorities on the global health agenda. Mental illness, he argues, accounts for more suffering — measured by years lived with disability — than all physical illnesses combined. The gap between the burden of unhappiness and the resources devoted to addressing it is not a policy nuance. It is a staggering mismatch that the research literature has been documenting, with increasing frustration, for years.
The absence of happiness from the global development agenda is not accidental. It reflects a set of deep historical, philosophical, and practical assumptions that have shaped the way governments, institutions, and international organisations think about their responsibilities — assumptions that are worth naming precisely because they are so rarely made explicit.
The first is the assumption that material conditions are the proper object of collective action while subjective wellbeing is a private matter. This division has deep roots in the Enlightenment separation of the public sphere — where reason, law, and economic organisation operate — from the private sphere — where emotions, relationships, meaning, and inner life reside. What governments do is arrange the external conditions of collective life: the economy, the infrastructure, the legal framework, the distribution of resources. What individuals do is live their lives within those conditions. The idea that the inner quality of those lives — whether people are genuinely happy, whether they find meaning, whether they feel connected and purposeful — is also a proper object of collective concern and collective action has been treated, for most of the modern era, as either philosophically confused or politically dangerous.
The second assumption is that happiness cannot be measured and therefore cannot be managed. This assumption is empirically false — the research on subjective wellbeing measurement has produced a sophisticated, reliable, internationally validated set of instruments over the past four decades, and the World Happiness Report’s annual publications represent only the most prominent of a vast literature on how to measure what people actually experience — but it has been surprisingly durable. It reflects a deeper conviction that the hard, quantifiable metrics of economic and physical development are the only legitimate basis for policy, and that the soft, self-reported metrics of subjective experience cannot bear the weight of institutional commitment.
The third assumption — perhaps the most consequential — is that economic growth will eventually solve the problem of unhappiness by solving the problems of poverty, disease, and material insecurity that cause it. This assumption has been directly and repeatedly tested by the happiness research literature, and it has not survived the encounter. Richard Easterlin at the University of Southern California documented the paradox that now bears his name: within countries, richer people are on average happier than poorer people; but across countries and across time, increases in national income do not reliably produce increases in national happiness above a certain threshold. The United States is dramatically wealthier than it was in the 1950s; it is not dramatically happier. Japan’s economic miracle produced extraordinary material transformation; Japanese subjective wellbeing did not rise in proportion. Economic growth is a necessary condition for addressing the most acute forms of suffering associated with poverty and material insecurity. It is not a sufficient condition for producing human flourishing, and the evidence suggests it is not even reliably correlated with it above the threshold at which basic needs are met.
Ed Diener at the University of Illinois, who spent four decades building the scientific foundations of subjective wellbeing research, argued toward the end of his career that national accounts of wellbeing — systematic, government-produced measurements of how citizens evaluate their lives, alongside GDP and other economic indicators — should become a standard feature of public policy in every country. Bhutan famously developed its Gross National Happiness index as an alternative to GDP in the 1970s. New Zealand, under Jacinda Ardern, introduced a Wellbeing Budget in 2019. Scotland, Iceland, and Finland have joined what has become a small but growing “Wellbeing Economy” movement that explicitly challenges the primacy of economic growth as the organising goal of government. These are meaningful steps. They are also, in the context of the global development agenda, still very much the exception.
The neglect of happiness in modern development policy stands in stark and somewhat embarrassing contrast to the central place that human flourishing has occupied in the world’s great philosophical and spiritual traditions — which understood, long before the randomised controlled trial existed, that the pursuit of a good life was the fundamental project of human existence and that it required serious, sustained, collective attention.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the foundational text of Western moral philosophy, opens with the observation that every human activity aims at some good — and asks what the highest good is, the one that all others serve as means. His answer — eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness or flourishing but better understood as the full realisation of human potential in accordance with virtue — is not a description of a private emotional state. It is a description of a life well-lived, which requires specific conditions: genuine friendship, meaningful activity, civic participation, and the cultivation of virtue. Eudaimonia is not something that happens to a person. It is something a person achieves, in relationship with others and within a community that supports the conditions of its achievement. The polis — the city, the community — is not merely the background of the good life. It is its prerequisite.
The Indian philosophical tradition arrives at a similar understanding through very different routes. The concept of Ananda — bliss, or deep joy — is understood in the Vedantic tradition not as a subjective experience to be pursued but as the inherent nature of the self, obscured by the conditioning of the mind and the false identification with temporary phenomena. The traditions of Dharma — right living, right relationship, right action — and Seva — selfless service, the orientation of one’s capacities toward the wellbeing of others — are not merely ethical prescriptions. They are descriptions of the conditions under which Ananda — the natural state of the flourishing self — becomes accessible. The ancient Indian understanding of wellbeing is, like Aristotle’s, fundamentally relational and communal: one does not flourish in isolation. One flourishes through right relationship with others, with one’s community, and with the larger order of which one is a part.
Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world is one family — encapsulates the political implication of this understanding. If the wellbeing of each person is inseparable from the wellbeing of all, then the suffering of any part of the family is the proper concern of the whole. The failure to address the unhappiness of billions of people is not, in this framework, a policy gap. It is a failure of fundamental human solidarity.
Buddhist thought adds the concept of karuna — compassion, the active response to the suffering of others — as one of the four Brahmaviharas, the divine abodes: the mental states that the tradition regards as the foundation of a genuinely good life. The Dalai Lama’s consistent argument that compassion is not a religious sentiment but a practical policy imperative — that a world organised around the recognition and alleviation of suffering would function better by every measure we currently care about — is not a pious hope. It is, the happiness research increasingly suggests, a testable and largely confirmed hypothesis.
The argument for taking unhappiness seriously is sometimes dismissed as a luxury concern — the preoccupation of wealthy societies that have already solved the more urgent problems. This argument is wrong on both empirical and moral grounds, and it is worth addressing directly.
On the empirical side: unhappiness is not a consequence of prosperity. It is an obstacle to it. The research on the relationship between mental wellbeing and economic productivity has produced findings that should concern any government primarily interested in economic outcomes. Depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy an estimated $1 trillion per year in lost productivity, according to the World Health Organisation — a figure that dwarfs the cost of treating them. Gallup’s global workplace engagement surveys consistently find that the vast majority of the world’s workers are either disengaged or actively disengaged from their work — a state that the research associates with reduced productivity, higher absenteeism, worse health outcomes, and greater staff turnover. The economic cost of the global unhappiness problem is not a soft statistic. It is a hard economic fact that is being systematically ignored by the economic frameworks that purport to measure productivity and growth.
Shawn Achor at Harvard University, whose research on what he calls the “happiness advantage” documented consistent relationships between positive affect and professional performance, creative problem-solving, and resilience under pressure, has argued that the conventional wisdom has the relationship between happiness and success backwards. We tend to believe that success produces happiness — that we will be happy when we achieve the income, the recognition, or the outcome we are pursuing. The research shows, with considerable consistency, that the relationship runs primarily in the other direction: positive emotional states, produced by deliberate practice and supportive environments, precede and produce the cognitive and behavioural capacities that drive professional success. Happiness is not the reward for productive economies. It is one of their inputs.
On the moral side: the argument that unhappiness is a luxury concern assumes that the unhappiness of poor people is adequately addressed by addressing their poverty. The World Happiness Report data makes this assumption visible as the error it is. Some of the most economically impoverished communities in the world report levels of life satisfaction that exceed those of significantly wealthier populations — because the social capital, the community connection, the religious and cultural meaning-making structures, and the quality of close relationships in those communities provide resources for wellbeing that income alone cannot purchase. Conversely, some of the wealthiest populations in the world report levels of loneliness, depression, and meaninglessness that constitute genuine suffering by any measure. The assumption that economic development solves the problem of unhappiness is not only empirically false. It is morally inadequate: it treats the inner life of human beings as a derivative of their material circumstances rather than as a dimension of experience that deserves direct attention in its own right.
The question of what it would mean to “solve” unhappiness deserves the same careful, disaggregated analysis that the development community has learned to apply to poverty and hunger. Just as “solving poverty” turned out to require separate interventions for income, assets, access to services, social protection, and political voice — because poverty is not one problem but many interacting ones — “solving unhappiness” would require a similarly differentiated set of strategies aimed at its different dimensions.
Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework — Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement — offers a useful map of the terrain. Each dimension has its own determinants, its own vulnerabilities, and its own evidence-based interventions. Positive emotion is supported by gratitude practices, acts of kindness, physical activity, and adequate sleep — all of which can be taught, structured, and incentivised at scale. Engagement requires the matching of challenge to skill and the protection of the conditions — attention, autonomy, intrinsic motivation — under which flow becomes possible. Relationships require the social infrastructure of community, the cultural norms that support connection, and the mental health services that help people when those norms and that infrastructure fail. Meaning requires the educational and cultural conditions that help people locate their lives within a larger narrative of significance — whether religious, philosophical, civic, or personal. Achievement requires not the endless escalation of performance standards but the experience of genuine mastery: of attempting difficult things and discovering, through the attempt, that one is capable.
These are not vague aspirations. They are specific, measurable, evidence-based targets — and the fact that they have not been incorporated into the global development agenda reflects not their impracticality but the assumption that they are not the proper concern of policy.
Richard Layard and his colleagues at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance have argued specifically that the single most cost-effective intervention available to governments seeking to improve national wellbeing is the expansion of mental health services — not because mental health services alone can address the full complexity of the unhappiness problem, but because depression and anxiety are the most prevalent forms of suffering in many populations and their treatment-to-need ratio remains catastrophically low. In most countries, fewer than 30 per cent of people with clinical depression receive any treatment. The treatment gap for anxiety disorders is similar. The cost of closing this gap, Layard’s calculations suggest, would be offset many times over by the productivity, healthcare, and social welfare savings produced by a less depressed, less anxious population.
The Rekhi Foundation for Happiness has been working from the conviction, since its founding, that the education system is the most powerful leverage point available for addressing the unhappiness problem at scale — not because education is sufficient, but because the habits, beliefs, and practices of emotional wellbeing, established at the formative moments of young adulthood, have compounding effects that extend across decades. The Science of Happiness Course, now offered at more than 50 universities across six countries including India, the United States, Japan, the UAE, and Pakistan, is the Foundation’s concrete expression of that conviction: the systematic, evidence-based cultivation of the knowledge and practices that the happiness research shows actually produce a flourishing life, delivered at the institutional scale that the size of the problem requires.
One of the most important developments in the effort to take unhappiness seriously as a policy problem is the maturation of the science of wellbeing measurement. The tools now available for tracking subjective wellbeing at scale are not perfect — no social measurement is — but they are substantially more sophisticated and reliable than the tools available for measuring many of the outcomes that the SDGs track.
The OECD’s Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-Being, published in 2013, provide a comprehensive framework for national statistical offices to incorporate wellbeing measurement into their standard data collection. The framework distinguishes between life evaluation (how people judge their lives overall), emotional experience (the positive and negative emotions they experience day to day), and eudaimonic wellbeing (the sense of meaning, engagement, and purpose in their lives) — distinctions that the research shows are empirically separable and have different determinants and different policy implications. Countries including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have incorporated elements of this framework into their national statistics. The measurement infrastructure is available. What is missing is the political will to make wellbeing a primary rather than supplementary metric.
The proposition is not that we should stop measuring GDP or health outcomes or educational attainment. It is that these metrics, taken alone, are an inadequate description of what matters about human lives — and that a civilisation serious about human flourishing would insist on measuring what ultimately matters and aligning its institutions and incentives accordingly.
We have arrived at a point in human history at which the technical capacity to understand and address the conditions of human happiness substantially exceeds our institutional will to do so. We know, with considerable scientific precision, what produces a flourishing life and what undermines it. We know that relationships matter more than income above a certain threshold. We know that meaning matters more than comfort. We know that the quality of attention, the depth of connection, and the richness of inner life are among the most important determinants of whether a person experiences their existence as good — and we know that each of these can, to a meaningful degree, be cultivated through education, supported by policy, and protected by institutional design.
What we have not done is decide, collectively and seriously, that this knowledge creates an obligation. We have not decided that the unhappiness of billions of people — the chronic, persistent, measurable inadequacy of their subjective experience of being alive — is an emergency of the same order as hunger or poverty, demanding the same scale of international coordination, resource allocation, and institutional commitment.
Perhaps the reason is that hunger and poverty are visible in ways that unhappiness is not. You can see a starving child; you cannot see a life felt from the inside to be hollow and purposeless. Perhaps it is that the tools of material development — infrastructure, technology, financial systems — are more comfortable for technocratic institutions than the tools of inner development, which require engaging with the parts of human experience that are most resistant to measurement and most in need of wisdom rather than engineering.
Or perhaps it is simply that we have not yet decided to take the inner life of the human being as seriously as we take their body. Not yet decided that the question the ancient traditions have always placed at the centre of their understanding of what it means to be human — how does one live well? — is also a question for governments, for international institutions, for universities, and for the global development agenda.
The science of happiness gives us no excuse for claiming we do not know the answer. It only leaves open the question of whether we are willing to act on it.
This objection is frequently raised and deserves a precise response, because it conflates two different questions: whether happiness can be measured, and whether governments should try to maximise it in the way they might maximise GDP. On the first question, the research is clear: subjective wellbeing can be measured reliably, consistently, and at scale, using instruments that have been validated across cultures and contexts for more than four decades. The OECD's Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-Being, the Gallup World Poll's life satisfaction data, and the World Happiness Report's annual methodology all represent sophisticated, peer-reviewed approaches to measurement that have survived extensive scrutiny. The claim that happiness "can't be measured" is no longer empirically defensible. On the second question, the proposition is not that governments should try to make people happy in some directive, paternalistic sense — that would indeed be both philosophically problematic and practically futile. The proposition is that governments should measure wellbeing alongside economic indicators and design policies that protect and promote the conditions that the research shows are most strongly associated with flourishing lives: the quality of social relationships, the presence of mental health services, the availability of meaningful work, the security of basic material conditions, and the cultural and educational infrastructure that supports the development of purpose and meaning. These are conditions that governments already influence through their choices about economic organisation, public services, and institutional design. The question is whether they do so with an awareness of wellbeing as an outcome, or only with an awareness of economic metrics that the research shows are an inadequate proxy for what actually matters about human lives. Richard Layard's argument at the London School of Economics — that mental health treatment, community investment, and educational wellbeing programmes represent among the most cost-effective policy interventions available — is not an argument for government control of inner life. It is an argument for taking the inner life of citizens as seriously as their physical health.
The relationship between material conditions and subjective wellbeing is real but considerably more complex than this question assumes, and the research on it produces findings that challenge both the optimistic version (solve poverty and you solve unhappiness) and the pessimistic version (material conditions don't matter). The Easterlin Paradox — named for economist Richard Easterlin who first documented it in 1974 — shows that within countries, income is positively correlated with life satisfaction, but across countries and across time, rising national income does not reliably produce rising national happiness above the threshold at which basic material needs are met. The United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom are all substantially wealthier than they were fifty years ago; none of them is substantially happier. More recent research by Angus Deaton and Anne Case documenting "deaths of despair" — the surge in suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism in economically struggling white working-class communities in the United States — shows that economic dislocation and unhappiness are deeply intertwined, but in ways that cannot be addressed by income transfers alone; they reflect a loss of meaning, status, and community that economic growth per se does not restore. At the same time, research by Angus Deaton on global wellbeing and by the World Happiness Report consistently finds that absolute poverty — the inability to meet basic material needs — is strongly associated with very low life satisfaction, which means that economic development in the world's poorest countries does produce significant wellbeing gains. The honest summary is: solving poverty is necessary but not sufficient for solving unhappiness. Above the threshold of basic material security, the determinants of wellbeing shift toward relationships, meaning, autonomy, and health — factors that economic growth influences only indirectly and that require specific policy attention in their own right.
Several countries have made meaningful moves in this direction, with results that are instructive if not yet definitive. Bhutan is the most famous case: the Kingdom began developing its Gross National Happiness index in the 1970s under King Jigme Singye Wangchuck as an explicit alternative to GDP, and the framework — which measures happiness across nine domains including psychological wellbeing, cultural resilience, ecological diversity, and good governance — has been incorporated into the country's five-year development plans since 2008. Critics have noted that Bhutan's human rights record complicates the GNH story, and that the framework has not prevented significant economic inequality; but the country consistently ranks among the highest in Asia on subjective wellbeing measures, and the framework has influenced development thinking globally. New Zealand's Wellbeing Budget, introduced in 2019 under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, is the most significant experiment by a wealthy democracy: rather than organising the national budget around growth targets, it organised spending priorities around five wellbeing goals — improving mental health, reducing child poverty, supporting indigenous peoples, building a productive low-emission economy, and creating a New Zealand where people feel safe. The approach attracted significant international attention and prompted the formation of the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership, which now includes Scotland, Iceland, Wales, Canada, and Finland alongside New Zealand. These experiments are at an early stage and their long-term effects on population wellbeing are not yet fully measurable. But they represent a genuine institutional shift in how governments understand their purpose — and they demonstrate that the proposition is not merely philosophical. It is actionable.
The science of happiness — comprising positive psychology, subjective wellbeing research, and the related literatures on mental health, social connection, and meaning — is sufficiently mature to guide policy in a number of specific domains, while remaining insufficiently developed in others. On what produces wellbeing, the research base is robust: the importance of social relationships, the role of meaningful work and activity, the contribution of physical health and sleep, the significance of autonomy and self-determination, and the protective function of meaning and purpose are among the most consistently evidenced findings in the social sciences. On how to cultivate wellbeing through intervention, the evidence is more mixed but increasingly strong: mindfulness-based interventions have been validated across hundreds of randomised controlled trials; gratitude practices have a substantial evidence base; positive psychology education programmes have demonstrated measurable effects on life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression in multiple populations. The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course draws on this evidence base to deliver structured, curriculum-embedded wellbeing education at university level — an approach whose effects are supported by the broader literature on positive psychology education. Where the science is genuinely less developed is in the translation from individual-level interventions to population-level policy — in understanding, with precision, how specific policy changes (working hours regulation, urban design, social housing quality, parental leave provision) affect population wellbeing. This is an active area of research, and the growing number of national wellbeing measurement programmes is producing the data that will allow these relationships to be better understood. The appropriate conclusion is not that the science is too immature to inform policy — the science of nutrition was similarly incomplete when governments began making dietary recommendations — but that the engagement between the research and the policy communities needs to deepen, and that the current near-total absence of happiness from the global policy agenda reflects not the inadequacy of the science but the inadequacy of the institutional will to take it seriously.
Education occupies a uniquely powerful position in any serious effort to address unhappiness at scale, for reasons that the happiness research makes clear. First, the habits, beliefs, relational patterns, and practices of emotional life that most strongly influence long-term wellbeing are established during the developmental periods that educational institutions span — childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The neural architecture of emotion regulation, the relational templates that shape how people connect with others, the capacity for meaning-making, and the habits of mind that either support or undermine flourishing are all more plastic during these years than at any subsequent stage of life. Educational institutions that embed emotional wellbeing development into their curricula are intervening at the moment of greatest leverage. Second, education is the institution with the broadest reach and the most consistent access to the general population. Every child passes through the school system; the majority of young adults in most countries now access some form of higher education. An educational system that teaches the science of happiness — that gives students the evidence-based knowledge and the practised skills of gratitude, self-compassion, mindfulness, relationship quality, and meaning-making — is operating at the scale that the unhappiness problem demands. Third, education shapes the people who will shape everything else: the leaders, the policymakers, the researchers, the teachers, the parents. An educational system that takes human flourishing seriously as a goal — rather than treating it as a pleasant side effect of academic and vocational preparation — is planting the seeds of the cultural shift that all other solutions to the unhappiness problem require. The Rekhi Foundation's Science of Happiness Course represents one model of what this looks like in practice: a credit-bearing academic subject, taught with rigour and grounded in evidence, that equips students not just with knowledge about happiness but with the practised capacity to live more flourishing lives. Offered at more than 50 universities across six countries, it is a demonstration that the institutional will to take happiness seriously in education exists — and that when it does, students respond with the hunger that the world's most popular university course on happiness, Laurie Santos's "Psychology and the Good Life" at Yale, first revealed to an astonished academic establishment in 2018.
Rekhi Foundation, founded in 2016, promotes Happiness Science via university centers, collaborating globally across six countries.
Table of Contents
6/79, S/F, Gurudwara Road, Karol Bagh, New Delhi – 110005, INDIA
2051, Last Chance Court, Gold River, CA 95670, USA
