Re-enchant and optimize economic behaviors by giving them a meaning
OPTIMIZING economic behaviors means making them more efficient, producing more and better without consuming more resources (natural resources, time, money, etc.).
RE-ENCHANTING economic behaviors is to reconnect them with their original mission : increase the well-being of the different stakeholders (producers and consumers, employers and employees…). And bring back joy into them.
Do both goals contradict each other ?
Does the search for growth and profit necessarily conflict with happiness? At the Happiness Economics Institute, we think it does not. Economics lies from its beginnings on a moral postulate: economic transactions increase the well-being of the two parts of the transaction. Hence the more one produces and sells, the more one generates happiness. Under some hypotheses, that belief is valid. The economic activity, when it respects a few rules, does increase collective well-being. It’s our duty to understand, respect and have those rules respected.
Why is it necessary to bring joy back into economic behaviors?
It’s necessary because growth has become joyless: while income keeps on increasing in developed countries, mean happiness has stopped improving. Work has also become joyless: satisfaction at work (an activity that consumes most of our time awake) has drastically degraded in the last decades.
Whom does the Happiness Economics Institute target?
The HEI’s primary mission is to help the different economic agents (companies, banks, public authorities and individuals) to adopt behaviors that are both more economically efficient AND more prone to increase individual and collective happiness.
Pursuing that mission, the HEI also accompanies charities whose actions daily prove that non-profit activities, like giving or volunteering, are strong levers for improving happiness.
The HEI also provides food for thought to students facing important career decisions and life choices by proposing lectures and conferences in universities, business schools and all types of secondary and higher education institutions.
Finally the HEI supports journalists interested in topics connected to Happiness Economics by answering their questions and making available its datacenter that aggregates hundreds of academic studies.
