Freed from Desire: The Path to a "National Happiness Index" in 1970s Poland and Czechoslovakia

By the late 1960s, governments on either side of the Iron Curtain faced popular unrest, mass disengagement from traditional political channels, and widespread skepticism about the ability of the state to meet individual needs and aspirations. This paper explores how technocratic socialist states drew on market research, the social sciences, and the transatlantic Social Indicators Movement to generate new forms of policy-making data that would address these challenges during the 1970s. As planners in Poland and Czechoslovakia expanded their conception of what constituted appropriate material needs, they also publicized new concepts of ‘wellbeing’, ‘self-actualization’ and ‘personal happiness’ to demonstrate that the state was fulfilling its end of the Social Contract – and shape the terms for assessing this contract’s success in the process.

Using the archives of public opinion pollsters, sociologists, economists, civic organizations, and international organizations including the UN and OECD, and oral interviews with former researchers, this paper reconstructs efforts in socialist Czechoslovakia and Poland to combine quality of life studies, sample opinion surveys, and social accounting procedures.

It examines how these efforts culminated in the idea for building a “National Happiness Index”, which would supplement Gross National Product as both a metric and marketing ploy for socialist development against the backdrop of economic downturn outside the socialist Bloc. It shows that ‘personal happiness’, ‘wellbeing’ and the new metrics that rendered these concepts observable were later retooled by civic organizations in the early 1980s pushing for greater social investment when domestic economic contraction finally arrived. The late socialist state, however, was unable to retreat from or jettison the horizons of expectation it had helped bring into being.