ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Scitovsky's work in the context of Keyne's work on wellbeing, offering a new perspective on welfare in the history of economic thought. In order to understand human welfare and desires better, Scitovsky drew insights and results from motivational psychology. Unfortunately, Scitovsky's analysis of human welfare suffers from two major weaknesses. First, he used a peculiar approach, that is, the arousal approach, as the psychological basis for his analysis. The second major weakness of Scitovsky's analysis of human welfare is due to the economic evidence which he set out in The Joyless Economy, and which does not reflect the theoretical analysis. In fact, Scitovsky considered self-rated happiness, which was used in questionnaire surveys by Easterlin, to be our best available measure of human welfare. The French encyclopaedist Nicolas de Condorcet was confident that the historical achievement of high levels of human knowledge would make it possible to disseminate basic knowledge to everybody, thus revealing and valuing talents.
