News – World: Starting in 2016, the men who run the United Arab Emirates went all-in on positivity. They installed a giant smiley face on the dome crowning a Dubai police station. They created a Ministry of Tolerance and a Ministry of Happiness, as if inspired by George Orwell. And they began funding research, bankrolling prominent global intellectuals to study the psychology and science of bliss.

For women living a second-class existence, activists sentenced to years in prison because of their Facebook posts, the UAE is of course not a happy place, and the branding effort might have flopped if not for the efforts of one man: renowned Columbia University economist and United Nations power broker Jeffrey Sachs.
 
Sachs helped the UAE take its message to the world. He supercharged the happiness drive, giving speech after speech linking it to pressing global issues. 
He called Emirati leaders “exemplary” and “wise.” At one point, he even sat on a Dubai stage with two other white male economists and CNN anchor Richard Quest and helped lead a crowd of Emiratis and expats in a round of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”
A nonprofit led by Sachs, the U.N.

 Sustainable Development Solutions Network, known as SDSN, has received at least $3 million from the UAE. The outlay has been used to fund work on the World Happiness Report, an annual ranking of countries’ quality of life, and on the Global Happiness Policy Report, a collection of cheery policy recommendations that accompanies the rankings. 
The UAE government has separately donated $200K to Columbia University for happiness research, according to Sachs, who provided The Intercept with the Columbia and SDSN donation figures in response to questions about their finances. Spending records from the Earth Institute, a research institute at Columbia formerly headed by Sachs, confirm that it has received UAE funding, but a spokesperson for the university declined to say how much.

The happiness project might be easy to dismiss if it didn’t confer legitimacy on a repressive government. Sachs has presented on SDSN’s happiness index everywhere from Google to “Morning Joe,” and within the U.N., where he has advised three successive secretary-generals, he has tethered the happiness work to official sustainability targets.
“It’s whitewashing,” scholar Matthew Hedges said of Sachs’s work. In 2018, while conducting research for a dissertation on the UAE’s security strategy, Hedges was detained by Emirati police. In his telling, he spent seven months in a windowless room, sedated with a cocktail of drugs, hearing screams through the walls. His captors repeatedly interrogated him, at one point for 15 hours on end.

After being forced to sign a confession saying that he worked for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, Hedges was convicted without a lawyer present and sentenced to life in prison; he was released only after the U.K. applied diplomatic pressure. “The second you start taking money from authoritarian states to illustrate happiness indexes, dystopian doesn’t even begin to describe it,” said Hedges, who is now a postgraduate scholar at the University of Exeter. “It’s more like a nightmare.”

Source: The Intercept Website