The Least Radical Case for Happiness Economics
There’s a fascinating debate on happiness going on over at The Economist. Officially, the motion is that: “This house believes that new measures of economic and social progress are needed for the 21st-century economy.” My own contribution tries to discipline the grandiose rhetoric of both sides, concluding that:
[T]he benefits of new happiness data have surely been overstated. But we economists compare benefits with costs. Adding a couple of questions to existing surveys is so cheap that it almost certainly passes any cost-benefit analysis. And when the motion passes, we nerdy social scientists need to stop writing grandiose treatises and get back to the mundane grind of social science, mining these data for yet more incremental insight.
My full argument is available over the fold. Read More »
The Happiness Wars Continue
There’s a growing sentiment among economists that GDP is a poor measure of a country’s well-being. (See our recent podcast on the topic; also, the research of Joseph Stiglitz.) The latest fad among European governments seeking to separate the overall health of citizens from sluggish economic data is to ask them if they’re happy. The results aren’t exactly encouraging. Less than half of British adults feel they are thriving. And France now ranks as the world’s most pessimistic country, with only 15 percent saying they expect things to get better in 2011. Read More »
Does Beauty Equal Happiness?
Are good-looking people happier than their unattractive counterparts? A new study says… they are indeed. But the reason why is different for men than it is for women. Read More »
The Old Money-and-Happiness Riddle
I sat down last week for a good chat with the smart folks who run the Planet Money podcast. The topic: Money and happiness. Read More »
Happy to Wait
“Emotions have historically received a bum rap from decision researchers” write economists John Ifcher and Homa Zarghamee. In a forthcoming paper called Happiness and Time Preference: The Effect of Positive Affect in a Random-Assignment Experiment, they address the tricky and oft-ignored role of emotion in decision-making. Read More »
Debunking the Easterlin Paradox, Again
I’ve written here before about my research with Betsey Stevenson showing that economic development is associated with rising life satisfaction. Some people find this result surprising, but it’s the cleanest interpretation of the available data. Yet over the past few days, I’ve received calls from several journalists asking whether Richard Easterlin had somehow debunked these findings. He tried. But he failed. Read More »
Should We Hope Congestion Gets Worse?
One of the less cheery parts of studying transportation is that the activity you have devoted your life to is widely considered an unmitigated downer. Even aside from the external environmental costs each trip places on society, travel is held to be no fun for the traveler. We don’t hop behind the wheel for the love of being honked at, cut off and stuck behind a creeping bus or semi; we endure travel only because we’ve got someplace to go. Right? Read More »
What's on England's Mind Today, Part 1 (National Happiness)
Britain will soon begin “measuring people’s psychological and environmental well-being” — i.e., their happiness. Read More »
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