• Facebook's Gross National Happiness

    I love it when the Interweb helps answer a persistent question like “how happy are we?” It’s a serious question—evaluating the well-being of a place—and one that Sightline has spilled a lot of cyber-ink on over the years. France may soon embark on the largest national measurement of what has been dubbed “gross national happiness.” But now it turns out that the United States may already have a halfway decent measurement available—and it’s...
    Read more »
  • Happiness, the Danish Way

    A while back I pondered why it is that Denmark ranks as the happiest country on earth. This little curiosity—Danes reporting higher levels of satisfaction than citizens of any other country—has been occurring for roughly 3 decades. What’s going on? I mean, this is the place that invented existentialism. Well, a new study on the subject purports to find an answer. Curiously enough, it may actually be related to the...
    Read more »
  • Measure Gross National Happiness

    Society needs to measure happiness as carefully as we do financial indicators such as income or gross domestic product. And we need to use these measurements to shape public policy.
    Read more »
  • The Economist on Happiness

    In the past couple of years, it’s been interesting to observe a promising idea—that happiness should count as much as economic indicators—become almost mainstream. This week, for example, The Economist published a long, meandering article that examines the concepts of relative poverty and relative happiness. It compares two men—a doctor in Congo and a retired coal miner worker in Kentucky—who earn about the same amount of absolute income. The contrast...
    Read more »
  • Happiness Should Count, says NYT

    As a follow-up to their story this week, the New York Timeseditorializes today on the importance of measuring happiness and using it to shape policy. “A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy – not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers – might help begin to reshape those assumptions in a way that has a measurable and meliorating outcome on the lives we lead and the world we...
    Read more »
  • Happiness Economics Being Taken Seriously?

    According to this lengthy New York Times article, the field of happiness economics—which we’ve followed closely over the last year—is gaining momentum. Countries ranging from Bhutan (which has declared that its national priority is gross national happiness, not GDP) to Britain (which released a first effort at an "index of well-being" in March) are experimenting with the concept that contentment should be measured as closely as spending. Aside from the...
    Read more »
  • Sex, Lies, and Happiness

    In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we dug up our two most popular posts-well, okay, probably our two only posts, unless you count news about contraception-that mention sex. The first is one of a stream of posts on the hot field of happiness research, which is using scientific methods to back up the common-sense maxim that money doesn’t really buy happiness (or love, or sex). Academics studying what makes people...
    Read more »
  • Happiness Is a Warm TV

    A study using a new method to measure happiness (we’ve covered this field extensively, e.g. here) turned up some surprising findings, the New York Times and the NIH report. A team of psychologists and economists—led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton—used the so-called Day Reconstruction Method to study daily mood swings in 909 women from Texas. The women kept a diary of everything they did during the day,...
    Read more »
  • What Good is Happiness, It Can't Buy You Money

    Recent advances in the economics of happiness (discussed on this blog here, here, and here) are getting a little more mainstream attention, due to the growing body of research on the relationships between money and subjective wellbeing. The bulk of the research that’s been done on the subject suggests that the correlations between income and happiness are weak. In general, wealthier people are a little happier than the less well...
    Read more »
  • The Economics of Un-happiness

    Most physical health trends have improved over the past half century. But mental health trends have diverged radically, according to this article (pdf) (Summarized in my previous post.) For reasons that no one really understands (social isolation? pollution? competitive individualism? media saturation? secularism? modern conveniences?), as societies around the world have grown richer at a galloping pace, their mental health has plummeted. Depression rates in the United States have climbed...
    Read more »