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Gallup just released a new poll, and the news is in: the recent Wall Street woes are affecting more than just our wallets—it’s getting to our happiness as well. Snarky-ness aside, the poll shows that depressed moods are at their highest rate so far this year: “The percentage of Americans experiencing a lot of happiness/enjoyment without a lot of stress/worry hit a new low for the year on Monday at...

What a mess.  As Kevin Phillips reports in a Harper’s article, “Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse Than We Know” (full text here) government agencies have made scads of tiny, incremental changes to economic statistics over the years that, in the aggregate, have completely changed our basic measures of economic health and wellbeing.  What’s especially troubling: the changes have been consistently biased to make the economic outlook seem rosier...

University of British Columbia researchers have put a price tag on happiness.  The good news:  happiness is available for the low, low price of $5.00 (Canadian, that is).  The better news:  you can’t spend that money on yourself.  Instead, to get the most smiles per dollar, you have to spend money on other people.  Dr Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and colleagues found that [experimental subjects]...

I’m a bit late on this, but Bill Dietrich had a terrific article in last weekend’s Pacific Northwest Magazine, in which he takes a look at whether money can buy happiness. Among the things psychologists say won’t make you happy in the long run are material possessions in general (we get bored with them, and they require maintenance), luxury items (every car goes the speed limit, every watch tells time),...

REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We refuse...

The first ever world map of happiness was just released by a researcher in the UK. Using the results of more than 100 studies, he color-coded countries’ levels of happiness. (In the map below, the redder the country, the happier it is.) Denmark, apparently, is the happiest country on earth; and other Scandinavian countries also rank highly. Canada pulls in at a very respectable number 10 while the United States...

No regional angle here, really, but astonishing nonetheless—according to a new report by Environmental Defense, American cars and trucks gobble up about 45 percent of the world’s highway fuels. Time and again, I’ve heard that the United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but consumes about a quarter of the world’s total resources (lumber, minerals, energy, etc.). When you do the math, this means that...

This is worth reading just because it’s interesting: an article on what actually makes people happy, which often has little to do with what people think will make them happy. To boil the article down to 3 points (we read, so you don’t have to!): Small but frequent comforts (say, a pair of shoes that really fits) can do more to make you happy than intensely joyful but infrequent events...

The New Yorker ran a great article by John Cassidy last week, discussing what it means to be “poor” in a nation as prosperous as America. The upshot: Cassidy recommends that the US replace the official poverty line—first adopted in 1969 and adjusted for inflation ever since—with a “relative” income standard that tracks how many people earn less than half the median income. I think he makes an interesting case,...

How much of a pay cut would you be willing to accept to take a more satisfying job? Via Kevin Drum, I see that UBC professors John Helliwell and Haifang Huang have tried to put a number on how much different kinds of job satisfaction are worth in cold, hard cash. The results (cribbed from this summary at MSNBC): Increased trust in your employer is worth a 36 percent pay...