Social Choice and Individual Reports of Subjective Well-Being

Empirical work has demonstrated that individually reported subjective wellbeing (SWB) may be positively correlated with objectively measured economic variables like income, and affected by non-economic personal circumstances. Assuming individuals’ own SWB reports emerge from random discrete choices, one can therefore use their stochastic properties to construct a broad class of ordinal level comparable interpersonal utility measures. In turn these can be used to determine a welfarist social choice rule. Ethically acceptability, however, seems to require more than level comparability. Beyond individuals’ own SWB reports, one could perhaps use data from experiments designed to elicit SWB inequality aversion. [89 words]