Happiness in this context is defined as `the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life-as-a-whole positively', or in short: how well one likes the life one lives. In this way, happiness belongs to a wider class of subjective appraisals of life, which is usually referred to as ‘subjective well-being’ (SWB) or ‘life satisfaction’. (cf. Chapter 2). We will confine this d...

Economic Approaches to Understanding Change in Happiness Are people condemned to an inherent level of experienced happiness? A review of the economic research on subjective well-being gives reason to the assessment that happiness can change. First, empirical findings clearly indicate that people are not indifferent to adverse living conditions when reporting their subjective well-being as obser...

The happiness literature provides evidence on various factors, other than money, that do seem to contribute to individual happiness. As one explores the produced “happiness economics” literature, it is direct to understand the difficulty to find proper information on developing countries reality. In our analysis we investigate the relationship between income, family composition, health and reli...

The study of happiness was of interest to early economists and philosophers. Centuries later, it has gone from the fringes of economics to the mainstream. Economists are using happiness surveys to study a host of questions, ranging from the happiness effects of health, marriage, and various institutional arrangements, to the unhappiness effects of unemployment, divorce, and commuting time. Beca...

AND OVER TIME IN THE UNITED STATES: Editor’s Note: One of the contemporary foundations of quality-of-life and social indicators research is studies of subjective well-being in general and happiness in particular. In this issue, I review two recent contributions to this subject. The first is a recent article by Yang Yang in the American Sociological Review. This article sets new standards for th...

This work examines happiness and suffering ratings of anchor periods (i.e., outstandingly meaningful life periods) among Holocaust survivors and comparison groups, and the relations of these ratings to present subjective well-being (SWB). The study included 360 participants, 141 of which were Holocaust survivors. Results showed that Holocaust survivors reported significantly lower happiness in ...

University-based community members (N = 181) participated in a four-wave, 6-month longitudinal experiment designed to increase treatment participants’ happiness levels. Participants were randomly assigned to set goals either to improve their life circumstances (comparison condition) or to increase their feelings of autonomy, competence, or relatedness in life (treatment conditions). We hypothes...

The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships between household income and SWB. But income is clearly an imperfect measure of economic well-being. Also needed are measures of wealth (net worth) and consum...