This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit—or even maximization— of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to...

Music and health as a field of research has flourished in the recent years, although the belief in a link between music and health is not new. In fact, the idea about music as salutary dates all the way back to But of course this link between people, music, and health/wellbeing is hardly new. It is a perennial knowledge that has been understood and practised in very varied ways across history*a...

A lifespan perspective on personality and health uncovers new causal pathways and provides a deeper, more nuanced approach to interventions. It is unproven that happiness is a direct cause of good health or that negative emotion, worry, and depression are significant direct causes of disease. Instead, depression-related characteristics are likely often reflective of an already-deteriorating tra...

Economists have traditionally eschewed direct measures of well-being on methodological grounds: the private nature of experience and the discomfort of making interpersonal comparisons. Instead, income is often used as a proxy for opportunities and well-being. If people are not fully rational, however, their choices will not necessarily maximize their experienced utility, and increasing their op...

Anthropology commonly is regarded as the study of human origins or exotic cultures, but in fact, its remit embraces all aspects of humanity. It is distinguished from other social sciences, conceptually, by its attention to both culture and biology and their interaction on the timescales of evolution, history, and the individual lifespan, and methodologically, by a tradition of ethnographic fiel...

This paper, which is to be published as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, provides an introduction to social-choice theory with interpersonal comparisons of well-being. We argue that the most promising route of escape from the negative conclusion of Arrow’s theorem is to use a richer informational environment than ordinal measurability and the absence of interpersonal compa...

Infectious diseases of both humans and farm animals are re-emerging as significant problems, because our arsenal of effective anti-infective tools is not expanding proportionally. Thus, there is an urgent need for new approaches to the treatment of infectious disease, especially in cases of drug-resistant microbes, microbes for which therapy is not available, or in cases of host immune impairme...

Diminishing marginal well-being from income suggests that redistributing income from the rich to the poor will raise average levels of well-being within a society. This utilitarian logic suggests that— conditional on average income—countries with greater income inequality will experience lower levels of average well-being. Yet existing research has failed to find clear evidence that inequality ...

There have been many evaluation studies on the impact of NREGS but there are hardly any systematic studies relating to impact of the scheme on children. This paper tries to fill this gap. There is a huge literature on awareness, implementation problems, impact on the livelihoods, women, migration, agricultural wages, marginalized sections etc. This paper makes use of some of the in-depth studie...