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ting in 2008 happiness economics has generated an entire new academic industry over 10 000 articles have now been published on the concept of happiness or subjective well being if you re happy and you know it clap your hands if you re happy and you know it stomp your feet a brief pause to reflect on what had us clapping and stomping our feet over the past year while the number of publications and citations on happiness soared according to the web of science high levels of public debt in the euro zone escalated into full blown crisis necessitating greece s and ireland s bail out by the imf strikes and riots against austerity measures to tackle budget deficits took place in greece france and the uk while in the us tea partiers rallied about deficits and jobless recovery an earthquake in haiti killed at least 230 000 leaving 1 million homeless and was followed by a deadly outbreak of cholera in addition to continuous terrorist attacks and high profile assassinations in pakistan millions of people lost their lives and homes after heavy monsoon rains and flooding suicide bombers killed scores of people in russia as the hottest summer in recorded russian history caused a public health crisis and panic over food security and the prices of cereals an explosion at a bp well in the gulf of mexico caused the biggest civilian oil spill to date north and south korea ended the year at their throats ethic rioting in kyrgyzstan threatened to turn into a civil war with so much felicity in the air happiness economics is set on a mission to answer the perennial question what makes us happy happiness economics is an off shoot of economics and psychology which aims to provide a quantitative assessment of happiness subjective well being welfare it is intended to fill a gap left by conventional utility economics based on ordinal concepts of utility or in the parlance of economics revealed preferences by including cardinal utility stated preferences in its measurements and analysis further it caters to the notion now prevalent in most fields of academic inquiry from decision theory to psychology to neuroscience to philosophy that individuals do not always act rationally when making decisions with regard to utility or to what is good for them the exclusive reliance on an objective approach by standard economic theory has thus in recent decades come under attack and given impetus to various non objectivist theoretical projects in economics including an individual s emotional state hermalin isen 1999 altruism altonji et al 1997 and fairness rabin 1997 happiness economics is the new kid on the block most researchers engaged in the topic of happiness economics see it as a complementary approach to that of decision utility rather than its substitute though the case of bhutan which recently replaced gdp with gnh i e gross national happiness index as the principal tool in the policy planning process gets quoted by academics and journalists ad nauseam its salient characteristic is said to be its breadth in contrast to the narrow income based measures of happiness economics it includes what is termed experienced utility an individual s experiences of consumption or life events in the past together with procedural utility utility derived from engaging in an activity preferred by an individual powdthavee 2007 the ghastly use of vocabulary aside it makes a distinction between short and long term experience and consequences of a utility in a way not unlike a teleological view of happiness as the ultimate goal of human life in its mission statement then happiness economics reveals a closer resemblance to ethical theory than pecuniary economics the ambiguities however emerge when we look at the indicators selected or in other words the characteristics that happiness economics designates as constituents contributing to the higher good as well as the methods used to measure happiness indicators used in the measurement of happiness fall into three categories frey stutzer 2000 though not all are always simultaneously used to the first category belong personality and demographic factors these include age gender citizenship i e national or foreigner extent of formal education family setting and employment status to the second category belong economic variables such as individual unemployment and income situation of the household after taxes a third category used in some research deals with political institutions variables here include an index for direct democratic rights and an index for the extent of local autonomy these indicators then are used in large scale surveys across countries and over periods of time with the hope to understand how they affect or contribute to happiness the approach which relies on stated preferences rather than on revealed choices employs single or multiple item questions on how an individual perceives his her state of happiness a typical single item question asks taken all together how happy would you say you are very happy quite happy not very happy not at all happy each response then scores one to four points from the lowest 1 not at all happy to the highest 4 very happy an example of a multi item scale question can be found in the general health questionnaire ghq in the british household panel survey which assesses positive and negative affects of happiness through the following set of questions have you recently been able to concentrate on what you re doing lost much sleep over worry felt that you were playing a useful part in things felt constantly under strain felt capable of making decisions about things felt you could not overcome your difficulties been able to enjoy your normal day to day activities been feeling unhappy or depressed been able to face up to problems been losing confidence in yourself been feeling reasonably happy all things considered been thinking of yourself as a worthless person armed with the type of data such surveys might be expected to produce it is hardly surprising that chairman bernanke feels he ought to evoke the authority of one of the founding fathers to justify interest in it undeniably the data collected from the ghq might prove useful in the medical research on depression or emotional imbalances but does it really tell us anything about happiness the end pursuit of human good happiness as perceived by thomas jefferson refers to an objective good the natural rights of american citizens as those proclaimed in the american declaration of independence and the french declaration of the rights of man and citizen it belongs thus to a class of goods closer in essence to spiritual satisfaction rather than material social improvements better food better health and sanitary conditions better education and greater equality of opportunity are obvious external conditions that facilitate man s quest for happiness in the tradition of american republicanism i use this word in its historical rather than present day political context the pursuit of happiness is the opportunity to realize man s full potential according to merit succinctly expressed by the americanism be all that you can be this paper does not argue that the study of social and economic indicators of well being cannot bring valuable insight to aid social and economic policy rather it calls for a distinction between short and long term material improvements in life quality for which decision utility coupled with behavioral analysis should form and indeed does form sufficient basis for policy and on the other hand an inquiry into happiness based on ethical and political considerations which cannot and should not be quantified if we are really honest with ourselves we will admit that excellence and merit are not to be found in large numbers consequently socio economic methods and statistics are not suitable methodologies for the inquiry on happiness to be fair there has been some recent research in the sphere of happiness economics which does attempt to differentiate between different levels of happiness and adapt measurements accordingly kahneman and deaton for example distinguish between emotional well being and life evaluation emotional well being sometimes called hedonic well being or experienced happiness refers to the emotional quality of an individual s everyday experience the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy fascination anxiety sadness anger and affection that make one s life pleasant or unpleasant life evaluation refers to a person s thoughts about his or her life kahneman deaton 2010 a temporal and a substantive distinction of this type is a better approximation of the constituents of happiness and its life cycles the indicators chosen can reflect the extent to which particular emotional characteristic is further away or closer on a scale whose center balance is happiness aristotle used the same measurement scheme which is known as the golden mean according to his formal definition excellence or virtue is a disposition involving intentional choice and directed toward observance of a mean between extremes a more detailed discussion of aristotle s notion of happiness will follow for now it will suffice to point out just a single example i e the discussion in the nichomachean ethics on the virtue of courage which is treated as a happiness indicator ne 3 6 9 the courageous man is said to be one who habitually i e consistently chooses the mean between cowardice and rashness the specific context of the treatment of virtue is the risk of sudden death in battle an important distinction is made between the man who acts courageously in pursuit of the reward of honor by his fellow citizens and the man who acts courageously for the sake of courage i e out of principle it is the latter who knows the true excellence of virtue the former acting according to the principles of utility is described as a good man or a political man if utility is the essence of economics then the true virtue or purpose of economics is achieving the maximum utility happiness economics is nothing but utility and happiness gone awry it detracts from the purpose of economics without contributing anything to that ethics back to kahneman and deaton who despite their laudable attempt to introduce indicators more relevant to the inquiry of happiness than the socio economic ones mentioned earlier subsequently disappoint with a discussion on the measurement methodology and the results expressing yet another platitude hardly worth the generous support of the gallup organization and the grant provided by the national institute on aging they duly acknowledge we read that emotional well being is assessed by questions about the presence of various emotions in the experience of yesterday e g enjoyment happiness anger sadness stress worry life evaluation is measured using cantril s self anchoring scale which has the respondent rate his or her current life on a ladder scale in which 0 is the worst possible life for you and 10 is the best possible life for you we find that emotional well being and life evaluation have different correlates in the circumstances of people s lives in particular we observe striking differences in the relationship of these aspects of well being to income the gleaming conclusions resulting from this study are that 1 more money does not necessarily buy more happiness but less money is associated with emotional pain and 2 income is more strongly related to satisfaction than to happiness which might potentially serve as policy guide to the goal of reducing suffering rather than maximizing happiness if the reader has failed to gain any insight into the nature of happiness and what makes humans happy from this research it is because there is no such insight to be found what is to be found however is an attempt to de mystify the so called easterlin paradox by means of weber s law and a generous back up of statistical proofs easterlin s paradox named after the founder of happiness economics refers to the finding that people in rich countries don t report much greater happiness than those in lower income countries even though in any individual country the rich say they are happier than the poor do from easterlin s original analysis published in 1974 has henceforth sprung the discipline of happiness economics which appears to have made it its mission to explain the above paradox easterlin s own interpretation of this finding is that happiness is relative to a certain threshold i e that an individual s happiness depends not on some absolute value of wealth but on the wealth of those around him or her this explains why rich people are happier than poor people in the same country as well as why happiness levels don t vary significantly between rich and poor countries following in easterlin s footsteps kahneman and deaton argue that the confusion regarding the effects of income on well being can be traced to incorrect analysis k d 2010 namely that measures of well being by psychologists and sociologists plot well being against income in real dollars they suggest that the logarithm of income is a better scale according to which differences are expressed as a percentage of change instead of an absolute amount the logarithmic transformation represents a basic fact of perception known as weber s law which applies generally to quantitative dimensions of perception and judgment e g the intensity of sounds and lights the rule is that the effective stimulus for the detection and evaluation of changes or differences in such dimensions is the percentage change not its absolute amount the application of weber s law is basically used in this paper to confirm the finding that higher income results in a higher percentage of reported individual s life evaluation i e reflective long term happiness even among those who are already well off and that the relative threshold of reported well being satiate fully at an annual income of approximately usd 75 000 a result independent of whether dollars or log dollars are used as a measure of income diplomatically kahneman and deaton abstain from making any policy recommendations based on their findings by stating that the relevance of subjective well being as a guide to policy is a contentious issue on which we do not take a position and the reader is once again left to wonder why this research was undertaken if its authors politely refrain from proposing an application for it another widespread interpretation of the easterlin paradox which points to the futility of happiness economics comes from the field of psychology veiling its vacuity in the nebulous term set point theory of happiness this simply refers to a phenomenon observed of people winning a lottery who after a short period of exaltation revert to the state of happiness they were in prior to winning the lottery in its positive manifestation set theory of happiness can be expressed through the folk saying that a novel situation is a three day wonder in its negative that time he...