{"id":17967,"date":"2012-11-29T09:01:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T14:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17967"},"modified":"2012-12-30T12:09:07","modified_gmt":"2012-12-30T17:09:07","slug":"one-economist-said-that-his-colleagues-pursuit-of-happiness-was-depressing-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/29\/one-economist-said-that-his-colleagues-pursuit-of-happiness-was-depressing-him\/","title":{"rendered":"“One economist [said] that his colleagues\u2019 pursuit of happiness was depressing him”"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you read newspapers or magazines, you’ll have noticed a spike in the economics of happiness over the last few years. Everyone seems to be reporting results of happiness surveys from all over … few of whom seem to agree on how to measure it or in some cases even what it is that they’re trying to measure. Claude Fischer<\/a> talks about this recent boom market:<\/p>\n

Bhutan\u2019s Gross National Happiness Commission uses citizens\u2019 reports of their happiness to assess national progress, and former French President Nicholas Sarkozy appointed a Nobel-encrusted commission to study a similar idea; the United Nations places \u201chappiness indicators\u201d on its war-burdened agenda; American science institutions pour money into fine-tuning measurements of \u201csubjective well-being\u201d; and Amazon\u2019s list of happiness books by moonlighting professors runs from The Happiness Hypothesis<\/em> to Stumbling on Happiness<\/em>, Authentic Happiness<\/em>, Engineering Happiness<\/em>, and beyond.<\/p>\n

Since at least the 1950s, academics have analyzed surveys asking people how happy or satisfied they feel. We\u2019ve used fuzzy questions such as, \u201cTaken all together, how would you say things are these days \u2014 would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?\u201d to assess respondents\u2019 morale. We\u2019ve compared, say, women to men and the poor to the rich. Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven started compiling the findings into his World Database of Happiness<\/em> back in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

So what set off the current frenzy? Economists found happiness.<\/p>\n

In the decade after 2000, the number of articles on happiness in major economics journals roughly tripled. One economist told me a couple of years ago that his colleagues\u2019 pursuit of happiness was depressing him. Nonetheless, established leaders and bright new scholars turned to the topic and brought with them the funding, media prestige, and political clout of the profession. That a guild which prides itself on scientific rigor and hardheadedness would embrace such a sappy concept measured in such mushy ways is, well, bemusing. Even Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke drew on the new economics of happiness to find the moral for his 2010 commencement address to University of South Carolina graduates: \u201cI urge you to take this research to heart by making time for friends and family and by being part of and contributing to a larger community.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you read newspapers or magazines, you’ll have noticed a spike in the economics of happiness over the last few years. Everyone seems to be reporting results of happiness surveys from all over … few of whom seem to agree on how to measure it or in some cases even what it is that they’re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,28],"tags":[869,575,39,290,691],"class_list":["post-17967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-economics","category-media","tag-bhutan","tag-happiness","tag-junkscience","tag-statistics","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4FN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17967"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18367,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17967\/revisions\/18367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}