Happiness is generally considered to be an ultimate goal in life; virtually everybody wants to be happy. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 takes it as a self-evident truth that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right”, comparable to life and liberty. It follows that economics is – or should be – about individual happiness. In particular, the question is how do economic growth, unemployment and inflation, as well as institutional factors such as good governance, affect individual well-being? In addition to this intrinsic interest, there are three major reasons for economists to consider happiness. The first is economic policy. At the micro-level, it is often impossible to make a Pareto-optimal proposal, because a social action entails costs for some individuals. Hence an evaluation of the net effects, in terms of individual utilities, is needed. On an aggregate level, economic policy must deal with trade-offs, especially those between unemployment and

Are Americans more individualistic and less collectivistic than members of other groups? The authors summarize plausible psychological implications of individualism–collectivism (IND-COL), metaanalyze cross-national and within-United States IND-COL differences, and review evidence for effects of IND-COL on self-concept, well-being, cognition, and relationality. European Americans were found to be both more individualistic—valuing personal independence more—and less collectivistic—feeling duty to in-groups less—than others. However, European Americans were not more individualistic than African Americans, or Latinos, and not less collectivistic than Japanese or Koreans. Among Asians, only Chinese showed large effects, being both less individualistic and more collectivistic. Moderate IND-COL effects were found on self-concept and relationality, and large effects were found on attribution and cognitive style. To contemporary Americans, being an individualist is not only a good thing; it is a quintessentially American thing. However, the term individualism itself appears to have its roots outside of the North American continent, namely in the French Revolution. It appears that individualism was first used to describe the negative

Policy decisions at the organizational, corporate, and governmental levels should be more heavily influenced by issues related to well-being––people’s evaluations and feelings about their lives. Domestic policy currently focuses heavily on economic outcomes, although economic indicators omit, and even mislead about, much of what society values. We show that economic indicators have many shortcomings, and that measures of well-being point to important conclusions that are not apparent from economic indicators alone. For example, although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction during this period, and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust. We argue that economic indicators were extremely important in the early stages of economic development, when the fulfillment of basic needs was the main issue. As societies grow wealthy,

This paper argues that institutional conditions in the form of the extent and form of democracy have systematic and sizeable effects on individual well-being, in addition to demographic and economic factors. Using recent interview data from 6,000 residents of Switzerland, we show that individuals are cet. par. happier, the better developed the institutions of direct democracy are in their area of residence. This also applies to a second institution, the degree of government decentralisation (federalism). Finally, we are able to support some of the earlier results for other countries and periods with new data also based on a survey with a large sample size. In particular, we find that the unemployed are to a great extent less happy than employed persons, and that a higher household income level only raises happiness to a small extent

A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by clinicians to be inversely correlated. The second is that blood-pressure problems can be reported more objectively than mental well-being. Using data on 16 countries, the paper finds that happier nations report lower levels of hypertension. The paper’s results are consistent with, and seem to offer a step towards the validation of, cross-national estimates of well-being.

According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model are needed. First, individuals ’ set points are not hedonically neutral. Second, people have different set points, which are partly dependent on their temperaments. Third, a single person may have multiple happiness set points: Different components of well-being such as pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can move in different directions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions. Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event. These revisions offer hope for psychologists and policymakers who aim to decrease human misery and increase happiness.

To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)

s huge. Our purpose in providing this document, a revised version of a portion of a grant proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation in 1996, is two-fold. One is that it provides a (necessarily selective and incomplete) documentation of some of the impressive advances in the study of elections, public opinion, and related areas that have been based on NES data. Given the central role these data have played in these fields, this document should constitute a helpful review of a crucial part of the relevant literatures. Second, this document should also help stimulate ideas about further research that might tap some of the vast unused potential of these 2 individual studies, as well as the "greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts" potential of the extensive time series. In the end, the value of the project depends on the ideas and work not just of those who design the study, but those whose inspiration leads to research based on the data. All who venture within are

In surveys of well-being, countries like Denmark and the Netherlands emerge as particularly happy while nations such as Germany and Italy report markedly lower levels of happiness. But are these findings credible? This paper provides evidence that the answer is yes. It does so, using data on 16 countries, by showing that happier nations also report systematically lower levels of hypertension. As well as validating the differences in happiness across nations, this suggests that blood-pressure readings might be valuable as part of a national well-being index. Finally, we produce a new ranking of European nations’ GHQ N6 mental-health scores.

Personality is shaped by both genetic and environmental factors; among the most important of the latter are cultural influences. Culture consists of shared meaning systems that provide the standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, communicating, and acting among those who share a language, a historic period, and a geographic location (Triandis, 1996). More recently Chiu and Chen (2004) have defined culture as “a network of knowledge that is produced, distributed, and reproduced among a collection of interconnected people” (p. 173). Culture is transmitted through language, media messages, cultural practices and institutions, and through the modeling of behavior. Cultural influences on personhood were a prevalent concern in early personality psychology (e.g., Allport, 1954; Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948; McClelland, 1961), but largely ignored in modern personality theory and research until the early 1990s.