Www Loveofmoneyisrootofallprosperity Happy Makes Szh R RichardWagnerHerbertvonKarajanOrchestrePhilharmoniquedeBerlin Happiness Finding Happiness Life Happiness Happiness Quotes Happiness Richard Layard Money Make You Happy Happiness Layard Can Buy Happiness Money Makes You Happy Money Happy What’s wrong with happiness measurement ?

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The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.

Science June 2006: 312(5782)

eudoxis: the alternative explanation of the Kahneman et al. result is that perhaps satisfaction is just something different from an aggregation of moment to moment good mood.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to the focusing illusion argument. But the Science article doesn’t actually provide much evidence for it.

that happiness scores rebounded to where they were, 6-12 months after the injury/onset of illness. … made me very skeptical of that instrument.

I’ve seen my dearest friend (who has multiple sclerosis) go from being able to walk a block on crutches to being able to move only her head, left arm, and left thumb. I won’t say she’s as happy now as she was then (at some point the effects of disability on happiness presumably start to resemble those of low income), but she’s happier than many folks I know – thanks in part to her own indomitable spirit and in part to TV, the Internet and iTunes.

“Essentially it questions how you can compare bounded statistics (happiness on a 1-10 scale) with unbounded statistics (say income) and hope to get useful information out of them over any long period of time.”

Because you think either: (a) that happiness actually is bounded; or (b) that, given the distributions of self-reports we see around the place, the bound is sufficiently far off for most people that it doesn’t particularly matter for your empirical conclusions.

(b) seems pretty accurate at the moment. (a) is a little more contentious, but not implausible.

Tom, your version makes things even worse for the standard uses of this data. If we rate our own happiness relative to our own personal experience, then it’s obvious that happiness can’t change much over time. More broadly, though, you’re reinforcing my point that these 1-10 scales are inherently relative to some unstated comparator, so you can’t use data from them to infer that happiness is relative.

On the brain-scan data, I agree that this might work in principle. But while I haven’t followed the literature closely, I haven’t seen anything that uses such measures to validate international or cross-group comparisons, and obviously they can’t be used to check data from the 1950s and so on.

“Tom, your version makes things even worse for the standard uses of this data. If we rate our own happiness relative to our own personal experience, then it’s obvious that happiness can’t change much over time.”

(1) Perhaps I’m missing something, but this doesn’t seem obvious to me at all.

(2) Whether it’s worse or better than under your suggested mechanism depends whether the maximum of your own instantaneous happiness is more or less stable than the maximum of others average happiness.
(3) In any event, you could go one step further than Tom and argue that we may actually fix our upper bound at what we imagine life would be like if we were to continuously experience the maximum of our peers’ instantaneous happiness.

“More broadly, though, you’re reinforcing my point that these 1-10 scales are inherently relative to some unstated comparator, so you can’t use data from them to infer that happiness is relative.”

This doesn’t seem to follow either; it all depends on what the unstated comparator is. I don’t think your argument works unless you think that the comparator for the reporting function is the same as the comparator for the underlying well-being function. Clearly, if we fix our upper reporting bounds at our maximum experienced happiness, then we can’t use evidence from surveys to argue that happiness is relative to our maximum experienced happiness. But that isn’t what most people are claiming it’s relative to.

Hi all. Great discussion here. I won’t add much, except to say that it seems to me that the big opportunities to increase utility are not in wealthy country happiness but in the world’s poorest, in livestock animals, and in basic future well-being (e.g. existential risks). I will, however, make a shameless plug for found pWww Loveofmoneyisrootofallprosperity Happy Makes Szh R RichardWagnerHerbertvonKarajanOrchestrePhilharmoniquedeBerlin Happiness Finding Happiness Life Happiness Happiness Quotes Happiness Richard Layard Money Make You Happy Happiness Layard Can Buy Happiness Money Makes You Happy Money Happy What’s wrong with happiness measurement ? — Crooked Timberr Happiness tWww Loveofmoneyisrootofallprosperity Happy Makes Szh R RichardWagnerHerbertvonKarajanOrchestrePhilharmoniquedeBerlin Happiness Finding Happiness Life Happiness Happiness Quotes Happiness Richard Layard Money Make You Happy Happiness Layard Can Buy Happiness Money Makes You Happy Money Happy What’s wrong with happiness measurement ? — Crooked Timberu r You Quotes Happiness Finding Happiness Life Happiness Happiness Quotes Happiness Richard Layard Money Make You Happy Happiness Layard Can Buy Happiness Money Makes You Happy Money Happy

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