Happiness & Public Policy

Time to pick up the pace with the happiness blogging. If I’m not doing a lot of thinking, at least I can be doing some linking.

Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness, by Jennifer Senior

More and more psychologists and researchers believe they know what makes people happy. But the question is, does a New Yorker want to be happy?Ab

Positive psychologist Chris Peterson on ABC News piece about measuring happiness, with a link to the survey on the Authentic Happiness site.

Dogs Come Top Of The Human ‘Happiness Index’.

There have been a ton of pieces about the Kahneman, Krueger, et al paper in Science. It’s far less exciting than it looks, and a little bit confused, I think. They have found, basically, that a backrub doesn’t feel any better when you’re rich. But they take this to mean that wealthier people are victim of a kind of “illusion” when they report “very happy” at higher rates. But is the integration of moment utilities have a better claim to “happiness” than global life-satisfaction judgments? If so, why? Argumentum ad Bentham? My take: a cultural constructivist emotional syndrome conception of happiness helps explain both the experience sampling and the life satisfaction survey results. Whoops! Thinking.