 Inequality, Well-Being and Happiness in Historical PerspectiveHesse Jan-Otmar and Mark Spoerer Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook, 2013, vol. 54, issue 1, 9-13 Abstract: Happiness research is a comparably new field of economics. Until Richard Easterlin’s seminal contribution published in 1974, most economists believed there to be a clear and positive correlation between the material standard of living and subjective well-being (or happiness). Economic happiness research has found that, although income matters, inequality, other economic and non-economic factors also play an important role in subjective well-being. Although economic happiness research usually requires longitudinal data, there has so far been no cooperation with economic history. We argue that contact between these fields might be mutually beneficial to both sides. On the one hand, economic historians are experts on historical datasets and qualitative sources and can assist economists in their quest for information prior to the 1980s. On the other hand, the results of happiness research are valuable for analyzing problems in (economic) history for which traditional economic theory has proved to be insufficient. Keywords: economic history; happiness research; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jbwige:v:54:y:2013:i:1:p:9-13:n:1 Access Statistics for this article Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook is currently edited by Dieter Ziegler More articles in Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook from De Gruyter |
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