Subjective and Objective Well-Being in Relation to Economic Inputs: Puzzles and Responses

Des Gasper

Review of Social Economy, 2005, vol. 63, issue 2, 177-206

Abstract: Systematic, large discrepancies exist between direct measures of well-being and the measures that economists largely concentrate on, notably income. The paper assesses and rejects claims that income is satisfactorily correlated with well-being, and addresses the implications of discrepancies between income measures and measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and objective well-being (OWB) and also between subjective and objective well-being measures themselves. It discusses a range of possible responses to the discrepancies: for example, examination of the specifications used for income, SWB and OWB, and looking for other causal factors and at their possible competitive relations with economic inputs to well-being. It rejects responses that ignore the discrepancies or drastically downgrade their significance by adopting a well-being conception that ignores both SWB and OWB arguments (e.g.: by a claim that all that matters is choice or being active). It concludes that the projects of Sen and others to build syntheses of the relevant responses require further attention.

Keywords: subjective well-being; objective well-being; well-being; Easterlin paradox; capability approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760500130309 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rsocec:v:63:y:2005:i:2:p:177-206

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RRSE20

DOI: 10.1080/00346760500130309

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Social Economy is currently edited by Wilfred Dolfsma and John Davis

More articles in Review of Social Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().