Measuring Happiness

Richard Easterlin

Chapter 2 in An Economist’s Lessons on Happiness, 2021, pp 7-17 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Happiness is about people’s feelings, so it’s measured by asking people how they feel: how happy they are, how satisfied with their lives, or where they stand on a “ladder of life.” The answers to such state-of-life questions turn out to be truthful and for most people do not change much from day to day or week to week. The responses are also comparable, because most people everywhere, when asked what’s important for their happiness, voice the same three principal factors: economic situation, family life, and health. Although responses differ from one person to the next in what specifically makes for happiness, these differences typically average out when we study groups of people, whether they are rich or poor, young or old, Americans or Indonesians. The three main sources of happiness predominate everywhere.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-61962-6_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030619626

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-61962-6_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).