Setting the Scene

Vani Borooah

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the main themes presented in this book. Most books on happiness are concerned with answering, in their diverse ways, a basic question: how should I live? Such books assume, however, that the path to happiness lies entirely within one’s control. Happiness is simply a matter of doing certain things and refraining from doing certain other things. This book, however, takes a different view. It is that happiness is not always within our control but, instead, prey to the attitudes and actions of others. Following Jean-Paul Sartre’s aphorism, “hell is other people”, the broad theme of this book is that “unhappiness is other people”. In the language of economics, “other” people, through their attitudes and actions, create externalities – generally negative - which serve to make “us” unhappy. The instruments for creating such externalities are intolerance and feelings of envy/superiority. This book expands on this theme in respect of three areas: religion, money, and prejudice.

Keywords: Survey; Happiness; Issues in Welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H0 I00 I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Routledge Studies in Development Economics (2024): pp. 1-9

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/123175/1/MPRA_paper_123175.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:123175

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().