Book Description
Can money buy happiness? Is income a reliable measure for life satisfaction? In this book, three economists explore the happiness-prosperity connection, investigating how economists measure life satisfaction and well-being. --
Author : Joachim Weimann
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 43,55 MB
Release : 2015-02-06
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0262028441
Can money buy happiness? Is income a reliable measure for life satisfaction? In this book, three economists explore the happiness-prosperity connection, investigating how economists measure life satisfaction and well-being. --
Author : Panel on Measuring Subjective Well-Being in a Policy-Relevant Framework
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 17,56 MB
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 0309294479
Subjective well-being refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives. This information has already proven valuable to researchers, who have produced insights about the emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups, engaged in different activities, at different points in the life course, and involved in different family and community structures. Research has also revealed relationships between people's self-reported, subjectively assessed states and their behavior and decisions. Research on subjective well-being has been ongoing for decades, providing new information about the human condition. During the past decade, interest in the topic among policy makers, national statistical offices, academic researchers, the media, and the public has increased markedly because of its potential for shedding light on the economic, social, and health conditions of populations and for informing policy decisions across these domains. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience explores the use of this measure in population surveys. This report reviews the current state of research and evaluates methods for the measurement. In this report, a range of potential experienced well-being data applications are cited, from cost-benefit studies of health care delivery to commuting and transportation planning, environmental valuation, and outdoor recreation resource monitoring, and even to assessment of end-of-life treatment options. Subjective Well-Being finds that, whether used to assess the consequence of people's situations and policies that might affect them or to explore determinants of outcomes, contextual and covariate data are needed alongside the subjective well-being measures. This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population's subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.
Author : Clayton M. Christensen
Publisher : Harvard Business Review Press
Page : 28 pages
File Size : 23,6 MB
Release : 2017-01-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1633692574
In the spring of 2010, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply his wisdom to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life, which led to this now-classic article. Although Christensen’s thinking is rooted in his deep religious faith, these are strategies anyone can use. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.
Author : Martin Seligman
Publisher : Hachette UK
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 44,38 MB
Release : 2011-01-11
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 1857884132
In this important, entertaining book, one of the world's most celebrated psychologists, Martin Seligman, asserts that happiness can be learned and cultivated, and that everyone has the power to inject real joy into their lives. In Authentic Happiness, he describes the 24 strengths and virtues unique to the human psyche. Each of us, it seems, has at least five of these attributes, and can build on them to identify and develop to our maximum potential. By incorporating these strengths - which include kindness, originality, humour, optimism, curiosity, enthusiasm and generosity -- into our everyday lives, he tells us, we can reach new levels of optimism, happiness and productivity. Authentic Happiness provides a variety of tests and unique assessment tools to enable readers to discover and deploy those strengths at work, in love and in raising children. By accessing the very best in ourselves, we can improve the world around us and achieve new and lasting levels of authentic contentment and joy.
Author : Richard A. Easterlin
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 24,69 MB
Release : 2021-03-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 3030619621
Once called the “dismal science,” economics now offers prescriptions for improving people’s happiness. In this book Richard Easterlin, the “father of happiness economics,” draws on a half-century of his own research and that conducted by fellow economists and psychologists to answer in plain language questions like: Can happiness be measured? Will more money make me happier? What about finding a partner? Getting married? Having a baby? More exercise? Does religion help? Who is happier—women or men, young or old, rich or poor? How does happiness change as we go through different stages of life? Public policy is also in the mix: Can the government increase people’s happiness? Should the government increase their happiness? Which countries are the happiest and why? Does a country need to be rich to be happy? Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some of the answers are surprising (no, more money won’t do the trick; neither will economic growth; babies are a mixed blessing!), but they are all based on reason and well-vetted evidence from the fields of economics and psychology. In closing, Easterlin traces the genesis of the ongoing “Happiness Revolution” and considers its implications for people’s lives down the road.
Author : OECD
Publisher : OECD Publishing
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 19,10 MB
Release : 2013-03-20
Category :
ISBN : 9264191658
These Guidelines represent the first attempt to provide international recommendations on collecting, publishing, and analysing subjective well-being data.
Author : Andrew E. Clark
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 18,86 MB
Release : 2019-08-27
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0691196958
A new perspective on life satisfaction and well-being over the life course What makes people happy? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a range of evidence using large-scale data from various countries, the authors consider the key factors that affect human well-being, including income, education, employment, family conflict, health, childcare, and crime. The Origins of Happiness offers a groundbreaking new vision for how we might become more healthy, happy, and whole.
Author : Nick Powdthavee
Publisher : Icon Books Ltd
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 22,58 MB
Release : 2010-08-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1848312245
Why is marriage worth £200,000 a year? Why will having children make you unhappy? Why does happiness from winning the lottery take two years to arrive? Why does time heal the pain of divorce or the death of a loved one – but not unemployment? Everybody wants to be happy. But how much happiness – precisely – will each life choice bring? Should I get married? Am I really going to feel happy about the career that I picked? How can we decide not only which choice is better for us, but how much it's better for us? The result of new, unique research, The Happiness Equation brings to a general readership for the first time the new science of happiness economics. It describes how we can measure emotional reactions to different life experiences and present them in ways we can relate to. How, for instance, monetary values can be put on things that can't be bought or sold in the market – such as marriage, friendship, even death – so that we can objectively rank them in order of preference. It also explains why some things matter more to our happiness than others (like why seeing friends is worth more than a Ferrari) while others are worth almost nothing (like sunny weather). Nick Powdthavee – whose work on happiness has been discussed on both the Undercover Economist and Freakanomics blogs – brings cutting-edge research on how we value our happiness to a general audience, with a style that wears its learning lightly and is a joy to read.
Author : Richard Layard
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 49,5 MB
Release : 2006-06-27
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1101117710
There is a paradox at the heart of our lives. We all want more money, but as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not speculation: It's the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled. The central question the great economist Richard Layard asks in Happiness is this: If we really wanted to be happier, what would we do differently? First we'd have to see clearly what conditions generate happiness and then bend all our efforts toward producing them. That is what this book is about-the causes of happiness and the means we have to effect it. Until recently there was too little evidence to give a good answer to this essential question, but, Layard shows us, thanks to the integrated insights of psychology, sociology, applied economics, and other fields, we can now reach some firm conclusions, conclusions that will surprise you. Happiness is an illuminating road map, grounded in hard research, to a better, happier life for us all.
Author : Daniel Gilbert
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 49,21 MB
Release : 2009-02-24
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0307371360
A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we’re so lousy at predicting what will make us happy – and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off? Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.