Subjective Well-Being and Policy

Subjective Well-Being and Policy

This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit—or even maximization— of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to...

Measurement and Public Policy Uses of Subjective Well-Being

Over the centuries happiness, or more broadly, well-being has been subject o f unremitting debate. Recently, measures of so-called subjective well-being (SWB; e.g. self-reported happiness) have gained prominence and are receiving increasing attention from scientists, policy makers and the public alike. A consensus appears to be emerging that people’s self­ assessment of how well life is going c...

Subjective well-being

This paper examines the notion of “subjective well-being” as it is used in literature on subjective measures of well-being. I argue that those who employ the notion differ at least superficially on at least two points: first, about the relationship between subjective well-being and well-being simpliciter, and second, about the constituents of subjective well-being. In an effort to reconcile the...

Subjective well-being.

Culture and Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is composed of people’s evaluations of their lives, including pleasant affect, infrequent unpleasant affect, life satisfaction (LS). We review the research literature concerning the influence of culture on SWB. We argue that some types of well-being, as well as their causes, are consistent across cultures, whereas there are also unique patterns of well-being in socie...