FEEDING THE ILLUSION OF GROWTH AND HAPPINESS: A REPLY TO HAGERTY AND VEENHOVEN Richard A. Easterlin Running head: FEEDING THE ILLUSION OF GROWTH AND HAPPINESS

If your letter had praised everything of mine, I would not have been as pleased as I am by your attempt to disprove and reject certain points. I regard this as a mark of friendship and the other as one of adulation. But in return I ask you to listen with an open mind to my rebuttal. For what you say, if it were allowed to pass without any reply from me, would be too one-sided. It is always a source of satisfaction to come across an article where one is cited often, especially by two scholars who have contributed so much to advance the study of subjective well-being. Of course, my happiness would have been greater had the references been favorable, rather than unfavorable. (Hereafter I use happiness and satisfaction interchangeably.) I take it that the Hagerty-Veenhoven (hereafter H-V) article (2003) is a rebuttal of my 1995 paper (Easterlin 1995), because there is only one reference to time series results of studies by other scholars done in the almost 10-year period since publication of my article. Indeed, I believe I detect an echo of a similar critique by one of the authors of my 1974 article (cf. Easterlin 1974 and Veenhoven 1991; for comments on the latter, see Easterlin 2004 forthcoming). 3 Apparently the editor and referee(s) of this Journal also viewed the H-V paper as a comment on my 1995 article; otherwise it would be hard to explain the absence of the customary literature review and reconciliation of new and disparate results with those of prior work. It seems appropriate, therefore, to offer a few comments in response, especially since the conclusions of the H-V article will no doubt be cited often as substantially different from my own when, in fact, they are not. I will focus on the time series analysis in the section " Descriptive Statistics of Happiness and Income " (pp. 11-18) which I take to be the heart of their article. Until one is sure about the data, methodology, and results of the time series analysis, hypothesis testing is superfluous. 1 THE UNITED STATES I was quite surprised to find the one country whose data I thought I knew fairly well to be among the seven for whom a significant positive correlation is reported between happiness and income. I had found no significant relationship between happiness and time over a period in which GDP …