Happiness is generally considered to be an ultimate goal in life; virtually everybody wants to be happy. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 takes it as a self-evident truth that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right”, comparable to life and liberty. It follows that economics is – or should be – about individual happiness. In particular, the question is how do ec...

Governments have paid great attention to the results of happiness research. In many countries, the object of government policy is no longer taken to be development in terms of raising GNP. Their focus has shifted to a National Index of Happiness. This paper analyses whether such an aggregate Happiness Index is a better guide to development than GNP or other indices of development. We argue that...

Few things seem more natural and functional than wanting to be happy. We suggest that, counter to this intuition, valuing happiness may have some surprising negative consequences. Specifically, because striving for personal gains can damage connections with others and because happiness is usually defined in terms of personal positive feelings (a personal gain) in western contexts, striving for ...

The measurement of individual happiness challenges the notion that revealed preferences only reliably and empirically reflect individual utility. Reported subjective well-being is a broader concept than traditional decision utility; it also includes concepts like experience and procedural utility. Microand macroeconometric happiness functions offer new insights on determinants of life satisfact...

Subjective happiness has been assessed in the U.S. since 1972 by the General Social Survey (GSS). We examine trends in happiness over the last 25 years, and investigate the objective causes of these trends. We present a model of how objective indicators of QOL (such as GDP/person, crime rates, etc.) affect satisfaction with domains of life, with overall happiness of citizens, and with behaviora...

Background and Objectives: Nowadays adolescents as the human capital of every society, in addition to the pressures of transition from adolescence period, are affected by environmental pressures, such as poverty, violence, and substance abuse. Given these factors, resilience plays an important role in this period. The present study aimed to investigate the role of happiness, attachment styles, ...