August 2005

“Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”
- H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
“Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence.”
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to [...]

By far the best overview of the happiness literature from an economics and policy perspective is Frey & Stutzer’s Happiness and Economics. Frey, a first class constitutional theorist, explores the big impact policy can have on happiness, but warns against construing the happiness function as an approximation of that unicorn of social science, the social [...]

Let’s go back to Layard’s attempt to justify his relative position “pollution” argument for taxation against his strawman libertarian critic:
Libertarians strongly object to this argument. They say it panders to the ignoble sentiment of envy, which ought to be disregarded. This is an extraordinarily weak argument. Public policy has to deal with human nature as [...]

“I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”
- Captain Shotover in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House
Discussion:
No doubt it would be helpful [...]

This fascinating paper by Di Tella and MacCulloch shows that the simple fact that one’s favored political party is in power has a big effect on happiness:
A surprising finding of the paper concerns the relative importance of politics. We include in our partisan happiness equations a variable that measures the ideological position of the government [...]