Measuring happiness

I have long been intrigued by the notion of measuring and researching "happiness' both at the individual level as well as culturally and cross-culturally. While I have been interested, much of the work to-date has been amateurish. Or should I say, much of the work to date has not adequately addressed the issue of how to measure happiness. Much of this is covered in The World Isn't Ready for Gross National Happiness by Noah Smith.

A couple of good points.

The focus on happiness represents a philosophical shift for the economics field, but not necessarily an unwelcome one. Economists’ traditional measures of well-being are based on utility, or the degree to which people get what they want. If I want a burger and I get it, my utility goes up -- and, according to standard economics, I am therefore better off. It’s a fundamentally libertarian, individualistic idea, because it says that people ought to get what they want.

But suppose the burger doesn’t make me happy? Suppose I feel bad after I eat it, because I broke my diet? Even though I might choose to eat burgers over and over, if I’m unhappy each time I succumb to temptation, am I really better off? Economists who study happiness have begun to entertain the notion that perhaps what matters isn’t the degree to which people get what they want, but how much they like what they get. Good emotions may be more important than satiation of desires.

That’s not a crazy idea. There’s one huge problem with happiness research, however. There is really no good way to measure what people are actually feeling.

Echoes the folk wisdom of Love the One you're With by Crosby, Stills, Nash.

If you're down and confused
And you don't remember who you're talking to
Concentration slips away
Because your baby is so far away

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with

Back to Smith's piece.

If hedonic adaptation is driving most of people’s responses to surveys, then we should see little correlation between self-reported happiness and emotionally driven behavior. In fact, that is what recent Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton and his co-author Anne Case found when they looked at the correlation between self-reported happiness and suicide:

Suicide is the ultimate act of desperate unhappiness...In a recent study...we find that some of the factors that correlate with happiness also correlate with low suicide rates, but that just as many do not...The lack of any clear relation between suicide and happiness [means that] perhaps we should...be cautious [about] giving too much weight to self-reports of life satisfaction.

If self-reported happiness can’t even predict how likely people are to kill themselves, then there are big problems with the research methodology. Emotions are incredibly important, but they are also complex, subtle and poorly understood. Until we find a better way of measuring them, I don’t think economists or governments should rush to replace traditional measures of well-being with survey measures of happiness.