Raising the happiness of all: is it even possible?
Abstract:
We revisit the Easterlin paradox about the flatness of the happiness trend over the long run, in spite of sustained economic development. With a bounded scale that explicitly refers to “the best possible life for you” and “the worst possible life for you”, is it even possible to observe a rising trend in self-declared life satisfaction? We consider the possibility of rescaling, i.e. that the interpretation of the scale changes with the context in which respondents are placed. We propose a simple model of rescaling and reconstruct an index of latent happiness on the basis of retrospective reports included in unexploited archival data from the USA that we retrieved. We show that national well-being has substantially increased from the 1950s to the mid-2000s, on par with GDP, health and education. Using Gallup data from 120 countries, we also show that the happiness index generally rises.
About Claudia Senik:
Claudia Senik is Professor at Sorbonne-University and the Paris School of Economics, and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the Director of the Wellbeing Observatory at CEPREMAP. Educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she received her PhD from EHESS. Her main research area is the economics of happiness, with a special interest in the relationship between income growth, income inequality and subjective wellbeing, as well as wellbeing at work. She also conducts a research stream on the cultural dimension of gender norms and the role of institutions in changing them.
Language: English
This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.
Supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) 17931929