Think about what would make you really, really happy. More money? Wrong. Smiling, well-adjusted kids? Wrong again. The fact is we are terrible at predicting the source of joy. And whatever choices we do make, we likely later decide it was all for the best.
These are insights from happiness economics, perhaps the hottest field in what used to be called the dismal science. Happiness is everywhere--on the best-seller lists, in the minds of policymakers, and front and center for economists--yet it remains elusive. The golden role of economics has always been that well-being is a simple function of income. That's why nations and people alike strive for higher incomes-money gives us choice and a measure of freedom. After a certain income can, we simply don't get any happier. And it isn't what we have, but whether we have more than our neighbor, that really matters. So the news last week that in 2006 top hedge-fund managers took home $ 240 million, minimum, probably didn't make them any happier, it just made the rest of us less so.
Now policymakers are racing to figure out what makes people happy, and just how they should deliver it. Countries as diverse as Bhutan, Australia, China, Thailand and the U. IC are coming up with "happiness indexer," to be used alongside GDP as a guide to society's progress. In Britain, the "politics of happiness" will likely figure prominently in next year's elections. Never mind that the world's top happiness researchers recently gathered at a conference in Rome to debate whether joy is even measurable.
Why is this all happening now? only in the last decade have economists, psychologists, biologists and philosophers begun cross-pollinating in such a way to arrive at "happiness studies". Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert humorously sums up much of the new wisdom in his book "Stumbling on Happiness". He says 24-hour television and the Internet have allowed us all to see more seemingly happy people than ever before. "We're surrounded by the lifestyles of the rich and famous," says Gilbert, "rubbing our noses in the fact that others have more."
of course, the idea that money isn't the real key to happiness isn't new. The 18th-centry British Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham argued that public policy should try to. maximize happiness, and many prominent economists agreed but could not quite embrace the idea. There was just no way to measure happiness objectively.
one of the early revelations of happiness research, from Richard Easterlin at the University of Southern
California, was that while the rich are typically happier than the poor, the happiness boost from extra cash isn't that great once one rises above the poverty line. The reason, says Easterlin, is the "hedonic cycle": we get used to being richer dam quick, and take it for granted or compare it to what others have, not what we used to have. Tums out, keeping up with the Joneses is hard-wired into our brains, thanks to our pack-creature roots.
Though many happiness researchers say "work less, play more" is the formula for happiness, Ruut Veenhoven, a professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, suggests otherwise. Hard-working Americans ranks 17th on his list; the hard-vacationing French 39th. Human beings do want a European-style safety net, but also want freedom and opportunity.
And perhaps our intuitions about happiness should triumph over the fuzzy data, anyway. The economics of happiness has given us a couple of fairly hard and fast roles about well-being-being truly poor is bad, and time with friends and family are good. The good news is that whatever choices we make individually and as societies in the pursuit of happiness there's good chance that they'll seem better in hindsight. Yet another truism of happiness is that "we all wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to our past decision-making," says Gilbert. Today's dreadful life choice will likely be tomorrow's happy accident.

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