#  Happy Holidays? 

 





December 22, 2009

 

 

This morning the [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/nyregion/22nyc.html?hp) alerted me to a [Science piece](http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1180606) written by two economists working on measuring happiness. Their basic finding is that objective measures of quality of life (nice climate, etc) are pretty highly correlated with subjective, self-reported measures of how satisfied people are with their lives. They provide a ranking of US states by happiness level, accessible [here](http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/research_finds_the/), which shows Louisiana first and New York last, with Massachusetts falling to 43rd. Go figure -- I like living in MA.

I really want to see some cross-national comparisons but I doubt anyone will be moving on to that unless the World Bank picks up Bhutan's [Gross National Happiness](http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/) measure as one of their development indicators.

Happy holidays to all!

Posted by [Richard Nielsen](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/author/richard-nielsen-1/) at December 22, 2009 9:25 AM



 

 

 



 

 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)