Counting happiness from the individual level to the group level

The development of a reliable procedure for the aggregation of individual level happiness leads to a proper understanding of group level happiness. Such a procedure is indispensable for a more responsive public policy-making. However, individual self-reports on happiness must meet the dual requirements of cardinality and relative interpersonal comparability in order that aggregation is not problematic and the resulting measure not only makes sense but also useful for group level interventions. The paper demonstrates the procedure for obtaining group level happiness using data from the Philippines.