Or Paradox Regained? The answer is Paradox Regained. New data confirm that for countries worldwide long-term trends in happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related. The principal reason that Paradox critics reach a different conclusion, aside from problems of data...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life", such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements....

Using panel data from the BHPS and its Understanding Society extension, we study life satisfaction (LS) and income over nearly two decades, for samples split by education, and age - to our knowledge for the first time. The highly educated went from lowest to highest LS, though their average...

John Stuart Mill claimed that "men do not desire merely to be rich, but richer than other men." Do people desire to be richer than others? Or is it that people desire favorable comparisons to others more generally, and being richer is merely a proxy for this ineffable relativity? We conduct an...

Richer people are happier than poorer people, but when a country becomes richer over time, its people do not become happier. This seemingly contradictory pair of findings of Richard Easterlin has be-come famous as the Easterlin Paradox. However, it was met with counterevidence. To shed more...

There is no significant relationship between the improvement in happiness and the long term rate of growth of GDP per capita. This is true for three groups of countries analyzed separately - 17 developed, 9 developing, and 11 transition - and also for the 37 countries taken together. Time series...

Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective...