Subjective measures of well-being - based on questions like "Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days: would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?" - are motivated in large part by widespread dissatisfaction with traditional economic...

This chapter explores accounts of individual and social welfare underlying contemporary welfare economics. It argues that there is a one-to-one mapping between three prominent approaches to welfare assessment and three philosophical accounts of individual well-being: while standard economics is...

This paper traces the historical roots of subjective measures of well-being, that is, measures designed to represent happiness, satisfaction, or other “positive” or desirable mental states. While it is often suggested that these measures are a modern invention, I argue that they have a long...

Behavioral economics has long defined itself in opposition to neoclassical economics, but recent developments suggest a synthesis may be on the horizon. In particular, a number of economists have argued that behavioral factors can be incorporated into standard theory, and that the days of...

Economics is permeated with value judgements, and removing them would be neither possible nor desirable. They are consequential, in the sense that they have a sizeable impact on economists’ output. Yet many economists may not even realise they are there. This paper surveys ways in which values...

The purpose of this paper is to give a principled answer to the question of under what conditions measures of happiness or life satisfaction, understood as subjectively experienced mental states, can serve as proxies for well-being. According to a widely held view, measures of happiness and life...

The rise of subjective measures of well-being represents at least two important trends in the measurement of welfare or well-being. The first trend, which has already received some attention in the literature, is a shift away from preference-satisfaction accounts of individual well-being and...