The measurement of individual happiness challenges the notion that revealed preferences only reliably and empirically reflect individual utility. Reported subjective well-being is a broader concept than traditional decision utility; it also includes concepts like experience and procedural...

Traditional economics identifies a person's well-being with the goods and services the person consumes and the utility that the person gets from such consumption. This, in turn, has led to the widely used approach of welfarism that uses individual utilities as ingredients for evaluating a...

In Happiness for All?, Carol Graham raises disquieting ideas about today's United States. The challenge she puts forward is an important one. Here we review the intellectual case and offer additional evidence. We conclude broadly on the author's side. Strikingly, Americans appear to be in...

This paper examines the impact of the failed coup d'état attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016, on people's happiness, life satisfaction, and trust and finds that the plot had a significant negative effect on all three variables. This paper is the first to show that coups d'état can have a...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

The article summarises the evolution of the Italian school of public finance, highlighting those themes that most attracted James Buchanan's interest. It considers such topics as the operations of the fiscal authorities, the Leviatan monopolist, financial delusion, public debt theory, and the...

This is the result of an interview conducted by email exchange during the period from July 2017 to February 2018, with minor adjustments later in 2018. Apart from some personal history, topics discussed include: (i) social choice, especially with interpersonal comparisons of utility; (ii)...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

The paper is a brief account of Georges-Théodule Guilbaud?s (1912-2006) contributions to contemporary aggregative theories. An unnoticed precursor, Guilbaud anticipated on the algebraic conception of aggregation and on the more recent judgment aggregation theory, which generalizes social...