The ongoing debate on the purpose of ‘development’ has given rise to many new studies on happiness and quality of life situated in both developed and developing countries. Recent insights from this field include the suggestions that ever-increasing incomes do not always increase happiness,...

This paper relates different subjective approaches to wellbeing to different traditions of economic analysis. The dominant formula of ‘Subjective Well-Being’ is attractive because it promises a direct measure of utility, but other approaches bring different strengths to policy evaluation....