• Advice for job-seekers! Inquire about autonomy, meaningful work, and a respectful atmosphere -- these will affect your well-being at work.
• Economic growth can be accompanied by declining happiness (or declining subjective well-being (SWB)).
• Three types of happiness measures: (1) Hedonic (or affective, or experienced); (2) Evaluative (life satisfaction); (3) Eudaimonic (meaning and purpose).
These measures are far from perfectly correlated; people seem to think that evaluative measures (overall life satisfaction) are most important.
• Four common findings: (1) Relative position matters; (2) Reference points matter; (3) Adaptation occurs, for both favorable and unfavorable events; and, (4) People can mispredict how their choices will affect their happiness, and actual choices might not reveal preferences (as measured by SWB).
• Some additional common findings include: (4) Income is positively connected with happiness; (5) Income increases are subject to hedonic adaptation; and (6) With respect to age, happiness appears to be u-shaped.
• SWB provides indirect evidence on the value of activities or possessions.
• For instance, we don’t need to ask, how happy does smoking make you; nor do we just infer from your heavy smoking that it greatly contributes to your well-being. Rather, we can ask you in general how happy you are, and then learn about your activities, and see (across large numbers of people) if smoking is associated with increased happiness.
• Maybe policy should aim to help the least happy people?
• People in objectively poor circumstances might still have a lot of hedonic happiness – have they adapted, or lowered their expectations?
• Beware of making happiness an official policy goal!? -- people will distrust the government's motives as well as the reliability of the data.
• Much of your happiness is inherited.
• Noise and commuting are hard to adapt to.
• In health studies, SWB can be a supplement to QALYs.
• Mental health becomes a priority when SWB is emphasized.
No comments:
Post a Comment