You may or may not have noticed that this blog has grown cobwebs. I decided to concentrate all of my blogging at my primary blog, The Fly Bottle. However, I’ve been blogging a good deal about happiness lately (in addition to other topics philosophical, economical, psychological, and political), so [...]
I’ve got a new piece at The American on how money saves us from unhappiness in old age. A slice:
Easterlin, a pioneer of the study of happiness in the field of economics, set out to chart the trajectory of happiness over an ordinary person’s life-span. He discovered that, on average, happiness rises slowly [...]
Contrary to the common notion that paying taxes can be a painful experience, researchers at the University of Oregon say the practice actually may trigger feelings of satisfaction and happiness.
“Paying taxes can make citizens happy,” Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology, said in a release accompanying the study in the [...]
I’ve only just begun, but I think I’m ready to recommend The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
Hecht has a fine pluralistic sensibility and a knack for getting distance from otherwise invisible cultural assumptions by relating them to historical precedent. She’s [...]
Matthew Pianalto has written a useful review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness. It looks to me like Shumaker is one of those guys who insists on making happiness coextensive with their conception of a good life, and then argues that we’re can’t be happy, even though we [...]
The truly delicious bits of this new NBER working paper by Di Tella, Haisken-De New, and MacCulloch on adaptation to income and status is the stuff on political leanings:
We study “habituation” to income and to status using individual panel data on the happiness of 7,812 people living in Germany [...]
Harvard’s Ed Glaeser essay in this month’s Cato Unbound is fresh this morning. He says lots of interesting things, but I thought I’d pick out this bit, which concerns my pet issues:
A belief in the value of liberty flows strongly through mainstream neoclassical economics. Economists frequently speak about an [...]
The solipsism of childlessness may be deplorable, but it’s not unhappy:
Although they won’t receive flowers or candy on Mother’s Day, women who have not had children seem to be just as happy in their 50s as those who did go down the family path.
In fact the loneliest, least [...]
Over at National Review Online, I examine how French economic policy is giving French folk short shrift happiness-wise in light of the upcoming election.
[...] If you’re tired of reading about happiness, maybe you’d like to hear me talk about it. Here’s my appearance on Counterpoint for ABC National Radio (that’s Australia) with presenter Michael Duffy, and my latest Cato podcast with Anastasia Uglova.
If you’re not tired of reading about happiness, here are [...]
