The Mental Elf:
The Origins of Happiness: can we predict life satisfaction?
22 January 2018
The prospect of this book did make me happy. The idea that a group of well-respected, eminent economists would be making the case that government should focus its efforts on increasing the happiness and life satisfaction of the population, rather than just focussing on money and Gross Domestic Product, is something to warm the heart on a cold winters evening. The book begins by quoting Thomas Jefferson “the care of human life and happiness… is the only legitimate object of good government” and the authors then set out their main purpose as to “lay out in quantitative terms what is known about the causes of well-being”. The authors do this by undertaking a series of analyses of data from longitudinal studies of human development (mostly from the UK), and they base their conclusions predominantly on this form of evidence. Related publications
The Origins of Happiness by Andrew Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Natavudh Powdthavee and George Ward is published by Princeton University Press, January 2018