Events
Quality of Life,
why focusing on the Good life is good business
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Professor Carol Graham
The Economic Value of Happiness
Carol Graham is Senior Fellow and Charles Robinson Chair in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development Programs at the Brookings Institution. She is also College Park Professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
She is the author of Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies (with Stefano Pettinato, Brookings, 2002). She is also the author of articles in journals including the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the World Bank Research Observer, the Journal of Socio-Economics, World Economics, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Development Studies, the Journal of Latin American Studies, World Development, the Journal of Happiness Studies, and of numerous chapters in edited volumes, including, most recently, in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
Throughout the centuries, human happiness and its causes have been a central concern to clerics, philosophers, psychologists, and therapists of various kinds. Given the subject matter, some might be surprised to see economists dipping their toes into these waters, viewing them as Johnny-come-latelys
or even as gatecrashers-economics, after all, is sometimes known as the 'dismal science.' But economists have their own rich tradition in this area, and their discipline is, in fact, rooted in 'moral science', in which happiness plays a central role.
Moreover, as "queen of the social sciences", economics bringswith it insights from myriad aspects of social life and a vast array ofmathematical tools for exploring relationships between self-reported happiness and just about anything else one can think of.
By bringing economic and psychological principles to bear, 'happiness economists' have produced a substantial body of evidence that health is a consistent determinant of self-reported happiness-one that transcends national boundaries, belief systems, and the highly subjective nature of happiness. The fruits of their labors include 'happiness equations', in which health is among the handful of measurable
variables that account for observed variability in human happiness. Even more compelling, Carol Graham informs us, is the observation that health correlates more strongly with happiness than any other variable included -even income- in countries throughout the world. Happiness surveys, Graham shows us, are powerful tools that members of the health policy community can use to gain
fresh perspectives on the public's health behavior and to develop policy worldwide.
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