Excellent talk on happiness by Justin Wolfers. Robert Frank and discussion which follow are also good but Wolfers is outstanding.

A couple of things I learned. The flat happiness line in the United States over time is often contrasted with rising GDP per capita to assert a paradox. The paradox goes away once you take into account that median earnings haven’t risen (ala TGS).

Wolfers also shows that income matters not just for happiness but for a large number of correlates, inputs and outputs of happiness. Compared to people in poorer countries, people in richer countries, for example, more often say their food tastes good, they report less pain and they smile more.



