Tag Archives: happiness

What is Happiness?  Post your entries in the comments. Sandwichman WILL JUDGE THEM. Tags: happiness

Tyler Cowen comments on a paper, and Barkley Rosser, who is not an author of the paper but is interested in the issues, responds in the comments. (Ignore the trolls in the comments.) I agree with Barkley Rosser. Social phenomena are difficult to measure and subjectivity greatly complicates this. However, it doesn't invalidate all models any more than similar issues invalidate modeling in economics. Where problems arise lies not so much in modeling and modeling decisions as in...

Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has just published The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, which seems to be getting a major media push from a bunch of completely uncritical reviewers and commenters, some of whom really should know better. It is not that this book is totally wrong or bad, but that it way overstates its case, cherry picking data and the views of people he has interviewed, with only the slightest of caveats. A typical sophistic argument runs from...

Steve Levitt, in addition to gaining fame (at least at an economist level, not a Justin Bieber level) for writing Freakonomics, has made a career teasing cause and effect out of (largely) observational data. (By “observational data,” I mean that he doesn’t explicitly run controlled experiments in a lot of cases and just looks at the world as it transpired naturally instead.) Observational data presents an interesting challenge because people usually make choices in life rather than being...