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Happiness and Economics
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Happiness and Economics

How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being

Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer
Princeton UP, 2001
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

This is a book of excellent insight and originality that will be accessible primarily to scholars. Authors and economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer explore the uncharted terrain of happiness. They teach that happiness is fundamental to economics, although economists disagree about what happiness is and how to measure it. The authors emphasize the importance of intangible, subjective factors in happiness, and bring a good deal of psychological research into the discussion of how economic circumstances affect happiness. They offer surprising evidence and conclusions, such as the facts that the old and the young are almost equally happy, and that a rising income ceases to increase happiness after clearing a relatively low hurdle. getAbstract.com recommends this book to the advanced specialists on economics and psychology for whom it was written, with the caveat that its dry academic style will not bring happiness to the intrigued but non-expert reader.

Summary

The Weight of Happiness

Happiness matters greatly in both philosophy and economics. Aristotle said that happiness is the supreme good, the end to which everything else is a means. However, he defined happiness quite differently than economists do today. In Aristotle’s view, happiness was not a matter of pleasure but a matter of morality. The moral person was happy.

Thomas Aquinas borrowed Aristotle’s notion of happiness as moral worth. Even the Scottish Enlightenment’s more materialist philosophers had a clear sense that material wealth had a limited ability to increase happiness. So, for that matter, did Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians, who found happiness to be a matter of balancing hedonic pleasure and displeasure in favor of the former. Bentham did not identify hedonic pleasure with hedonism, but he did allow for such intangible pleasures as personal satisfaction at achieving a goal. Although he was a long way from Aristotle, who saw the pursuit of pleasure as a kind of self-enslavement that ultimately caused unhappiness, Bentham was also a long way from the objectivist economists who now dominate the field.

Objective vs. Subjective Reasons for Happiness...

About the Authors

Bruno S. Frey is professor of economics at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Zurich. He also wrote Economics as a Science of Human Behavior, Not Just for the Money. Alois Stutzer is a University of Zurich lecturer on the theory of economic policy, including public choice, labor economics, and economics and psychology.

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