Are You Happier Now Than You Were Four Years Ago?

A report in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest tells us that money doesn't buy happiness:

Money, however, is a means to an end, and that end is well-being. But money is an inexact surrogate for well-being, and the more prosperous a society becomes, the more inexact a surrogate income becomes.

The authors argue that, sure, you need a certain amount of resources to be happy (starving people aren't happy), and money buys more choices, but beyond a certain point--a point we Americans have surpassed, the correlation no longer holds. But we still measure success--as individuals and as a culture--by money, presumably, the authors say, because economic measures are ubiquitous and widely reported. (And easier to measure objectively oneself, I might add: you can always know exactly what's in your bank account; it's not so easy to put a number on a sense of malaise.)

However, the authors of this article suggest that psychological science does have sufficient indicators of well-being to assess our happiness as a nation. And if we took this seriously:

...politicians should base their campaigns on their plans for reducing distress, increasing life satisfaction and meaning, enhancing marital and leisure satisfaction, and optimizing engagement at work.

That's an awfully tall order. And one somewhat less amenable to sound bites: much easier to count jobs, report a change in interest rates. (We'll leave for another time a discussion of the essential meaninglessness of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.) But no doubt someone will figure out how to reduce it to a slogan; perhaps instead of a chicken in every pot, a TV in every living room, it will be a soft, furry pet in every lap . . .