The Wellbeing Reading List News: June-August 2022
View the original WWP Wellbeing Reading List HERE
We asked the World Wellbeing Panel (WWP) panelists to nominate 5 relevant papers in the wellbeing literature that they believed should be added to our Wellbeing Reading List. The nominations are in, and from now until the end of 2022, we will disclose the 24 most-nominated papers.
Papers will be revealed two at a time, starting with those that had the fewest nominations and using the number of citations in 2021 (according to Google Scholar) when there are ties.
The Wellbeing Reading List is managed by WWP panelist Daniela Andrén (Örebro University) and the managing committee of the World Wellbeing Panel.
Please use the hashtag #WellbeingReadingList on social media to share and comment on the papers.
June – August 2022
Easterlin, R.A. (1995). Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all? Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 27(1), 35-47.
Total google scholar citations: 4237
This paper is a follow up of Professor Easterlin’s 1974 seminal contribution by providing new evidence on the weak correlation between income and happiness growth over time, despite the positive correlation, at a given point in time, between income and happiness. The author reconciles the two findings by referring to changing material norms. In other words, as income of all increases, material norms shift. This paper presents empirical evidence aligned with this argument.
Kahneman, D., Krueger, A.B., Schkade, D.A., Schwarz, N. and Stone, A. A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The Day Reconstruction Method. Science, 306 (5702), 1776–1780.
Total google scholar citations: 4014
This paper introduces the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), an innovative measure developed by the authors to understand how individuals spend their time and what they experienced every day while doing different activities. This DRM opened up a new research agenda that relates subjective wellbeing to time use.
Kahneman, D. & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 107.38 (2010): 16489-16493
Total google scholar citations: 3450
This paper presents an analysis on the distinction between life satisfaction and emotional wellbeing, defined as the frequency and intensity of the following emotions: experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection. Emotional wellbeing is measured with questions regarding yesterday’s emotional experiences and life satisfaction with the Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale. The authors find that both measures have different correlates. Income, for example, shows a stronger correlation with life satisfaction and a plot analysis shows that while the correlation between income and emotional wellbeing flattens at around 75000 dollars, the correlation with life satisfaction is present at all income levels. The authors conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.
Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A & Frijters, P. (2004). How Important is Methodology for the Estimates of the Determinants of Happiness? The Economic Journal, 114 (497), 641-659.
Total google scholar citations: 3270
This paper presents the first systematic analysis of all the implicit assumptions made when using life satisfaction (subjective wellbeing) measures to infer individuals’ utility or welfare. The authors classify the assumptions into three theoretical and three statistical assumptions and reviewed the impact that each of them has on the results. The paper concludes that while assuming cardinality or ordinality of the life satisfaction answers is rather innocuous to the results, how time persistent individual unobserved factors are taken into the analysis has a significant impact. The impact of income on life satisfaction, for example, gets reduced by about 2/3 when controlling for individual fixed effects.
Diener, E. D., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The satisfaction with life scale. Journal of personality assessment, 49(1), 71-75.
Total google scholar citations: 36314
This paper contributes to life satisfaction measurement by presenting a study on the development and validation of the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a 5-item scale designed to measure global cognitive judgments of one’s life satisfaction,. Respondents need to answer the 5 items using a 7-point scale from strongly agree (7) to strongly disagree (1). The paper shows evidence of the SWLS’ high internal consistency and temporal reliability and its moderate to high correlation with other measures of subjective well-being.
Oswald. A.J. (1997), Happiness and Economic Performance. The Economic Journal 107(445), 1815-1831.
Total google scholar citations: 2874
Written 25 years ago, this paper argues for the use of happiness indicators as a measure of progress to be used by policy makers and , defends happiness measures as being meaningful and having a legitimate place in the political agenda. The paper also complements Easterlin’s 1974 seminar contribution by providing newer evidence on the weak link between economic growth and happiness and highlighting the importance of other macro-economic indicators, notably unemployment, which “[…] appears to be the primary economic source of unhappiness”
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