The Wellbeing Reading List News: September 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.
September 2022
Diener, E., Suh, E.M., Lucas, R.E., & Smith, H.L (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological bulletin, 125(2), 276-302.
Total google scholar citations: 18272
Diener’s et al. article revolves around Wilson’s (1967) early findings/belief that the happy person to be well-paid, young, educated, religious, and married and how evidence has changed during the thirty years that span between the two articles. This article argues for a better understanding of the interaction between psychological factors with life circumstances and how this would also contribute to a better understanding of individual wellbeing, including issues such as causality and adaptation. The authors emphasize that the happy person is blessed with a positive temperament, tends to look on the bright side of things, and does not ruminate excessively about bad events, and is living in an economically developed society, has social confidants, and possesses adequate resources for making progress toward valued goals. The article ends by stating that “Hopefully, in 2028 nobody can possibly claim that we know nothing more than the ancient Greeks about subjective well-being.”
Stutzer, A. (2002). What can economists learn from happiness research? Journal of Economic Literature, 40 (2), 402-435.
Total google scholar citations: 4857
This article argues that the answer to the happiness questions can be understood as a proxy measure for utility, a central concept in economics. It then summarizes the main contributions of the literature and argues in favour of it use in economics. The article divides the relevance of the happiness literature for economics into three main points: the use of happiness to evaluate economic policy in terms of utility gains and losses, the importance of institutions and social capital for wellbeing, and the relevance of the happiness literature to feed theoretical models with information on concepts and assumptions. The article ends with recommendations for future research as well as discussing the challenges.
View the BEST/World Wellbeing Panel page HERE.