Literature 1 Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach. Revised Edition. By

To describe what economists think about the recent boom in the “economics of happiness ” research is perhaps no different to quoting the now famous tagline from Marmite © commercials – which, if you happen to be living outside Great Britain, is a well-known food spread made purely from yeast-extract: You either love it or hate it. The negative attitudes many traditional economists have towards the use of “subjective well-being data ” in economic analysis is predictable. Despite having been taught to put people’s welfare at heart, economists are trained to ignore what people say about their well-being. Happiness or satisfaction data are criticized for being too subjective, too interpersonally incomparable, and too insensitive to changes in macroeconomic conditions such as GDP and unemployment rates to be of any real use to economists (see, for example, Johns and Ormerod, 2008). Then along came Happiness Quantified – a book that could perhaps challenge the way many of us view happiness research for good. Unlike other books that were published on the same topic before it (e.g., Frey and Bruno, 2002; Layard, 2005), Happiness Quantified is jam-packed with statistical theories, econometric models, policy applications, and not to mention a whole lot of numbers. Co-authored by Bernard Van Praag and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell, two specialists in applied micro-econometrics, the current volume (which is a revised version of its first print in 2004) tackles a wide range of issues related to the study o