The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being

People do not always know what will give them lasting satisfaction. They tend to focus too much on their initial response to changes in their daily lives and overlook how soon the pleasure of a new car or a pay raise or a move to warmer climes will disappear and leave them no happier than before. Conversely, they often fail to realize how quickly t

“a person is said to have high [well-being or happiness] if she or he experiences life satisfaction and frequent joy, and only infrequently experiences unpleasant emotions such as

Instead, they attach too much importance to the immediate effects of a happy or unhappy experience without realizing how quickly they will adapt and grow used to what has occurred.

One investigator has found that couples that deliberately choose to be childless are just as happy as couples that make the opposite choice.36

In particular, they seem unable to predict the duration of the happiness or unhappiness brought on by many common events or changes in their lives.

Several familiar lifestyle choices also have surprisingly little effect on well-being. Moving to warmer climates does not help. Likewise, hours spent watching television or going to the movies do not make much positive difference and yield less satisfaction than exercising, gardening, or playing sports.28 Other experiences, such as a good meal at a

Yet psychologists report that those who attach great importance to achieving wealth tend to suffer above-average unhappiness and disappointment.21

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert cites several other studies showing that the happiness of couples declines after the birth of children and does not rise again until their offspring leave home.38

The second discovery of psychologists (including the Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman) is that people are often surprisingly bad judges of what will make them happy.14