How do you measure happiness?

We all want to be happy. Our governments often will take decisions in the name of our happiness or welfare. But in order to know whether one makes the right choice, the choice that improves one’s happiness, one must be able to compare two states of affairs and reliably decide which of the two is “happier.” That is, one needs to be able to measure happiness in some reliable way. How can this be done? How can happiness be measured?

A survey

Let’s begin with a fun exercise: Assume that you wanted to measure someone’s degree of happiness. Go on and prepare a questionnaire with 1-5 questions with which you would measure the level of happiness of some random person on the street!

Read on after you’re done.

Let’s see. Look at your survey now, and try to answer the following questions:

• Did you think of particular measurements more than once? Are some of your survey questions similar to others? What were the most common questions you thought of?
• What understanding of happiness is reflected in your questions?
• How could the answer lead to a wrong result, for example by measuring something other than “happiness”?
• Is the understanding of happiness reflected in the questions complete, or does it only address a specific version or subset of what we generally call “happiness”?

Here are some questions my students regularly come up with. Try to see how we can evaluate them using the four criteria above:

1. How often do you laugh loudly? (each month or year)
2. Do you have any religious background?
3. Are you a confident person?
4. Do you live under high pressure?
5. Are you satisfied with your life now?
6. How often do you smile or laugh?
7. Do you have good relationships with your family and friends?

What can we say about each of these questions?

Laughing

Number (1) seems to assume that laughing is correlated to happiness. On a superficial level, we certainly do expect laughing people to be happier than crying ones. But can we really say that people who don’t laugh are unhappy or less happy? One may be perfectly calm and happy in a satisfied way, without ever laughing out loud. While someone may make a big show of laughing his heart out, but in reality they may be unhappy, depressed, and feeling lonely.

Religiosity

Question (2) is also based on an interesting assumption, namely that there is some correlation between religiosity and happiness. We have discussed elsewhere that this is indeed the case. But why would this be so? A few quick thoughts:

• Religious people, particularly …

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