Some results are predictable enough: Work is miserable, and commuting is worse. Others are not so obvious. For instance, praying is fun, but looking after the kids is not. Spending time with your friends is one of the most enjoyable things you can do, but spending time with your spouse is merely OK. In fact, parents or other relatives turn out to make more enjoyable company than the supposed love of your life.

What is perfectly clear, though, is that socializing with anyone except your boss makes you feel good. Sex is best of all. This is handy advice at last. But what if you are having sex with your boss? Whereof economists cannot speak, we must remain silent. [More]

Our analysis points to two explanatory factors. The Danish football triumph of 1992 has had a lasting impact. This victory arguably provided the biggest boost to the Danish psyche since the protracted history of Danish setbacks began with defeat in England in 1066, followed by the loss of Sweden, Norway, Northern Germany, the Danish West Indies, and Iceland. The satisfaction of the Danes, however, began well before 1992, albeit at a more moderate level. The key factor that explains this and that differentiates Danes from Swedes and Finns seems to be that Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come. Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.

This finding is supported by Danish news coverage of the 2005 pronouncement by Ruut Veenhoven, Dutch Professor of Social Conditions for Happiness and head of the World Database of Happiness, that Danes are the world’s happiest people. The headlines in Denmark ran: We’re the happiest “lige nu.” The phrase “lige nu,” which can be translated literally as “just now,” is a quintessentially Danish expression redolent, indeed reeking, of the sentiment “for the time being, but probably not for long and don’t have any expectations it will last.” [More]

Labels: happiness

And then, finally, I came to the thought that Bretton Woods, the fixed-exchange-rate system, was coming apart. And when it finally comes apart, wouldn't there be a need for foreign-exchange futures? Our board thought I was crazy, and very frankly I thought it was a little crazy too, because why hadn't anybody else done this? I went to Milton Friedman, though, and he absolutely embraced the idea.

So the board had to go along with me. And the minute we went to foreign exchange, I said to the membership that if it works in foreign exchange, the sky is the limit! I was like a kid in a candy store, honest to God. Because in agriculture, where could you go with it? But in finance - ah, look at this! I mean, whoa, anything you want! [More of interview]

Labels: happiness, wealth

If people are determined to pursue their calling rather than simply taking a job, some professions (surgery, cookery, genetics) may become overcrowded, others undersubscribed. But when a job cannot find enough takers, the market finds ways to ennoble it: first pay, and then status, begin to rise. It becomes economical to automate some aspects of the work, employing machines to do the deadening humdrum toil that men and women are no longer willing to put up with. What remains of the job will be the bits only people can do: tasks that require insight, ingenuity and the human touch. Ms McCloskey recalls the Cincinnati sewerman, interviewed a few years ago on National Public Radio, who earned $60,000 a year and liked to tell girls he was an “environmental” worker. [More]

"In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, [the poor] are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings fight for."

Recent research conducted by Daniel Gilbert (a professor of psychology at Harvard) and others has unearthed several new elements about the business of happiness as concerns humans. The first element being that the major events of our lives have a minimal effect on our overall long-term happiness. Did you get married this year, or not? Have you been involved in a war lately or a victim of a crime? Regardless as to your answer, it is a fair bet that your happiness will be more or less the same in the long term. The latter could be understood if you accept that the brain has a mechanism of sorts to reset people back to their baseline happiness over time. The second element of happiness is the terrible truth that we are awful at predicting what will give us happiness. Do you expect that a new car or home will give you happiness? Certainly it will, just not as much as you expect. The same is true in the opposite. Do you think that getting rejected by your crush or losing a game will make you unhappy? It will, just not as much as you expect. [More]

Federal payments put money in farmers' pockets, which they used to bid up land prices to as much as three times its production value, Lines said. Prime Ohio farmland is valued at $2,500-3,000 per acre, compared to its productive worth of about $1,000 per acre, Lines said. [More drivel from 2001 here]

Labels: economics, happiness

Labels: economics, happiness, psychology, video