The Origins of Happiness

Introduction If we are interested in affecting life- satisfaction, we want to know how we could affect it by intervening at diff ...

Introduction But to evaluate a specific new policy we need to conduct a proper controlled experiment. This experiment will nor- ...

Introduction people mainly compare this outcome with that of other people?”— both crucial questions if we wish to increase the a ...

Introduction the result observed. But we have few such experiments in all social science and even fewer on happiness. So in this ...

Introduction Conclusion Is any of this remotely useful? Can we really persuade policy makers to focus on the life- satisfaction ...

Introduction become the standard prelude to policy change. The conse- quences will be massive. As Angela Merkel said “What matte ...

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1 Happiness over the Life Course: What Matters Most? All human life is here. — News of the World The central aim of this book is ...

Chapter 1 Interpreting the Results Throughout the analysis we start from the huge variation in well- being in the population. Th ...

Happiness over the Life Course where income is measured in dollars and education in years. From this type of equation we can pre ...

Chapter 1 the coefficients in an alternative version of equation (1) in which all the variables are “standardized”— that is they ...

Happiness over the Life Course Improving Adult Happiness So what can we say about what determines the life- satisfaction of an a ...

Chapter 1 mental illness is one based on an actual diagnosis (and this is the measure that we mainly use in Chapter 6). However ...

Happiness over the Life Course brings us to the more “distant” causes of human happiness — in childhood. Which aspects of childh ...

Chapter 1 measured by parents’ involvement with the child, and fam- ily stability by whether the parents were still together whe ...

Happiness over the Life Course The Causes of Adult Outcomes Equations (1) to (3) give us a good idea of the effect of in- terven ...

Chapter 1 and school. The analysis is based on the more detailed infor- mation provided by the Avon Study, which includes more d ...

Happiness over the Life Course All the determining variables are averaged over the child’s life up to 16. The results of each re ...

Family income Mother worked in 1st year Mother worked thereafter Father’s unemployment Mother’s mental health Father’s mental he ...

Happiness over the Life Course The next issue is how the parents relate to each other. There is clear evidence that parental con ...