Welcome, this is the Cato Daily Podcast, April 20th and I'm your host

Anastasia Glova.

T-G-I-F. Friday is probably as good a day as any to address the topic of happiness, a budding area for researchers.

Cato's own Will Wilkinson recently authored a policy analysis on the subject,

entitled In Pursuit of Happiness Research. Is it reliable? What does it imply for policy?

It's in this podcast's RSS feed or you can always access the study on the Cato website.

Will is our happiness reporter for today.

Let's begin with what is happiness research?

Happiness research is an interdisciplinary field involving economists, sociologist, psychologists,

psychologists, and other areas that tries to determine the correlates of happiness or what sometimes called subjective

well-being.

So things that they measure include trying to find the correlation or relationship between people's self-reported happiness and

variables like how many children they have, how much money they make, whether

they're employed or unemployed, whether they're married or not married.

So going through all sorts of different kinds of variables to determine how they affect people's

sense of well-being.

Okay, so then how does one go about empirically gauging something as subjective as one's well-being?

Well, most happiness research is conducted just using surveys.

So there are survey questions. We can do one right now, so I could ask you,

Anastasia. Taking your life as a whole, how happy would you say you are these days on

a scale of one to ten?

I'd say ten.

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