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Toward national wellbeing accounts (2004)
| Venue: | American Economic Review |
| Citations: | 80 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Kahneman04towardnational,
author = {Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger and David Schkade and Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone},
title = {Toward national wellbeing accounts},
journal = {American Economic Review},
year = {2004},
pages = {429--434}
}
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Abstract
Economists have traditionally eschewed direct measures of well-being on methodological grounds: the private nature of experience and the discomfort of making interpersonal comparisons. Instead, income is often used as a proxy for opportunities and well-being. If people are not fully rational, however, their choices will not necessarily maximize their experienced utility, and increasing their opportunities will not necessarily make them better off (Kahneman, 1994; Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler, 2004). Direct measures of experienced utility become particularly relevant in a context of bounded rationality. Furthermore, advances in psychology and neuroscience suggest that experienced utility and well-being can be measured with some accuracy (Kahneman et al., 1999). Robust and interpersonally consistent relationships have been observed between subjective measures of experience and both specific measures of brain function and health outcomes. In part because of these findings, economic research using subjective indicators of happiness and life satisfaction has proliferated in recent years (see Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer [2002] for a survey). Most work on well-being uses a question on overall life satisfaction or happiness. We suggest an alternative route based on time budgets and affective ratings of experiences. I. Plausible and Puzzling Findings of Well-Being Research Numerous studies have established that life satisfaction is weakly correlated with income and with religiosity, but uncorrelated with either
Keyphrases
toward national wellbeing account experienced utility life satisfaction direct measure methodological ground affective rating alternative route bounded rationality time budget alois stutzer economic research brain function private nature subjective measure richard thaler overall life satisfaction well-being research numerous study specific measure bruno frey consistent relationship recent year health outcome well-being us subjective indicator puzzling finding interpersonal comparison
