The World Book Of Happiness EN. Home | Happy Planet Index. The Pursuit of Happiness: Can We Have an Economy of Well-Being? - Up Front Blog. At this year’s American Economic Association meetings in Denver, there were the usual panels on topics like the financial crisis and the real estate market. More unusual was a session on whether happiness measures should replace GNP. The latter was written up (rather skeptically) by The Wall Street Journal. That same month there was a similar panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, with Jeffrey Sachs, the once wunderkind of free markets, calling for happiness as the next United Nations Millennium Development Goal. That session was written up (less skeptically) by The New York Times. What is the world coming to? I participated in both panels (kicking myself for not skiing at either place).
Until a few years ago, I was one of a handful of economists studying happiness and questions as diverse as the well-being effects of commuting time, why cigarette taxes make smokers happier, and why the unemployed are happier when there are more unemployed people around them. Emotional Health.