Measuring Happiness

One of the real treats I get to read is the Journal of Happiness Studies. The indicator set I work with explicitly avoids measuring happiness, prefering instead to concentrate on quality of life as "a feeling of well-being, fulfillment, or satisfaction resulting from factors in the external environments," and then measuring the external environments.

But I'm extraordinarily curious about ways to get at the piece that's missing -- are people in my community happy? I'm not sure that always lends itself to public policy suggestions, though the opposite does appear to be true (plenty of public policies can make me unhappy, for example, but well-written, thoughtful legislation doesn't often put a smile on my face like it should.)

Howard Dratch takes on the issue of measuring happiness, in light of the BBC series called The Happiness Formula. His response is, well, skeptical, but it's an interesting read anyway.

However, he pointed the way to the World Database of Happiness. I haven't run any of the statistics out of the database, but somehow just knowing that it exists makes me happy.

So thank you, Howard.