This book gives an unbiased overview of the economic research on wellbeing

This book does what it says on the tin: it sums up the economic research on wellbeing. Books written by researchers fall into two categories: simplifications of their own published papers and extended literature reviews. This book takes the latter approach, with the authors citing their own research sparingly.

In my reading, the main takeaways from this book are:
- Happiness is difficult to meaure because it's subjective and qualitative, and because our expectations for what the minimum and maximum possible happiness change over very long periods of time. That said, happiness is not impossible to measure, because it is fairly stable, predictable, and reactive to certain common life circumstances like unemployment, marriage, and illness.
- The global measures ("cognitive happiness") are probably more useful than the moment-to-moment measures ("affective happiness"). Though there is still a debate in the literature about the appropriate methodology for measuring happiness (a single overall question, multiple scales for different life areas, diary studies, phone apps with constant reminders).
- The Easterlin Paradox, which postulates that very high incomes do not lead to higher happiness, is probably not individually true per se but better explained by the logarithmic perception of stimuli (the Weber-Fechner Law). The global poor would be substantially happier with one extra dollar per day while this amount would go unnoticed by an upper-class American. But that does not imply doubling an upper-class American's income would have no effect at all on their happiness. On the societal level, the Easterlin Paradox can be dismissed, because economic growth leads to longer lifespans which means greater total happiness per life.

This book does not provide a guide for the reader on how to become happy or a guide for a policymaker about what to do to make everyone more happy. Those topics are outside the scope of this book. But if you want to read what economists have to say about wellbeing research, this is an excellent book for that.

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