I just can't shake my distaste for this entire "how happy are you?" literature. It just seems so metaphysical to me. Some of this stems from my economist bias in favor of revealed preference instead of survey responses, but it goes deeper than that. (After all I use survey data a lot in the EFW index.)

I think one of the basic problems in this literature is that it treats happiness as some kind of stock of wealth that once created can be stored for the future. But I think of happiness as a flow not a stock, and I think of it being a flow like electricity in that it can be created but (for all intents and purposes) not stored. Seriously, how much electricity does America have? This is a silly question at a fundamental level. We can talk about how much electricity we can generate over time t, but how much we have? Well it just doesn't make any sense to ask that question. Electricity is a flow not a stock.

I think happiness, whatever that is, is like this. I create happiness in my live in a myriad of ways, but like electricity, the feeling goes away very soon after I create it. I don't know how to save the feeling for later. So I have to create more happiness all the time. I do think that if I'm rich I can create many more such moments than if I'm poor. But at any point in time, such as when I'm filling out a silly survey asking my how happy I am, there is no reason why I should be happier as a rich person than as a poor person.

Btw, the same might be said of hunger. In the U.S. at least, I'm sure poor people would report to being hungry no more often than rich people. We all get hungry, and we all satisfy that hunger by eating food. Then darn it, we get hungry again, and have to eat again, and so on. Poor people may satisfy their hunger at McDonalds and rich people may do so at the local bistro. But they both satisfy the hunger, but most poor people would prefer the bistro over McDonalds.

I'm rambling now, but something about the whole happiness business just doesn't sit right with me.