Daniel Kahneman on Happiness

Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently

Happy Marriage fact of the Day

a marriage is worth almost £80,000 ($110,000) a year; this reflects partly the fact that marriage makes people happy, but also the fact that we need lots of money to increase our well-being by much.

-Economics in Desperate Housewives

How to be Happy with Dan Gilbert

Money does buy Happiness

Recent research by economists Amy Finkelstein, Erzo Luttmer, and Matthew Notowidigdo suggests that you'll get a bigger bang for your consumer buck by spending while you're healthy, before old age starts to take the fun out of life's indulgences. Their research is part of a larger academic enterprise attempting to understand what makes us happy. Economics is a field more associated with rational calculation than emotion, but there's an ever-growing subculture of "happiness economists." Just as mainstream economists spend their time figuring out things like gross national product—how much a country produces in dollar terms—these happiness scholars churn out numbers like gross national happiness (how much happiness a country produces).

It's relatively easy to measure things like corporate profits and trade flows. Measuring a person's psychic well-being is trickier, though happiness economists take a relatively straightforward approach: For the most part, they just ask people if they're happy. They then try to figure out what makes people say yes or no. Perhaps not surprisingly, money-obsessed economists have been fixated on whether higher incomes make us happier. And after much debate, their conclusion is that money does indeed buy happiness. Or, as an economist would put it, there's a positive marginal utility of consumption. People in rich countries say they're happier than people in poor countries, and in just about every nation, the well-to-do report being happier than their impoverished counterparts.

-Spend It While You Can

US Fact of the Day

How Are We Doing?

Happiness is ....

A Filipino couple made the best of travel in monsoon rains in Manila.

Photos from America for Europeans

Children of God

Richard Thaler on Nudge

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Related;
Dustin Hoffman’s mental accounting

Song of The Flower

Song of The Flower by Khalil Gibran

Thomas Friedman- 'Call Your Mother'

The best column of Thomas Friedman;

My mom left two indelible marks on me. The first was to never settle for the cards you’re dealt. My dad died suddenly when I was 19. My mom worked for a couple of years. But in 1975, I got a scholarship to go to graduate school in Britain and my mom surprised us all one day by announcing that she was going, too. I called it the “Jewish Mother Junior Year Abroad Program.”

Most of her friends were shocked that she wasn’t just going to play widow. Instead, she sold our house in little St. Louis Park, Minn., and moved to London. But what was most amazing to watch was how she used her world-class bridge skills to build new friendships, including with one couple who flew her to Paris for a bridge game. Yes, our little Margie off to Paris to play bridge. She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.

The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too.

My mom’s other big influence on me you can read between the lines of virtually every column — and that is a sense of optimism. She was the most uncynical person in the world. I don’t recall her ever uttering a word of cynicism. She was not naïve. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.

Six years ago, I was in Israel at a dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which publishes my column in Hebrew. I asked the editor why the newspaper ran my column, and he joked: “Tom, you’re the only optimist we have.” An Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, was seated next to me and as we walked to the table, he said: “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist. It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”

Well, the truth is, I am not that short. But my mom was. And she, indeed, could only see that part of the glass that was half full. Read me, read my mom.

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

Related;
My mom by Donald J. Boudreaux

Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke

Jeff Greenwald

Book recommendation- The Size of the World

Related;
Thirteen Tips for the Accidental Ambassador

Where you live really matters

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
by Richard Florida

Assorted

Odd Crop Prices Defy Economics

Harvard’s $34.9 Billion Endowment Makes Its Choice for New Chief

Be It Ever So Illogical: Homeowners Who Won’t Cut the Price

Treasury Dept. Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power

Japanese Court Rejects Defamation Lawsuit Against Nobel Laureate

When the Disease Eludes a Diagnosis

Loans and Leadership

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

America, Insure Thyself

Scientists try to explain religion

Bureaucrats

Using the Minimum Wage to Beat the Competition

Are You Happy?

Incoming at the Governor’s Office

Guide to Fed’s Alphabet Soup

Recession, Shmecession? Ask Mishkin

Self Help at Google

Sonja Lyubomirksy, "The How of Happiness: A Practical Guide to Getting the Life You Want."


Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America's Greatest Inventor


Esther Gokhale on self-help guide to overcoming back pain, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

How 'Happy Meals' destroy America

Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood

Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing & Advertising
by Susan Linn

Assorted, Most Macro

Happiness: Enough Already

What Is the Yield Curve Telling Us?

Monetary Policy: Providing Liquidity

A Brief History of Central Banks

Global Risks to U.S. Monetary Policy

Price Stability: Issues and Challenges

Some Lessons on the Rescue of Long-Term Capital Management

Inflation Central

High-Level Regional Seminar on Inflation Targeting

Current Account Surplus in Latin America: Recipe Against Capital Market Crises?
Guillermo Calvo and Ernesto Talvi

Global-Warming Jujitsu

Will the FTC Allow Microsoft to Buy Yahoo?

The Difference Between US and UK Economists


Professional Prognosticators: Is forecasting a science or an art?


Runs Make the Bank: The fragile capital structure of banks makes them inevitably prone to runs, and that's a good thing

Oil Prices Rise to Near-Record Levels, Then Fall

Feel Like a Fraud? At Times, Maybe You Should

China up close: Understanding the Chinese economy and financial system

Notional Pensions: Does Sweden Have the Answer?

From Complacency to Crisis: Financial Risk Taking in the Early 21st Century

Financial Globalization and the U.S. Current Account Deficit

Wrong call by RBI

Republic of Serbia: Selected Issues

Industry-Specific Exchange Rates

Economic survey of the Netherlands 2008

Inequality and Growth: Challenges to the Old Orthodoxy

Krugmania

Carnival of Podcasts

Bill Cosby Says Black Youth Need to Be Re-Educated

Bill Cosby, actor and philanthropist, and Alvin Poussaint, professor at Harvard Medical School, spoke yesterday with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about the reasons for writing the book, "Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors," challenges for educating black youth and their visions for strengthening the black community

Shiller Says U.S. Home Prices `Falling at a Rapid Pace'

Feldstein Says Recession May Be Deeper Than Recent Ones

Serious Fun - how designers think today
Chris Wise, incoming Master of the Faculty of the RDI

Recent Fed Actions
Michael Moran, Daiwa Securities America
David Resler, Nomura Securities International
Chris Varvares, Macroeconomic Advisers, moderator

The Malvinas-Falklands War

Politics and justice: the Lockerbie trial

Economic meltdown for 2008?
Economist Professor Andrew Oswald talks about the chances of an economic recession and what consumers could do if it happens.

Global Markets Vulnerability

Philosophical love stories
This week, Friedrich Nietzsche meets the Frankenstein monster and Simon de Beauvoir hangs out with the Desperate Housewives, in a philosophical look at some stories of attraction and love.

Philosophy for Lunch

Minds and computers

The Neurobiology of Suicide

Is it really me? A question of bodily integration and identity
Professor John Bradshaw, a neuropsychologist from Monash University in Melbourne, has a neurological explanation for a not uncommon phenomenon, that of experiencing the powerful and disturbing sensation of someone watching us or standing behind us, whether or not there is really someone there.

Michael Gurr on the Gettysburg Address

Review of new Collins Australian Dictionary

Crusader Medicine

Spiritual Classics: Teresa of Avila, and John T. Robinson
New Age guru Caroline Myss tells us why the 16th century Catholic saint Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle is her spiritual classic. And the controversial retired American Bishop, John Shelby Spong, reveals the book that changed his destiny, John T. Robinson's Honest to God

Spiritual Classics: Jung and Eckhart

Spiritual Classics: Kahlil Gibran and M.Scott Peck

The Existential Jesus

P.J. O'Rourke on freedom, free markets, Paris Hilton and Adam Smith's wealth of nations

Sudhir Venkatesh

MLK Jr. after 40 years: a Fraternal Memoir

The post-imperial maestro: Sir Colin Davis

A New Divorce Law that changed men to show more affection

Salarymen -- the black-suited corporate warriors who work long hours, spend long evenings drinking with cronies and stumble home late to long-suffering wives -- have danger waiting for them as they near retirement.

Divorce. A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives -- hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect -- are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D.

Skittishly aware of the trouble they're in, 18 salarymen, many of them nearing retirement, gathered at a restaurant here recently for beer, boiled pork and marital triage.

The evening began with a defiantly defeatist toast. Husbands reminded themselves of what their organization -- the improbably named National Chauvinistic Husbands Association -- preaches as a sound strategy for arguing with one's wife.

"I can't win. I won't win. I don't want to win," they bellowed in unison, before tippling from tall schooners of draft beer.

The pork was scrumptious and the mood jolly, but throughout the dinner meeting there was an undertow of not-too-distant domestic disaster.

"The fact that a wife can now get 50 percent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages," said Shuichi Amano, 55, founder of the association and a magazine publisher in this city of 1.3 million in western Japan. The word chauvinist in the group's name, Amano says, is not intended to refer to bossy men. Instead, it invokes the original meaning of the Japanese word that today translates as chauvinist, kanpaku, a top assistant to the emperor.

Men near the end of their corporate lives, he said, are especially edgy. "To be divorced is the equivalent of being declared dead -- because we can't take care of ourselves," Amano said.

When his wife told him eight years ago that she was "99 percent" certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.

Since then, in addition to learning how to listen and talk to a wife he had ignored for two decades, Amano said, he has learned how to take out the trash, clean the house and cook.

Marriage in Japan is going through an increasingly rough patch. As in the United States and most wealthy industrialized countries, the age of first marriage is being pushed back in Japan. Between 1962 and 2006, the average age at which a woman married for the first time slid from 24 to 28.

-Japan's Salarymen, With Pensions At Stake, Work on Their Marriages


Via The latest edition of Foreign Exchange Show

A robust critique of the so-called 'economics of happiness'

In Happiness, Economics and Public Policy, Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod analyse the economic research that underlies politicians’ growing preoccupation with measures of ‘wellbeing’.

Why the Econometricians are Happy

A working paper for the day-
Lyttkens, C.H (2007) Why the Econometrician is in Good Spirits – a workshop through the looking glass;

This paper aims to explore the determinants of research-related quality of life (RRQoL) of econometricians in health economics. It is well-known (standard expression for not bothering to look up the references) that an extensive literature deals with the measurement and determinants of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of the general population. However, if the standard neo-classical paradigm applies (self-interested, utility-maximising behaviour, etc), scientists are of course much more interested in the wellbeing of scientists than of other people.

In addition to its intrinsic interest, this is an important issue for public policy. Analogously to the extra-welfarist approach in health economics (Hurley 2000), we may assume that the purpose of allocating funds to the scientific community is to maximise their RRQoL. We may safely assume that this interpretation is endorsed by the scientists in question (supplier-induced demand).