How Not to Buy Happiness

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Robert H. Frank, Cornell Univ.

Daedalus, Spring 2004

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An enduring paradox in the literature on human happiness is that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor within any country at any moment, average happiness levels change very little as people’s incomes rise in tandem over time.(1) Richard Easterlin and others have interpreted these observations to mean that happiness depends on relative rather than absolute income.(2) In this essay I offer a slightly different interpretation of the evidence–namely, that gains in happiness that might have been expected to result from growth in absolute income have not materialized because of the ways in which people in affluent societies have generally spent their incomes.In effect, I wish to propose two different answers to the question “Does money buy happiness?”...

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From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of Happiness: 400 b.c.– a.d.1780

Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State Univ.

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It is only right that Dædalus should devote an issue to happiness, seeing that its publisher was chartered with the “end and design” of cultivating “every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Its publisher, of course, is the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780 at a time when Americans–newly independent and free–were demanding that their institutions, like their government, serve a purpose, that they be useful. And to many eighteenth-century minds, there was simply no better test of usefulness than ‘utility’–the property of promoting happiness...

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