Happiness: A Revolution in Economics

摘要

Research on happiness and well-being has been a rapidly expanding field in economics in recent years. Of the 465 relevant articles published in EconLit journals between 1960 and 2006, no less than 363 appeared since 1995 and 285 since 2000. It is not, however, because of the rapid expansion of the field that Bruno S. Frey speaks of happiness research as the trigger of 'a revolution in economics'. The revolutionary potential of using happiness data in economic research lies in the ability of these data to serve as an empirical proxy for 'utility' - a concept dismissed as metaphysical in the positivist turn of economics in the 1930s.