ABSTRACT
One serious attempt to remedy the shortcomings of using gross national product to address the quality of life was made by Japanese scholars who in the late 1960s replaced it with a measure called net national welfare. The most interesting aspect of this measurement was that leisure time and activities outside the marketplace were considered to have value. Social statistics are seldom concerned with individual satisfaction and subjective well-being, yet the quality of life depends on personal happiness, which might be considered a state of mind totally independent from material living conditions and the social environment that one lives in. One must use sophisticated methods of empirical research to study individual satisfaction. Without such methods, the categories of "loving" and "being" remain a matter of conjecture. Given the quality of Soviet sociology, the degree of individual satisfaction in the Soviet Union also remains a matter of speculation.
