ABSTRACT
Economists have recently begun to pay more attention to studying happiness, instead of just using the more traditional GDP per person. They have found that in the last fifty years there has been no apparent increase in personal happiness in Western nations, despite steadily growing economic wealth. In both Europe and the USA surveys have found no rise in the level of happiness since the 1950s, which seems surprising given that wealthier people generally claim to be happier than poorer people. In America, for example, more than a third of the richest group said they were ‘very happy’, while only half this proportion of the poorest made the same claim. Although it would be logical to expect that rising national wealth would lead to greater general happiness, this has not happened. Individually, more money does seem to increase happiness, but when the whole society becomes richer, individuals do not appear to feel better off.
