ABSTRACT
The data from questionnaires can be used to relate reported happiness to other life circumstances, such as disability and marital status. The disutility of the torture of the deviant minority would be supposed to be more than offset by the increased happiness of the majority, especially if the threat of torture were an effective deterrent that would need to be used very seldom. The real income-adjusted average happiness response provides an indicator of the utility of income as price indices provide an indicator of preferences, and the several indicators are more closely related than most economists would suppose, and are probably about equally reliable. A few prominent economists interpret happiness in the sense as welfare and would put it at the center of welfare economics. R. Layard is a call for a welfare economics that interprets self-reported happiness as utility and as the maximand for a reasoned public policy.
