Counting happiness from the individual level to the group level

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-30-2012

Abstract

A procedure for identifying the happy individuals in society is indispensable to efforts to align public policy with the needs of the citizenry. Individual self-reports on happiness, however, must first meet the dual requirements of cardinality and (at least) relative interpersonal comparability before they can be used in conjunction with a counting procedure to give a meaningful estimate of group level happiness. The paper demonstrates a count-based measure of group happiness that exhibits these desired qualities using data from the Philippines.

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