Life satisfaction and sustainability: a policy framework.

The growing maturity of the "science of happiness" raises the prospect of enabling government policy to be more accountable to the measurable subjective experience of the population. In its ideal form, the application of this science promises to inform decision makers about the likely distribution of life satisfaction resulting from any prospective policy, allowing for the selection of more optimal policy. Such "budgeting for wellbeing" invites three natural objections, beyond normative quibbles with the subjective objective: (1) non-incremental changes are unlikely in large bureaucracies, so a new accounting system for devising and costing government policies and budgets is too radical, (2) governments do not have an authoritative set of credible cost/benefit coefficients to use in analysis, and (3) long-run objectives, risks, and environmental considerations cannot be feasibly captured in quantitative projections of human subjective wellbeing. Three institutions are needed to address these challenges. I describe (a) an evolving collection of largely objective indicators for monitoring progress, with life satisfaction providing quantitative structure and overarching visibility to the system, (b) a publicly curated, evidence-based Database of Happiness Coefficients, and (c) independent public agencies that decide on a growing list of material constraints on the economy. Rather than overwhelmingly novel, these features have antecedents and analogues. Moreover, most civil service decision-making and projection-making apparatuses need not change. Also, there will be no less room nor less need for political debate and platforms. While shifting society to human-centred measures of progress may be radically transformative in the long run, it can be initiated smoothly and non-disruptively.

Happy without money: Minimally monetized societies can exhibit high subjective well-being.

Economic growth is often assumed to improve happiness for people in low income countries, although the association between monetary income and subjective well-being has been a subject of debate. We test this assumption by comparing three different measures of subjective well-being in very low-income communities with different levels of monetization. Contrary to expectations, all three measures of subjective well-being were very high in the least-monetized sites and comparable to those found among citizens of wealthy nations. The reported drivers of happiness shifted with increasing monetization: from enjoying experiential activities in contact with nature at the less monetized sites, to social and economic factors at the more monetized sites. Our results suggest that high levels of subjective well-being can be achieved with minimal monetization, challenging the perception that economic growth will raise life satisfaction among low income populations.

How happy are your neighbours? Variation in life satisfaction among 1200 Canadian neighbourhoods and communities.

This paper presents a new public-use dataset for community-level life satisfaction in Canada, based on more than 500,000 observations from the Canadian Community Health Surveys and the General Social Surveys. The country is divided into 1216 similarly sampled geographic regions, using natural, built, and administrative boundaries. A cross-validation exercise suggests that our choice of minimum sampling thresholds approximately maximizes the predictive power of our estimates. The resulting dataset reveals robust differences in life satisfaction between and across urban and rural communities. We compare aggregated life satisfaction data with a range of key census variables to illustrate some of the ways in which lives differ in the most and least happy communities.

Prosocial spending and well-being: cross-cultural evidence for a psychological universal.

This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined and showed that prosocial spending is associated with greater happiness around the world, in poor and rich countries alike. To test for causality, in Studies 2a and 2b, we used experimental methodology, demonstrating that recalling a past instance of prosocial spending has a causal impact on happiness across countries that differ greatly in terms of wealth (Canada, Uganda, and India). Finally, in Study 3, participants in Canada and South Africa randomly assigned to buy items for charity reported higher levels of positive affect than participants assigned to buy the same items for themselves, even when this prosocial spending did not provide an opportunity to build or strengthen social ties. Our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts.

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes observed up to 20 MeV.

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) from Earth's upper atmosphere have been detected with the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite. The gamma-ray spectra typically extend up to 10 to 20 megaelectron volts (MeV); a simple bremsstrahlung model suggests that most of the electrons that produce the gamma rays have energies on the order of 20 to 40 MeV. RHESSI detects 10 to 20 TGFs per month, corresponding to approximately 50 per day globally, perhaps many more if they are beamed. Both the frequency of occurrence and maximum photon energy are more than an order of magnitude higher than previously known for these events.