Happiness Quantified A Satisfaction Calculus Approach [Hardcover]

How do we measure happiness? This important and long-awaited book presents a new and unified approach to the analysis of subjective satisfaction and income evaluation. Drawing on empirical analyses of German, British, Dutch, and Russian data, it develops new methodology to establish a model of well-being which includes satisfaction with life as a whole and with various domains of life. This method is applied to study individual and collective norms, to construct family-equivalence scales, to estimate health damages, compensation for externalities, and the construction of tax tariffs, and to define subjective inequalities with respect to well-being, income, and other domains of life. Written for a wide readership of social scientists, the book presents a theoretical and empirical breakthrough into a new and fruitful methodology in the social sciences.

1. Introduction
2. The analysis of income satisfaction with an application to family equivalence scales
3. Domain satisfactions
4. The aggregation of satisfactions: General satisfaction as an aggregate
5. Political satisfaction
6. Males, females, and households
7. The impact on past and future on present satisfaction
8. The influence of the reference group on norms
9. Health and subjective well-being
10. The effects of climate on welfare and well-being: External effects
11. How to find compensations for aircraft noise nuisance
12. Taxation and well-being
13. Subjective income inequalities
14. A generalized approach to subjective inequalities
15. Poverty
16. Epilogue
References

Timely...this is a real book, with a great homogeneity in terms of issues and method. --Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

B. M. S. van Praagstudied econometrics at the University of Amsterdam where he defended his dissertation on Individual Welfare and the Theory of Consumer Behaviour cum laude in 1968. Between 1969 and 1992 he heldlƒ&