Happiness Studies is a new field of scholarship which has gained much attention over the past two decades. Triggered by the insight that economic growth does not result in higher levels of well-being once a certain baseline of wealth is passed (the so-called Easterlin paradox), economists, sociologists and psychologist have joined forces to find out what makes individuals and societies happy.
In this lecture class, I introduce different concepts of well-being and discuss to what extent
objective and subjective measures for individual and societal happiness can be an indicator for the quality of a society. We compare different societies and analyse how culture impacts understandings of happiness and discuss what the role of happiness can be for public policy.