Excerpt: …I here tackle three topics: first, the lowly place of happiness among the goals of political action in the great tradition of political thought; second, the novelty of the idea of happiness is the proper aim or public policy; and last, the importance of the distinction between what was aptly described by T.H. Green as "hindering hindrances to the good life" and the promotion of happiness by political action. As that might suggest, I shall say some unkind things about the paternalism implicit in some recent emphasis on happiness as an object of state action.

Does a more generous welfare state make people happier and increase their life satisfaction? Available empirical research gives a clear and positive answer to this question. This goes counter to many arguments that the welfare state creates a culture of dependency, leads to heavy-handed bureaucratic intrusions into private life, creates problems concerning personal integrity, is bad for economic growth, implies stigmatization of the poor, and crowds out civil society and voluntarism. This counterintuitive result is explained by to which degree social programs are universal in the coverage and structure. Four common misunderstandings of universal welfare states are discussed and refuted: This it is too costly for the economy, that it cannot be combined with individual choice, that it does not redistribute in favour of the poor and that it should be detrimental to economic growth. Using a "social mechanism" approach, it is argued that the relation between subjective well-being and universal welfare states operates in a complicated causal pattern with two other variables, the degree of corruption and the level of social trust in society. This approach is used to explain why empirically, countries tend to cluster so that countries with large and mostly universal welfare state programs also have low levels of corruption, a high degree of social trust, and high levels of happiness and social well-being. And vice versa, why countries with smaller welfare systems tend to be higher on corruption, have lower levels of social trust, and lower levels of social well-being.

Excerpt: Far from seeking to deny ourselves, we seem intent on pursuing pleasure and happiness at every turn. The subject of intense fascination in the media and popular culture, and of lively research in a host of academic disciplines ranging from psychology to sociology to economics, happiness as emerged in recent years as a major preoccupation of our time, at once the goal of individual lives and the "sole horizon," as the critic Pascal Bruckner has observed, or "our modern democracies" (Bruckner 2000:84). What, we ought to be asking, does this modern ideal of happiness mean?

Excerpt: There are an awful lot of stories out there that treat happiness as an experience, as put off to the end, or as both. So let us review two famous, distant, but related narratives of Western literature, each with a remarkable geometry of its own even though they putatively tell the same story: Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. When Henry James associates his trade with drawing circles, he invokes more than two millennia of studying Euclidean geometry in the classroom. He doesn't insist on proof. The artist resorts to fiction, "a geometry of this own"; nevertheless he or she customarily envisions, within the artificial spatial and temporal confinement of the action, a sort of Q.E.D.: Quod erat demonstrandum. Whatever individual readers of Ulysses conclude about its treatment of happiness, however, it will be clear that Joyce does not subscribe to the convention (or religion) of living happily ever after. As Declan Kiberd argues at length, Ulysses is about "the reality of ordinary people's daily rounds" (2009: 10).

This essay has three parts, corresponding to the three concepts announced in my title: happiness, joy, and unhappiness. "Happiness" does not refer only to a feeling or subjective state, but designates as well an evaluation of a life or the narrative of a life. Accordingly, in representing the lives of fictional characters, novelists invite their readers to assess both what happy or flourishing lives might be, and the narrative routes, variously composed of circumstances and choices, by which such lives might be attained. Joy, as distinct from happiness, is an episodic or dispositional element in an individual's emotional life, and as such not subject to public evaluation in quite the same way as happiness is. And yet joy, which is arguably with desire and sorrow one of the three fundamental emotions of narrative, can nonetheless be subjected to ethical discipline: the novelist can, and often does, prompt her reader to feel joy and grief at the right things. Finally, this article's third section concerns the narrative importance of unhappiness in the novel, especially the Continental novel.

Happiness is multiple, conflicting ideas—often changing from context to context with each change presaging a cascade of different meanings and interpretations. In this essay I shall try to link a number of them in a manner that is not causal but, I hope, rather evocative. I want to begin with a specific "Jewish" turn in the history of the concept of happiness at the close of the nineteenth century—one that turns out not to be very "Jewish" in its origin—and conclude with some thoughts on Michael Jackson and our need to understand happiness in the twenty-first century.

The concepts of "religion" and "happiness" are deceptively simple—domesticated products of the modern liberal order—but probing their connections can be illuminating. Seeing religions as means to a generic kind of happiness blinds us to the promise and danger of religious difference. Seeing religion as compensation for the absence or unjust distribution of happiness reinforces unexamined worldly conceptions of happiness. To learn to think about religion and happiness beyond modern consumerist pieties, examination of prosperity religion, the metaphysics of William James's "religion of healthy-mindedness" and the prosperity of the Biblical Job helps more than a survey of views of human fulfillment and joy in the "world religions."

This article argues for the importance of distinguishing the form of a theory of happiness from its content. It applies this distinction to ancient ethics, to show that almost all ancient philosophers subscribed to the same basic form or conception of happiness while differing over the details or content of happiness.

The claim that Empirical Research has Philosophical Implications (or ERPI) is the thesis that empirical happiness research in psychology, economics, sociology, neuroscience, or some other similar field has direct implications for the truth of some philosophical theory about happiness. ERPI appears to be an unquestioned presupposition of some philosophers who write about happiness. Several psychologists seem to have endorsed ERPI. Other empirical researchers (not in psychology) have made similar claims.

The pursuit of happiness is a preoccupation for many people—and probably has been ever since the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens. The scientific understanding of the brain basis of happiness and its pursuit is, however, still in its infancy. Here we focus on recent scientific research on the closely related concepts of pleasure and desire, and discuss their underlying neural mechanisms and their roles in happiness. We also speculate on potential contributions of the brain's default networks to orchestrating cognitive aspects of meaningfulness that are important to happiness. Finally, we discuss how the lack of pleasure, anhedonia, is a central feature of emotional disorders such as depression and thus perhaps the most important obstacle to happiness for many people.

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulation of the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective well-being is often taken as a proxy measure for individual welfare. In our review, we intend to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and of three directions it might develop. First, it offers new ways for testing the basic assumptions of the economic approach and for going about a new understanding of utility. Second, it provides a new possibility for the complementary testing of theories across fields in economics. Third, we inquire how the insights gained from the study of individual happiness in economics affect public policy.

A wide body of research in the field of happiness economics shows that individuals adapt to both prosperity and to adversity and return to their usual levels of happiness. In this paper we used novel methods and data to assess the effects of the deep economic crisis of 2008-2009 on well-being in the United States. We found, as expected, that the crisis had profound effects on happiness levels, as well as on individuals' assessments of their standards of living and of their future. These attitudes varied significantly depending on respondents' socioeconomic cohort, the industry that they were employed in, and their pre-existing states of mental and physical health. Our most notable finding, though, is a clear, U-shaped trend in reported happiness, with levels falling sharply with the onset of the crisis in mid-08 and trending downward until late March 2009—around the time that stock markets stopped their free fall. From that point on, happiness levels increased, eventually surpassing the levels that they were in the pre-crisis period of early 2008. This general pattern supports our previous research suggesting that although people react negatively to unpleasant events, they adapt to unpleasant certainty better than they do to uncertainty.

Excerpt: How does subjective well-being change over the life course and what concepts do people draw upon when they answer questions about their well-being? Does well-being indeed change or are people endowed with a set level of happiness around which their well-being fluctuates? These are some of the questions this paper will address with a focus on three domains of life: family, work, and health.