World Happiness Report 2016: Volume II

This Special Rome Edition was prepared for the March 2016 launch event in Rome.1. Inside the Life Satisfaction BlackboxThe authors propose the use of a package of domain measures of the quality of life to supplement or perhaps even replace the overall life evaluations central to the World Happiness Report. They find that their package measure is more fully explained by a typical set of individual-level variables, and prefer it for that reason. They recommend, as do we, the collection of a broader range of variables that measure or arguably support various aspects of well-being. Only thus can the science of well-being be broadened and strengthened. However, to measure overall happiness, we continue to attach more validity to peoples’ own judgments of the quality of their lives than to any index we might construct out of possible component measures.2. Human Flourishing, the Common Good, and Catholic Social TeachingThis paper makes three claims. First, human beings are by their nature oriented toward broader notions of happiness that are intimately tied to the common good. Second, with the turn toward the individual, post-Enlightenment political and economic developments have stripped the common good of all substantive content. Third, by restoring the centrality of the common good, Catholic social teaching offers a coherent and internally consistent framework for human flourishing that applies principles to particular circumstances in a way that does not depend on agreeing with the confessional claims of the Catholic Church.3. The Challenges of Public An Historical-Methodological ReconstructionThe central idea of this paper, drawn from Aristotle, is that there is an intrinsic value in relational and civil life, without which human life does not fully flourish. They contrast this broader conception of a good life, for which they see roots in the Italian civil economy, with what they see as narrower and more hedonistic approaches. The central role they ascribe to the social context—what they refer to as relational goods—has echoes in the empirical findings in the World Happiness Report, where the quality of social support and the excellence of civil institutions are of primary importance, supplemented now by an apparent preference for equality of happiness.4. The Geography of Parenthood and Do Children Make Us Happy, Where, and Why?The author digs deeper into a frequent finding that having children does not add to the happiness of their parents. The paper confirms a negative relationship between parenthood and life satisfaction that is stronger for females than males, and turns positive only for older age groups and for widowers. Looking across the world, a negative relationship between parenthood and life satisfaction is found in two-thirds of the countries studied. The negative effect of parenthood on life satisfaction is found to be significantly stronger in countries with higher GDP per capita or higher unemployment rates.5. Multidimensional Well-Being in Contemporary Analysis of the Use of a Self-Organizing Map Applied to SHARE DataThe authors use a network-based mechanical data-reduction process to look for common and divergent features of 38 different well-being indicators collected from the same survey of older European adults that provided the data for the paper by Becchetti et al. They find that the measures of positive emotions tend to cluster together, as do the measures of negative emotions. Overall, life evaluations show a more umbrella-like character, with somewhat more kinship to the positive emotions.Learn more at