"Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have" - Anon

THE HAPPINESS EQUATION: THE SURPRISING ECONOMICS OF OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET

ICON BOOKS, UK and TOTEM BOOK, US

         

                   Paperback (Out 02/06/2011)                                                 Hardback Cover

Why is marriage worth £200,000 a year?

Why will having children make you unhappy?

Why does happiness from winning the lottery take two years to arrive?

Why does time heal the pain of divorce or the death of a loved one - but not unemployment?

Everybody wants to be happy. But how much happiness - precisely - will each life choice bring? Should I get married? Am I really going to feel happy about the career that I picked? How can I decide not only which choice is better for us, but how much it's better for us?

The results of new, unique research, The Happiness Equation brings to a general readership for the first time the new science of happiness economics.

It describes how we can measure emotional reactions to different life experiences and present them in ways we can relate to. How, for instance, monetary vales can be put on things that can't be bought or sold in the market - such as marriage, friendship, even death - so that we can objectively put them in order of preference. It also explains why some things matter more to our happiness than others (like why seeing friends is worth more than a Ferrari), while others are worth almost nothing (like sunny weather).

Nick Powdthavee - whose work on happiness has been discussed on both the Undercover Economist and Freakonomics blogs - bring cutting-edge research on how we value happiness to a general audience, with a style that wears its learning lightly and is a joy to read.

*****

'This intelligent and entertaining book shows how to scientific study of happiness is changing the field of economics - and the world!'
Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University and the author of the Stumbling on Happiness
'An important, readable, incisive, and often marvelously funny book. The author is an international expert in the field and his deep knowledge shines through in the prose'
Andrew Oswald, University of Warwick'
An adventure to one of the new frontiers of knowledge, this book is a masterful blend of personal experience, contemporary culture, and social science'
Richard Easterlin, University of Southern California
'This is probably the ideal happiness beach book. It is readable, but based on on-going, relevant and exciting new research, to much of which the author has himself contribute. I would only change one thing, the title. I would have ...entitled it "Just Call Me Nick"
Andrew Clark, Paris School of Economics 

You can purchase The Happiness Equation from the following good online book stores:


*****
News: The Unfortunate Incidence of The 0.38 Typo...

Alison Flood, a journalist writing for the Wired Magazine, had recently spotted a typo on p. 89 in The Happiness Equation (proof version) which has already gone to print. The income coefficient of '0.38' should really have been '0.038'. The calculated shadow prices are correct, however (since 0.038 has been used instead of 0.38 in all of the calculations). The problem has been rectified for future prints, but it's too late for the first edition :) Oh well!.

*****