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Education, Happiness and Wellbeing

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Abstract

Answers to the questions ‘Does education influence happiness and if so, how and how much?’ depend on how one defines and operationalizes ‘education’, ‘influences’ and ‘happiness’. A great variety of research scenarios may be constructed from our three essential variables. What public policies one ought to adopt and implement regarding the influence of education on happiness depends minimally on which of the great variety of research scenarios one adopts and maximally on lots of other things as well. My personal preference is for a robust definition of the three terms. Because human beings are complex organisms, an adequate construction of the idea of human wellbeing must also be complex. Therefore, any discipline-driven, reductionist definition that pyschologizes, medicalizes, economizes, geneticizes, socializes or politicizes the idea should be avoided.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Social Research and Evaluation, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, BC, Canada, V2N 4Z9

    Alex C. Michalos

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  1. Alex C. Michalos
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Correspondence to Alex C. Michalos.

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The first version of this paper was written for the International Conference on ‘Is happiness measurable and what do those measures mean for public policy?’, at Rome, 2–3 April 2007, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, organized by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, OECD, Centre for Economic and International Studies and the Bank of Italy. I would like to thank the organizers of the conference for the invitation and the participants for helping me clarify some things.

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Michalos, A.C. Education, Happiness and Wellbeing. Soc Indic Res 87, 347–366 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-007-9144-0

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