Nick Powdthavee

Happiness is Subjective? Not Anymore!

If you thought happiness with subjective you may do well to read this book and rethink your ideas. The Happiness Equation: The Surprising Economics of Our Most Valuable Asset is a real treat for me. Nick Powdthavee has managed to bring a book classified as economics to my attention in the most enjoyable, witty and interesting way yet. The aim of this book is to find a scientific way of constructing a "happiness formula" through measuring and studying peoples emotions and reactions to different life events regarding what makes us truly happy. It is also an account of Powdthavee's personal journey for the pursuit of happiness, and
how we can take steps in the right direction to find ours.

Can money really buy everything? Love maybe, but what about happiness? If you had the prefect life-fulfilling job - would your happy life be complete? These are just some of the issues raised, and discussed in fascinating detail.… (más)

I just didn't enjoy this book. Even though it's the sort of topic that I usually like, I found myself struggling to get through it so that I could write my review. At first I thought that the problem might be the writing: Powdthavee sometimes writes like a mathematician (or economist?), with an extreme precision that can actually get in the way of the reading. On further reflection, though, I think the problem is deeper than that: I sometimes just didn't find the concepts convincing. For example, a couple of chapters are devoted to the idea of assigning a monetary value to the happiness effect of certain events: getting married, or the death of a child. Powdthavee lays out an initial approach that comes up with certain values, and then says that there's another factor that needs to be taken into account, leading to a revision of the numbers. The difference is several orders of magnitude: something like $100,000 vs. $5000. And the way he presented it didn't make it clear to me that the "final" answer was any more complete than the initial attempt. If different methods can lead to such different outcomes, I found myself wondering whether the entire idea was meaningful at all.

On a similar note, Powdthavee makes a big deal about how having children doesn't really make us happy, despite all the common opinion to the contrary. This is a theme that persists throughout the whole book. And then there are a couple of pages toward the end where he introduces the concept of life satisfaction. He says that even things that don't make us happy per se can lead to greater life satisfaction, while things that do make us happy, like watching television, may do nothing for our overall satisfaction with life. This seems like a huge issue to me, and again made me question the point of the whole book. Maybe "happiness" isn't what we should be focusing on after all, and then the results won't seem as surprising. I'm personally a lot more concerned about my overall life satisfaction than I am about my happiness at any given moment. I'd rather go through the difficult experience of raising children than spend my life watching television. I don't think Powdthavee's treatment of this issue was nearly sufficient; as with the whole book, I was left with the impression that he had somehow missed the mark.… (más)

This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in what makes us tick. It makes the strong case that what we think will make us happy in reality has only a limited impact on our happiness or quite possibly does not make us happy at all. The author does get into some rather technical descriptions of studies on happiness. While some of the reasoning was at times hard to follow, there were also explantations that helped me to understand concepts I've had a hard time understanding before. All in all an compelling read.… (más)

When I took economics in college, I was disillusioned to discover that classic economics is based on a lie - the existence of the imaginary "homo rationalis" for whom money is the only thing that matters and for whom more money is always more important that anything else. As anyone with any common sense knows, money isn't always the most important criterion in making a decision.

In the past few years there has been a change in economics as a few persistent researchers have begun to look at economics in a much more realistic way.

This book details some of those new ways of looking at economics and the results of some of the studies of happiness researchers who have been trying to understand what makes most of us happy and why some people are happier that others.

Powdthavee writes in a readable style, with a slightly academic tone. His examples are interesting and varied and provide a good introduction to an area of economics that is in flux as a whole new way of looking at money and value are being developed. Many of the theories presented in this book are themselves in flux and the book should spark interest in this dynamic topic.

This book is a worthwhile read for anyone, even those who are not particularly familiar with classic economics.… (más)