Abstract
AbstractThe acceptance of happiness studies within economics was a surprising event. The materialistic and theoretical conception of utility in modern economics deemed any attempt to measure and analyze the subjective dimension of utility unscientific. Nevertheless, some economists were unsatisfied with such preconceptions. In this paper we argue that ordinalism, being an incomplete and inconsistent form of economic analysis of welfare, opened the floor for alternative definitions of welfare and utility. In particular, some economists prone to interdisciplinarity and specialized on topics where welfare issues were more relevant (such as labor or welfare economics), saw in the cardinality of subjective well‐being data an opportunity to remedy those problems. The data availability and scientific analysis of happiness from the 1990s onwards, gave credit to the utilization of subjective well‐being in economics and paved the way for happiness in economics, which is now a dynamic research topic with empirical findings that challenge standard welfare analysis and policy advice. We conclude this paper with some policy implications and with what happiness has yet to contribute to economics.
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