There are a few articles on happiness research out on the web today, mostly linked from Cato, who seems to be getting interested in the game. One is mostly concerned with data that show consumerism does not make us unhappy and that people are happier when they have a great deal of economic freedom. I'll be honest that I am a little bit concerned about some data massaging for political purposes for that study, but the numbers they present are interesting and I certainly think there is a need for studies about happiness to be more rigorous with defining their terms and more related to actual policy positions, both of which the paper is trying to do. The other is a short piece that is arguing with the idea that we aren't getting happier. One of the main points is that it is difficult to take measures of happiness that are not automatically comparative, so it is hard to get data longitudinally, but that we do seem to be slowly getting happier and that we are spending many more years of our lives happy.

All this goes in the toilet if you are middle aged, though, and you'd better hope that income mobility doesn't hurt our collective happiness because things are not looking good on that front.