My favourite items in the well-being literature

I wrote the post below for twitter, which is why it might seem disjointed at times.

I recently tendered my doctoral dissertation (woohoo!). I thought I’d summarise my favourite texts and what topics I think are hot right now for anybody interested.

My favourite 5:

1. Marc & Blanchet – Beyond GDP. A masterpiece. The chapter on SWB mounts penetrating critiques against the ethics of using SWB for welfare economics and the interpretability of scale measures of SWB. Rest also gold, esp. on capabilities. 
2. Sheldon and Lucas (ed.) – Stability of Happiness.  The state of the art in hedonic psychology. This book is effectively an update of the seminal Kahneman et al handbook Wellbeing: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology.
3. Alexandrova – A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. An absolute must-read on the normative and epistemic foundations of well-being scholarship. The challenges this book raises ought to drive a lot of research. If I was advising a PhD student I would suggest they start with this book.
4. Ryan and Deci – Self-Determination Theory. SDT is the dominant “eudaimonic wellbeing” paradigm in clinical psych circles as far as I can tell and one of the deepest and richest bodies of empirically-verified theory going around.
5. Graham 2017—Happiness for All? A great example of all the important and insightful things you can do in social science using WB data without having to take a deep dive into theory or measurement issues. A seminal text in economic circles

I read a lot for my dissertation—my bibliography is 15000 words long—across a lot of disciplines. As such, I think maybe there is some value in me giving a breakdown of my top 5 books by discipline, and top 5 influential works going forward:

Top 5 texts in economics:

1. Fleurbaey and Blanchet, already mentioned
2. Graham 2017, already mentioned
3. Clark and Senik (eds.) 2014 – Happiness and Economic Growth. A comprehensive treatment of the relationship between income and subjective well-being, which remains the core issue in happiness economics. This book is a summary of conference proceedings with the papers: the discussion transcripts are cool. 
4. Adler 2013—Happiness surveys and Public Policy, What’s the Point? A thorough treatment of the challenges associated with doing welfare economics using SWB metrics
5. Frey and Stutzer: Happiness and Economics—an interesting series of inquiries including into institutions like direct democracy and how they affect WB. Measurement issues perhaps a bit dated now but the questions aren’t. In fact, WB and voting is just heating up.

Top 5 texts in psychology:

1. SDT already mentioned
2. Stability of happiness already mentioned
3. Wong (ed.) 2010: The Human Quest for Meaning. Logotherapy and existentialism don’t feature much in the WB discourse but they should. Terror-management theory is there, but that’s a little bit different. Wong is key resource for meaning and purpose!
4. Forgas and Baumeister (2018): Handbook of Social Psychoology and Well-Being. An important integrative text so you don’t need to go fishing through the handbooks on identity and existential psych.
5. Paul Dolan: Happiness by Design. This book annoyed me because of its bravado (especially towards philosophical issues), but the core ideas are important, particularly the difference in the way pleasure and purpose are experienced, something philosophers haven't thought about. 

Top 5 texts in philosophy:

1. Alexandrova already mentioned
2. Haybron (2008) The Pursuit of Unhappiness—an extremely thorough theoretical treatment of happiness in the psychological sense as distinct from the well-being sense, but with loads of solid commentary on both. Accessible.
3. Fletcher (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being—a well-curated comprehensive reference. I found Besser-Jones' chapter on eudaimonia particularly helpful because it clarified the differences between philosophical and psychological conceptions of eudaimonia.
4. Sumner: Welfare, Happiness and Ethics. The best attempt at a grand theory of the prudential good with a dense treatment of all key philosophical issues.
5. The ethics of ambiguity by Simone De Beauvoir. Best summary of existentialist contribution to meaning and WB. If there is something more recent I am not aware of it. I have something forthcoming on this topic.

What’s Hot in Economics?

1. Graham’s work again on optimism, stress and other dimensions of well-being and their implications for development economics and economic behaviour, including exit from poverty and discount rates. 
2. Eudaimonia generally seems to be heating up (finally!). Stevenson and Wolfers had a neat working paper at the ASSA 2019 conference on the income-meaning relationship. The slope was negative, which is the opposite of what we see for other well-being dimensions. 
3. Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball, Kristen Cooper, Alex Rees-Jones et al have a bunch of papers in AER about the using SWB metrics to compare marginal rates of substitution between goods, integrating preferences and SWB, and the challenges of wellbeing measurement. They also presented a "radically multidimensional" approach to WB analysis at ASSA 2019. I think all of these papers will influence econ heavily
4. Bond and Lang forthcoming in JPE on how measurement of wellbeing is cooked. This paper might finally make SWB scholars take scale-recalibration seriously
5. Jan Emmanuelle De Neve et al have thought provoking work in REStat on the differential effects of recessions and growth on WB that touches on the endowment effect and other biases. Should provoke further inquiry.

What’s hot in psychology?

1. Alex Wood, Chris Boyce et al have pathbreaking papers on how different personality types affect changes in life satisfaction and how WB can drive changes in personality. Big opportunities for straightforward extensions
2. Positive psychology is doing heaps of work applying SDT, personal strengths and mindfulness in organisations and schools. Explosive growth in publications.
3. Some work is emerging on how attention and time allocation affect wellbeing. Paul Dolan and Ashley Whillans have done a lot in this space; there must be others too
4. There seems to be a large effort underway to connect different aspects of social psychology together through well-being. Forgas and Baumeister book a good place to start
5. Hedonic psychology continues to develop mood management techniques. Lyubomirsky the queen of this field IMO.

What’s hot in philosophy?

1. Philosophy will get more involved in normative underpinnings of well-being policy just as it did with behavioural economics. Tiberius and Haybron 2015 a good early and indicative piece 
2. Gil Hersch is doing related work in PPE that I think will turn into a cottage industry looking at what *can* be done in WB policy *despite* shaky normative and epistemic foundations
3. Lots of opportunities for critical work given that normative and epistemic foundations of WB understudied. Davies 2015 on the happiness industry and Pykett et al on neuroliberalism good starting points
4. Heaps more work to be done on measurement. McClimans et al on interpretability of measures a good starting point. They are doing QoL studies, but same nexus
5. For the cognition people: the philosophy of what Oswald 2008 calls the reporting function seems a rich vein to me that could do with some philosophical oversight.

Other stuff that's hot:

1. The geography of well-being. See Okulisz-Kozaryn for a primer
2. Well-being and voting - I think this is about to explode
3. Optimism

What has gone cold?

1. The U-shaped relationship between age and happiness
2. Relative income effects
3. Epidemiological studies just running regressions on big data sets. We are finally moving to causal inference, albeit very slowly
4. Scale validation. More work seems to be going into dealing with scale recalibration nowadays and considering alternatives to scales. This is very welcome
5. Work that defines well-being as emotional state and nothing but emotional state

And I’m spent. A warning to any embarking: WB is an interdisciplinary field. It’s hard to understand it without reading widely, but the wider you go the less specialised you are in a discipline and the harder it will be to find an early career job. I got lucky and landed a Fulbright postdoctoral scholarship, so I’m off to Brookings in September to work with Carol Graham, but of all my other job market applications I often didn't even get an acknowledgement of receipt, let alone an interview.