Are You Happy? - The New York Review of Books
Chances are if someone were to ask you, right now, if you were happy, you'd say you were. Claiming that you're happy--that is, to an interviewer who is asking you to rate your "life satisfaction" on a scale from zero to ten--appears to be nearly universal, as long as you're not living in a war zone, on the street, or in extreme emotional or physical pain. The Maasai of Kenya, soccer moms of Scarsdale, the Amish, the Inughuit of Greenland, European businessmen--all report that they are happy. When happiness researcher Ed Diener, the past president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, synthesized 916 surveys of over a million people in forty-five countries, he found that, on average, people placed themselves at seven on the zero-to-ten scale.
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