Processes, such as those we have examined in the two previous chapters, require structures to guide and harness them; they need an organization of ideas, rules, and behavior to implement these guiding and harnessing structures. The market itself guides and harnesses much economic behavior, but it would frustrate our purpose and destroy our perspective to rely on the market structure to channel behavior that often belongs outside the market and often defies its rules. In this chapter I will borrow and invent other structures for our purposes. None are so grand as the market; they are ministructures to guide particular aspects of the analysis.

In this discussion I speak more of satisfaction with life-as-a-whole, or life satisfaction, than of happiness because of the frequent emphasis on cognitive processes (as mentioned, happiness is more of a mood) and because the analyses we rely upon more frequently use life satisfaction as the explanandum. With either happiness or life satisfaction as the focus of attention, it is appropriate that these structures should be psychoeconomic hedonic structures, ordering the relation of one pursuit to another, the effects of smaller scale moods and cognitions to overall happiness, the relation of central concerns to more peripheral concerns, the relation of the specific to the general, and the partitioning of the world into domains. We will start with the most important: If we think of persons rather than transactions as the core of the analysis, of human behavior rather than price behavior as the principal components of economic behavior, what sort of a structure would that imply? We start with that question.