High rates of divorce in western society have prompted much research on the repercussions for well-being and the economy. Yet little is known about the important topic of whether parental divorce has deleterious consequences upon adult children. By combining experimental and econometric survey-based evidence, this study attempts to provide an answer. Under controlled conditions, it measures university students’ subjective well-being and productivity (in a standardized laboratory task). It finds no evidence that either of these is negatively associated with recent parental divorce. If anything, happiness and productivity appear to be slightly greater, particularly among males, if their parents have divorced. Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey—to control for so-called fixed effects—we then cross-check this result, and confirm the same finding, on various random samples of young British adults.

Buying lottery tickets is not a rational investment from a financial point of view. Yet, the majority of people participate at least once a year in a lottery. We conducted a field experiment to increase understanding of lottery participation. Using representative data for the Netherlands, we find that lottery participation increased the happiness of participants before the draw. Winning a small prize had no effect on happiness. Our results indicate that people may not only care about the outcomes of the lottery, but also enjoy the game. Accordingly, we conclude that lottery participation has a utility value in itself and part of the utility of a lottery ticket is consumed before the draw.

John Stuart Mill claimed that “men do not desire merely to be rich, but richer than other men.” Are people made happy by being richer than others? Or are people made happy by favorable comparisons to others more generally, and being richer is merely a proxy for this ineffable relativity? We conduct an online experiment absent choice in which we measure subjective well-being (SWB) before and after an exogenous shock that reveals to subjects how many experimental points they and another subject receive, and whether or not points are worth money. We find that subjects are made significantly happier when they receive monetized rather than non-monetized points, suggesting money is valued more than the points it represents. In contrast, subjects are made equally unhappy when they receive fewer monetized points as when they receive fewer non-monetized points than others, suggesting relative money is not valued more than the relative points it represents. We find no evidence that subjects are made happier by being “richer” than others (i.e., by receiving more points—either monetized or non-monetized—than others). Subgroup analyses reveal women are made unhappier (than men) by being “richer” and “poorer” than others, and conservatives are made unhappier (than progressives) by being “poorer” than others. Our experimental-SWB approach is easy to administer and may complement choice-based tasks in future experiments to better estimate preference parameters.

This essay situates Mary Astell’s understanding of women’s moral freedom in the context of her under-studied vocabulary of “Epicurism.” It foregrounds Astell’s engagement with two contemporaneous accounts of the will, both of which can be broadly characterized as hedonistic. On the first, developed by John Norris (1688, 1693), God ensures conformity between his will and the human will by endowing agents with a love of pleasure that moves them in his direction. On the second, delineated by John Locke (1690), human wills are motivated by a morally neutral desire for pleasure, which acquires moral significance only when agents exercise their power of freedom or bring their reason to evaluate the goods that give them pleasure. In her writings of the 1690s, Astell develops a feminist ethics that is far closer to Locke’s than has been recognized. Like Locke, and unlike Norris, she suggests that agents are themselves responsible for aligning their wills with God’s, and they must do so by cultivating reason and a taste for virtuous pleasures. In a distinctively feminist move, she maps how patriarchal society corrupts women’s wills by directing their desires to sense-based goods only, preventing them from achieving the happiness due to them as rational beings. While Astell is routinely characterized as a rationalist philosopher, she is a rationalist who, like Locke, is highly aware of the limits of reason, and deeply interested in the potential of agents to transform their likes and dislikes so that they find pleasure in the exercise of virtue.

Is there a connection between pro-social behavior and well-being? This question has long been of interest, with Aristotle famously suggesting a nexus between virtues and well-being. To delve into this relationship, I conducted an extensive study encompassing multiple classical economic games and nearly 100 well-being questions. My findings confirm that different patterns of pro-sociality are robustly correlated with each other. On top, I find reliable correlations between well-being and pro-social behavior, as well as certain forms of punishment. In terms of underlying explanations, I observe that pro-sociality is particularly associated with a form of long-term well-being known as eudaimonia, suggesting that pro-social behavior plays a fundamental role in people perceiving their life as meaningful.

This study addresses a significant knowledge gap in the literature by examining the relationship between religious involvement and subjective wellbeing (SWB) among older adults in Taiwan, a cultural context that has been underrepresented in existing research, with a focus on gender and age differences. Using data collected in Taichung City in 2017 (N = 645), this study measured religious involvement through religious affiliation, religiosity and frequency of religious participation, and assessed SWB via life satisfaction and happiness. Findings revealed no significant association between religious involvement and life satisfaction. However, religious participation was positively correlated with happiness. Gender differences were observed: Buddhism and Taoism were positively associated with life satisfaction among males, whereas religiosity and religious participation were significantly related to life satisfaction and happiness among females. Age disparities were also found, with religiosity significantly relating to both life satisfaction and happiness in the old-old group (70–89 years) but not in the young-old group (60–69 years). These findings highlight the nuanced associations between religious involvement and SWB, emphasising the importance of considering gender and age variations in future research. Future studies should further explore the cultural contexts that shape these relationships and examine other potential mediating factors to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how religious involvement influences wellbeing across different demographic groups.

Existential happiness is happiness that one has a basic life at all. Having a basic life, as I understand it, involves being the subject of experiences and being an agent in some minimal sense. As I argue, existential happiness is a fitting response to having a basic life. To make this argument, I look at two possible accounts of the fittingness of existential happiness: the value of a basic life and attachment to the constitutive elements of one’s life. I also consider a few possible sources of existential happiness, including encounters with death, counterfactual thinking, and hedonically positive feelings of awe directed toward one’s own consciousness.

This study explores the relationship between maternal working hours and a child's emotional well-being using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Child well-being is assessed through self-reported happiness and a well-being index that includes concerns, temperament, bullying, and behaviour. Results show a positive association between maternal employment and child well-being, supported by factor analysis combining child, mother, and teacher reports. The association remains consistent across income levels and is unaffected by commuting time or cohabitation status. These findings highlight the importance of maternal employment and contextual factors in shaping child well-being.

While in his early years, Kahneman followed the world of classic utilitarianism in which smart individuals base decisions on how they will truly feel each moment in the future, Kahneman in Mandel (2018) adopted a very different position, namely that what matters is the story people tell of their lives. He thus grappled with evolving stories of both the future and the past, and the presence of different decision-supporting evaluations for the short-run and the long-run.