IN PURSUIT OF GREATER HAPPINESS FOR A GREATER NUMBER: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

IN PURSUIT OF GREATER HAPPINESS FOR A GREATER NUMBER
A personal account

Chapter prepared for the Handbook of Quality-of-Life and Social Change, edited by Cornelia Walther, to be published by Springer in 2023

Ruut Veenhoven

ABSTRACT
I was raised and tasked by my parents to contribute to society. As a student, I learned about the moral principle that we should aim at achieving greater happiness for a greater number of people and took this as a lead. I do not advocate any particular way to greater happiness, but I have spent my academic life charting determinants of happiness. To this end, I developed the World Database of Happiness. This is a findings-archive in which I stored the results of empirical research on happiness in the sense of life-satisfaction. Research on this subject has grown exponentially since the 1960s and to date (2022) the archive holds some 50.000 findings. This provides an evidence base for rational pursuit of happiness.

Keywords: utilitarianism, subjective wellbeing, life-satisfaction, finding archive, research synthesis

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IN PURSUIT OF GREATER HAPPINESS FOR A GREATER NUMBER A personal account

IN PURSUIT OF GREATER HAPPINESS FOR A GREATER NUMBER
A personal account