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

Cornelia C. Walther (Ed.) Handbook of Quality of life and social change. Series International Handbooks of Quality of life. Springer Cham, Switzerland 2024 19 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39507-9_29 (Update working paper 2015b)

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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