From Happiness to Social Provisioning: Addressing Well-Being in Times of Crisis

The paper offers a critique of happiness research based on subjective well-being (SWB) data and proposes an alternative approach to the study of well-being drawing on the political economy tradition. The World Happiness Report (WHR) interpretation of the impact of the global financial crisis on SWB data is used to illustrate the problems with happiness research and the merits of an alternative political economy approach to well-being. The development of such an approach takes inspiration from broader notions of social provisioning rooted in political economy, and its application is seen to yield a better understanding of the meaning of, and the changes in, SWB data than that found in the WHR.