Daniel Kahneman was the king of happiness—as a field of academic study
Every year, the World Happiness Report ranks countries in terms of happiness by calculating their happiness scores. The six key variables that make up this index are GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and lack of corruption. These are mostly calculated on the basis of individual self-assessments.
In contrast, looking back at the legacy of Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), a 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fused Psychology and Economics, it’s noteworthy that, starting in the 1990s, a significant part of his work concentrated on the assessment of “objective happiness" through “moments" of life. These efforts bear a strong connection with his and Amos Tversky’s paradigm-shifting research from the 1970s that pioneered Behavioural Economics. Perhaps following that idea, Kahneman provided a whole new meaning of ‘happiness,’ which is multifaceted and neither separate nor time-neutral.
According to Kahneman, if a person wins a lottery twice in a row, for example, the winner’s total utility will be higher if the first win is $1,000 and the second is $1 million, rather than if the sequence is reversed. Moments: What about them? According to a popular estimate, each of these little time-spans of psychological presence (as in ‘present tense’) might last up to three seconds. This would mean that at least about 500 million moments occur in a life span of 70 years.
Kahneman created a moment-based conception of objective happiness, an aspect of well-being, sometime in 1999-2000. He posited that measurements of moments must be made in accordance with logical principles in order to generate a useful estimate of experienced utility. Populations with different life conditions can have
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