I happened to come across this post from 2006, Immigration and relative happiness, and it reminded me that “happiness” was really big in social science, twenty years ago. We had a lot of posts on the topic–not that coverage on this blog is the same as importance within social science, but I will often end up posting on things that are being talked about–if you search on “happiness” you get 4 posts from 2006, 3 from 2007, 3 from 2010, 1 from 2011, 2 from 2012, 2 from 2014, 2 from 2016, and three since then. Which reflects a gradual decline of interest in the topic, but it’s really more than that. Back in the 2005 zone, we were thinking about happiness a lot, whereas now it’s just one of many social and behavioral research topics.
That’s an internal-to-science take. We can also give an external, societal take: 20 years ago we were still in the long post-1990s economic boom, and there was a political consensus and a feeling that many of the world’s major problems were on the way to being solved. When I say “political consensus,” I don’t want to overstate the point: in the U.S. there were major political conflicts at the time (Iraq War, Social Security, a continuing increase in partisan polarization); still, it was nothing like how things are going on in the world now, both economically and in international relations. The point is just that, from the perspective of the early 2000s, it seemed that modern society was on the way to solving the big material and social problems, so it made sense to look at happiness, in a sort of quantitative-social-science update of the work of Galbraith and others in the 1950s. Now here we are in the 2020s, and people are running around trying to avoid getting bombed, or arrested, or fired; “happiness” seems like less of an immediate priority.
Maybe there’s a way to combine these perspectives to ask why happiness flared and then faded as a hot research topic. An easy answer would be that the problems have all been solved, but I don’t think so. It’s more like it faded away . . . it was more of a dead end. Or, not a dead end, exactly, more that not all its hopes were satisfied. I guess this arises in social science more generally, that an idea will flare in popularity, there will be lots of work in the area, some progress is made, some open questions remain, and then it becomes part of our background knowledge, just one more set of unresolved questions in our understanding of the world.
Happiness research still gets hyped–no, I don’t believe the claim, attributed to “a landmark paper in 2010,” that “a rise in income increased people’s well-being, but only to a ceiling of $75,000”–but it’s no longer the next new thing.
I’m not trying to dish on happiness studies in particular; it’s just an example of a social-science fad that was in the right place at the right time.
Calling something a “fad” is not to label it as useless–hula hoops are still around and providing people with hours of fun!–; it’s just interesting how an idea in social science can come out of nowhere, become huge, and then fade away. Not all the way to zero, and it didn’t start at zero either–the General Social Survey has been asking about happiness since 1972–but a fad nonetheless.
On the other hand, there’s this:
So maybe what’s happening is that happiness research continues to be a big deal, and I’ve just been implicitly noticing the derivative of its popularity rather than the absolute level. When happiness research was on the way up, it caught my attention. Now that it’s a mature subfield, it’s not so exciting. I don’t know. As with many social-science ideas, happiness research burst onto the scene with the promise that it would solve all sorts of problems, then it settled down to just become one more thing.
I’m guessing you’ve noticed this, but maybe not: this phenomenon–hot topic just fades away–is how Meehl introduced the problems associated with NHST in one of his most famous papers (Meehl, PE. (1978). “Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology”. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46, 806-834). Here’s the abstract:
“Theories in ‘soft’ areas of psychology lack the cumulative character of scientific knowledge. They tend neither to be refuted nor corroborated, but instead merely fade away as people lose interest. Even though intrinsic subject matter difficulties (20 listed) contribute to this, the excessive reliance on significance testing is partly responsible, being a poor way of doing science. Karl Popper’s approach, with modifications, would be prophylactic. Since the null hypothesis is quasi-always false, tables summarizing research in terms of patterns of ‘significant differences’ are little more than complex, causally uninterpretable outcomes of statistical power functions. Multiple paths to estimating numerical point values (“consistency tests”) are better, even if approximate with rough tolerances; and lacking this, ranges, orderings, second-order differences, curve peaks and valleys, and function forms should be used. Such methods are usual in developed
sciences that seldom report statistical significance. Consistency tests of a conjectural taxometric model yielded 94% success with zero false negatives.” I don’t think one can read too much Meehl.
I find this decline in happiness research somewhat puzzling. It is tempting to label it as a step forward – an ill-defined term subject to all kinds of statistical abuses is finally being somewhat discarded. But it is hard to square such “progress” with the myriad other abuses which continue unabated (dishonesty, trust, nudges, etc.). I also find external reasons (such as generational changes from an era where ” many of the world’s major problems were on the way to being solved” unconvincing. I don’t see changes in the external environment that would explain the rise and fall of happiness research. I’m left wondering if it is simply the natural hype cycle of social science research. However, I’m not sure there is such a natural cycle nor have I examined any evidence concerning whether other topics have similar trajectories. As I said, I am puzzled.
Studies of happiness are correlated with the number of bridge players named Susan in their 60s. QED.
I did a quick pubmed search for “happiness” [Title/Abstract], and put a graph here: https://imgur.com/3xH3LAk
It suggests more of a peak & decline than a plateau.
Raghu:
Here’s the graph you posted:
Is this really a decline? It looks to me like the apparent decline is coming because the graph includes 2025, a year that is only half complete.
You’re right! Somehow I had it in my mind that 2024 was the last year plotted. Given that it’s 2025, there isn’t any sign of a decline.
I suspect that doesn’t tell us much about happiness research per se. What does total number of papers look like?
Even the length of the titles/abstracts may be increasing due to online editions.
I loved the idea of searching for publications containing the word ‘happiness’ in the title or abstract, so I replicated the project on JSTOR. I restricted my research to journal articles, but did not restrict it to any particular research domain. Here is my plot: https://github.com/rapkroes/MISC/blob/main/happiness_articles_plot.png
The raw data are also available in that repository, in a file called ‘happiness_research_articles_JSTOR.csv’.
Interestingly, the JSTOR data show a sharp decline in articles mentioning ‘happiness’ starting in 2020. If this decline was due to the pandemic, it must have essentially eradicated that field of research, as only 20 publications were recorded in 2023 and just 9 in 2024 (the lowest number on record). These numbers are so low that I wonder if there is an issue with using the JSTOR database for such purposes.
You’re right, there is an issue–for most journals, there’s a delay before articles are included in JSTOR–e. g., 3 years for the American Sociological Review and American Economic Review, and 6 for APSR.
No decline on OpenAlex: https://explore.openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=title_and_abstract.search:happiness
I should probably check in on this one since I was somewhat optimistic about happiness metrics 20 years ago but less so today. My guess is that interest in happiness is related to the rise of behavioral econ and the recognition that people are not rigorous utility maximizers, whatever that might mean. (Long ago Sen pointed out that “utility” has no positive content; it’s really just a placeholder in formalizations of choice.)
From this perspective, measures of happiness or something like it play an important role in the study of consumption behavior. My favorite example is commuting, where a landmark study in Germany in the early 00’s reported a negative association between commuting time and self-reported well-being. A recent US study came to a similar result. Even in these cases, it isn’t clear whether “happiness” has positive content either; it’s what you need if you want to study whether decreased commuting time improves some notion, perhaps diffuse, of quality of life.
Where I think happiness has seen diminishing interest is in debates over the use of GDP as a metric of economic progress. There was a flurry of work on this a couple of decades ago, with various alternative measures proposed, and “gross national happiness” was a contender. There is still a fascination with this topic in certain quarters of the eco-left, but the professional literature has moved on, recognizing that no overall metric can reflect the many interests and concerns we bring to the notion of progress; you can have progress on one thing but retrogression on another, and the tradeoffs are not necessarily commensurable or even stable.
This is my perspective coming from my own immersion in the worlds of environmental econ and regulation. I’m interested in how it looks from other perspectives.
On utility, it’s as its proposer meant it to be, “independent of any psychological, introspective implications.” (Samuelson, P. A. (1938). A note on the pure theory of consumer’s behaviour. Economica, 5, 61–71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2548836)
One way I would like to think about it = the quality of the question and tractability.
There is firstly an innovation in psychology. That suggests happiness can be ‘manipulated.’ And let’s assume improving happiness was always on the agenda, but people weren’t sure it was possible. Next, it can become a “bureaucratic science” in that lots of people look for levers to improve happiness.
Hmmm… The New York Times recently ran an op-ed and a full-scale magazine article based on the large-scale World Happiness Report for 2025. The first happiness report was issued in 2012, but they’ve kept at it. And if the NYTimes does two pieces on it, then someone’s interested.