Happiness economics. How to measure growth and welfare?

Submitted Assignment from the year 2016 in the subject Economics - Other grade: 2.0 University of applied sciences Düsseldorf course: Economics language: English abstract: Everybody wants to be happy. There is probably no other goal in life that commands such a high degree of consensus because to most people happiness is all they want and try to achieve. Thus happiness has long been considered the ultimate human goal in life. Even Aristotle considered happiness the ultimate motive for all human action. In today's consumer culture this happiness is often pursued in the marketplace. Yet economists have refused to deal with individuals' happiness a long time but considered it to be an unscientific concept. However in the past few years the situation has changed and economic science has experienced the introduction or reintroduction of individuals' happiness into economics. While traditionally economics has almost exclusively focused on consumption wealth and other monetary indicators to measure individuals' well-being it now more and more adopts the subjective notion of well-being to analyze how economic determinants such as income wealth and employment as well as non-economic determinants such as personality traits and socio-demographic factors affect individuals' utility and life satisfaction. Although Easterlin already examined correlations between economic growth and welfare and individual happiness it still took about twenty years for the idea to take off. In the meantime happiness research and economics has provided many interesting findings and insights. Today there is a wide range of literature on the so-called happiness economics that analyses individuals' well-being and its determinants.