So in order to increase happiness we want to get as close to full employment as we can.
FORBES: World Happiness Report: Even Jeff Sachs and Richard Layard Don't Really Believe It
Jeffrey Sachs chases after the Easterlin Paradox and so claims that we should all be running the economy to increase happiness not just to increase the economy.
However, this does give us a clue to what I think would in fact be the one single thing we could do in order to increase happiness in our modern day society.
Some people handle increasing income well, using it as a tool to increase their happiness (Oprah comes to mind).
To increase your happiness, you may want to consider friending more miserable-seeming people on Facebook.
Once we get a lot of data onto maps, we can really begin to understand reality in much different ways, like where to build a house to increase the happiness of the people inside it, how to make routes that avoid accidents, and how to design better urban systems.
This question was addressed in a large-scale project by Gretchen Rubin who tried to increase her happiness over the course of a year by setting herself specific goals that covered, among other areas, marriage, work, leisure, parenthood, friendship, money and so on.
King Jigme's goal, he says, is to increase the "gross national happiness, " and to that end he spends weeks traveling his Himalayan realm, in a Toyota Land Cruiser until the roads end and then on horseback or by foot, inquiring about what it would take to make people content.
In this way, social entrepreneurship is a gesture of ethics, an attempt to eradicate suffering and increase happiness.
Before we thought money could, indeed, increase happiness, but only up to a certain point.
FORBES: Mom Was Wrong: Money Does Buy Happiness. There's Research To Prove It
Economists reckoned the uplift in happiness at that time was equivalent to 60% of the increase in wellbeing people tend to experience when they cross the line of median income, from the third income quartile into the second one.
With well-being rather than happiness as the topic, interventions are now to be designed to increase flourishing, and not just life satisfaction, by increasing positive emotions, engagement with activities, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment.
FORBES: Atlantic Philanthropies and Charles F. Feeney: How Wealth-in-Action Redeems Us All
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