Happiness Gap

Researcher tracks feelings of well-being worldwide
by Chris Carroll While economists traditionally deploy cold, hard numbers like gross national product and growth rates to compare welfare around the world, Carol Graham (below, inset) is trying a less conventional measurement: happiness. Graham, a professor in the School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, is a leader in a movement using subjective feelings of happiness to examine economic success and social mobility. For a recent study published in the journal World Development, she and her research partner, Milena Nikolova Ph.D. ’14, analyzed well-being metrics from the Gallup World Poll to assess factors that make people feel good—and how they vary across countries and income levels.
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