| |
| | Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle » 2005 » December |
 | | Given the simply embarrassing lack of longitudinal studies (it is, of course, hard to get tenure while waiting 20 years for the data to come in), for all we know people who read self-help books generally are happier, but they are offset in the aggregate by people miserably addicted to Us Weekly. |
 | | If the happiness bank hypothesis was true, then a flat happiness trend line plus high self-help sales might speak volumes. |
 | | So, it may be that we are in fact getting happier, and that the surveys can’t track the shift, due to adaptation, social comparison, limit aversion, and other phenomena governing the self-reporting of subjective states. |
| www.willwilkinson.net /flybottle/2005/12 (6416 words) |
|