Research Agenda 2019
Aims of the Happier Lives Institute
The Happier Lives Institute (HLI) aims to address the following question: how can we most effectively use our resources to improve global well-being? Governments and policy organisations are starting to take well-being, as measured through self-reported happiness and life satisfaction, as the measure of social progress instead of GDP. There are now active efforts to determine which policies should be adopted to increase well-being. However, there is relatively little evidence-based guidance available for individuals or organisations who want to help people become happier around the world. HLI intends to fill this latter gap.
HLI’s Vision: a world where everyone lives their happiest life.
HLI’s Mission: to provide rigorous research that informs those seeking to make people’s lives happier.
This document
As of October 2019, we are still in the process of finalising our research priorities. We are, and have been, consulting with HLI’s stakeholders (individuals and organisations we think would, or could, be interested in our work) as well as leading academics in the field. This document summarises our current thinking on the overall structure of our planned research. It sets out a non-exhaustive and non-prioritised list of topics that we would like to be addressed. Our previous research agenda can be found here.
Summary of our plan
There is a substantial and fast-growing academic literature on subjective well-being (SWB), self-reports of people’s happiness and life satisfaction. This research is primarily emerging from the fields of economics and psychology. We consider SWB scores the best available means of measuring well-being and so determining how best to increase it.
Our research falls into two streams: theoretical and applied. The former concerns various outstanding questions about well-being and its measurement – issues that need to be addressed about whether,
when, and how to make use of the SWB research. The latter pertains to ‘cause prioritisation’: if we aim to improve global well-being, what are the most pressing problems to work on and what are the best means of making progress on them? We expect this applied research to reveal new theoretical issues.