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Review of Environmental Economics and Policy Advance Access first published online on July 11, 2008
This version published online on July 14, 2008
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, doi:10.1093/reep/ren006
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Reflections on the Literature

V. Kerry Smith*

* W. P. Carey Professor of Economics, Arizona State University, Resources for the Future University Fellow, and National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Associate.

This article considers the large literature on "happiness economics," which uses people's answers to survey questions about their happiness to address economic policy tradeoffs. The authors of this literature contend that their assessments provide a measure of respondents’ "true internal utility." They have also argued that these assessments can be used to measure the tradeoffs people would make to change policy. Happiness economics seems to have captivated both the editors and referees of the flagship journals in economics. Theorists are trying to reconcile existing economic models with the empirical results of happiness economics, and behavioral economists are using the empirical results to support calls for new approaches to consumer sovereignty. Serious responses to happiness economics from environmental economists are long overdue. This article examines how a happiness survey would fare if it had to face the same standards used to evaluate contingent valuation or stated choice questions.

JEL Classification: D60, Q50

Thanks are due Eric Moore for exceptionally careful research assistance and for his comments on many of the ideas in this paper. As with my past Reflections on the Literature essays, thanks are due to Suzy Leonard, who worked her "magic"—greatly improving all aspects of this essay.

The manuscript type for this article has been corrected.


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