National Happiness

Two academics have used digitised books and newspapers since 1820 to measure happiness based on word usage.
They control for the change of meaning in some words (e.g. awful – used to mean ‘to inspire awe’).
You can see clearly in the chart that war is bad for happiness.
They also find that wealth does lead to an increase in happiness but it is dwarfed by the impact of increases in health.
In fact, 1 year of longevity has the same effect as 4.3% of GDP Growth.
Source: The Economist.