The Declaration of Independence states that our inalienable rights include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Life and liberty are easy to understand, but that last phrase is less intuitive. How can people have a right to strive for happiness?
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Uniting to Fight Poverty: A TED Talk
How do we solve problems like poverty with so much political polarization?
Welcome to the Pursuit
To pursue our happiness, to achieve our liberty, and indeed to find fulfillment in our lives, we must start with a moral consensus, a fundamental truth around which we all revolve. Think of an atom. The outer field of electrons is full of chaotic activity. Electrons are rapidly orbiting and moving in a constant buzz. What contains that chaos and gives it structure? The fact that the whole chaotic cloud orbits one central nucleus.
Are the Danes Really the Happiest People on Earth? A Semantics Test
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness,” tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic...
read moreWhat People Around the World Mean When They Say They’re Happy
Even though she is still healthy and lively, Mrs. Xie has already prepared the clothes she will be buried in. An 86-year-old Chinese woman who lives in Dongshan, a city on China’s southeastern coast, Xie has an active life, cooking for friends at the local...
read moreStudy: Religion and Bank Loan Terms
Wen He and Maggie (Rong) Hu, senior lecturers at the University of New South Wales Business School in Australia, examine whether religion affects the terms of bank loans. In the paper’s abstract, they write, “We hypothesize that lenders value the traits of...
read moreThe Economics of Homelessness
Turns out the 2008 recession didn’t increase the number of homeless while at the same time the number of sheltered homeless didn’t expand during or since the recession. Nonetheless, the renewed effort since 2007 to count the number of homeless has ushered...
read moreThe Real Victims of Victimhood
A study on victimization found divided subjects into two groups. One which was prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers. Comically, the researchers noted that the “victims” were more likely to leave trash behind and steal the experimenter’s pen.
read moreScience Behind the Factoid: Lottery Winners Are No Happier Than Quadriplegics
Here’s a frequently repeated, counterintuitive factoid: people who win large sums in the lottery are no happier, over time, than people who become paralyzed in traumatic accidents. This “fact” comes from Brickman et al’s 1978 paper called Lottery Winners and Accident...
read moreNovelty or Surprise: A Study in Motivation and Learning
Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications,...
read moreMaryland to Mail Free Books Each Month to Baltimore’s Children
Not your typical government-sponsored program: “The Youth League of Baltimore will help coordinate the effort — dubbed ‘Governor’s Young Readers’ — by identifying local partners to lead fundraising efforts, promote the program and help families...
read moreChoose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier
Twenty-four years ago this month, my wife and I married in Barcelona, Spain. Two weeks after our wedding, flush with international idealism, I had the bright idea of sharing a bit of American culture with my Spanish in-laws by cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner....
read moreChicken or Egg: Does Happiness Itself Directly Affect Mortality?
Background Poor health can cause unhappiness and poor health increases mortality. Previous reports of reduced mortality associated with happiness could be due to the increased mortality of people who are unhappy because of their poor health. Also, unhappiness might be...
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