When I first began to study the subject of happiness a few years ago, I was almost stopped in my tracks by a dismissive objection to the entire undertaking. Why study that subject now? Isn't it a luxury to do so, given the anguish and insecurity of our own time and given our awareness of how many people live in dire poverty, devastated by wars and epidemics? Shouldn't my inquiry be focused, rather, on suffering in all its forms?

I asked myself the same question at the time of the devastation in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. I felt unable to return to the topic of happiness for weeks. Then I realized that happiness—indeed everlasting bliss in an imagined paradise—was at issue even in those murderous assaults, held out as a tantalizing reward by instigators claiming to convey God's commands.

Even apart from such violations of the most basic respect for human life that is upheld by religious and moral and legal doctrines alike, it is precisely in times of high danger and turmoil that concerns for happiness are voiced most strikingly and seen as most indispensable. From earliest times, views of what makes for human happiness were set forth against the background of human suffering, poverty, disease, and the inevitability of death, by thinkers such as Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Aristotle, and Epicurus and in texts such as the Bible and the Koran. The Roman Stoic thinker Seneca wrote his most moving letters on the subject while being hunted by the henchmen of the Emperor Nero who finally forced him to commit suicide. And the American Declaration of Independence, stating as inalienable rights "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," surely did so at a time of exceptional insecurity and massive threats to life and liberty.

The subject of happiness never was a luxury to be postponed until more serene, peaceful times. Pursuits of happiness have often been debated as matters of life and death. But I believe that the study of these pursuits may be more needed than ever in our time, in part because there has been an unprecedented shift in how people the world over perceive the possibility of happiness in their own lives. Over the course of the last century, societies the world over have seen dramatic reductions in illiteracy, infant mortality, and premature death. The majority of the world's peoples now enjoy standards of living and political freedoms unimaginable to their great grandparents. By the end of the twentieth century, average life expectancy in some of the world's poorest societies, such as Bangladesh, was higher than that of Britain at the beginning of that century. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, therefore, ancient notions about the need for submissive acceptance of misery, segregation, discrimination, perhaps in hopes of a better life after death, are losing their power.

A second reason why I believe that the study of happiness is not a luxury has to do with the need to bring into the open the stark political and moral assumptions that underlie most debates about its pursuit. These assumptions are familiar in philosophy and political science, but often go unspoken in social science research on happiness. They concern questions of power—power exerted or defended against, whether in families, communities, or political and religious institutions; and in turn questions about freedom, justice, and equality. Do all or just some people have the right to the pursuit of happiness? At what costs to others? How are the means to happiness best distributed? What else should matter in human lives aside from happiness? And how should we weigh efforts to achieve personal happiness in a world where we are aware, as never before, of extremes of misery and opulence?

The mounting differences between haves and have-nots has exacerbated the perennial tension over these questions. Even as so many people the world over now do enjoy political freedoms and standards of living unimaginable to their great grandparents, the near-quadrupling of the Earth's population has also meant that far more individuals than ever are beset by poverty, poor health, and religious and political oppression.

These levels of suffering and deprivation are rightly seen as the more unjust because they are unnecessary, given the vast resources in principle available to overcome them. And here is where a third reason why I find the study of happiness so timely comes in. Recent research in the natural and social sciences has made it possible to examine factors and policies that contribute to human happiness or detract from it in ways about which past thinkers could only speculate.

The world over, psychologists, economists, and sociologists are exploring the degree to which factors such as age, health, income, employment, and marital status contribute to felt happiness or unhappiness. Neuroscientists use magnetic resonance imaging to map fluctuations in the brain when people experience pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, elation and dejection. Geneticists are tracing inherited differences among individuals in regard to such factors as temperament, energy level, and ability to withstand stress. And psycho-pharmacologists are studying differences in how individuals react to a variety of drugs that influence mood.

As a result, it is possible, for the first time, to compare what large groups of people say about their actual experiences of happiness and unhappiness in different societies; and to be more specific about what sorts of policies, in families, communities, and societies, might increase human happiness. We are nowhere near agreement about how individuals and societies can benefit from a more sophisticated understanding of factors and policies that contribute to, or detract from, happiness; but there is no doubt that the studies now under way are indispensable to arriving at such an understanding.

Without the insights they can provide, a perennial temptation has been to issue portentous one-dimensional declarations about the state of human happiness. Theologians contrasting the miseries of earthly existence to heavenly felicity have been as likely to utter grim estimates on this score as secular thinkers declaring that most people lead lives of quiet desperation. John Stuart Mill went so far as to draw a figure out of his hat, in Utilitarianism: "Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness: it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of humanity." His godson Bertrand Russell, while speaking with less mathematical precision in the Conquest of Happiness, nevertheless still claimed that the great majority of people were unhappy: all you needed to do to recognize this state of affairs was to look at your friends or at people you meet in the course of an ordinary day, or to stand on street corners observing the expressions on the faces of passers-by.

Today's cross-cultural surveys of what people say about how happy or satisfied they feel about their lives represent an improvement over such armchair speculation. The results flatly contradict both dismal and exultant generalizations. No, fortunately for humankind, most people do not see themselves as leading lives of quiet desperation; instead, the majority among them regard their lives as moderately or very happy—at all levels of income and education. No, however, it is equally wrong—and indeed sentimental—to imagine that happiness has nothing to do with standards of living, that it can be achieved equally well by all persons regardless of poverty, ill health, or denials of basic human rights. Although some people can be happy even in direst misery, more individuals in democratic societies with higher average incomes and standards of living report feeling happier, more satisfied with their lives, than those in the poorest societies. On these scores, all studies agree.

As I look over the research on subjective well-being, I note that no one factor or set of factors has been found to be necessary for people to feel happy or satisfied with their lives. Neither health, nor goodness, nor poverty, faith, or any other factor can be seen as a defining factor. Scholars may disagree with respect to just how much good health or any of the other factors contributes to people's sense of well-being; but all agree that none is indispensable. Human beings are so complex, they experience happiness in so many different ways, that for any factor some take to be indispensable, examples will be found of someone thriving without it.

All evidence indicates that certain factors are more likely than others to correlate with happiness in most people. Health is surely among them, as is being above a threshold of economic well-being. So, in all probability, is goodness. And among factors most likely to detract from happiness are, not unexpectedly, deaths in the family, divorce, and prolonged unemployment.

Those engaged in social science research on happiness will also benefit, I suggest, from considering what people say about their experiences, not just in surveys and experimental studies, but also in letters and journals and other personal accounts, and from how such experiences are portrayed in art. To neglect these deeper, sometimes more intimate forms of testimony is to waste a precious resource for the study of happiness. After all what people recount about experiences of happiness, bliss, joy, elation, contentment, pleasure, euphoria, or ecstasy, as about sadness, sorrow, melancholy, despair, pain, misery, grief, and agony, turns out to be so much more vivid than dictionary definitions or responses to surveys.

Beyond all that we can gain from journals, letters, and auto-biographical writings in seeking to understand the range and depth and richness of experiences of happiness and unhappiness, works of art can give us still more. As the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch points out, in The Sovereignty of Good,

Any story which we tell about ourselves consoles us since it imposes pattern upon something which might otherwise seem intolerably chancy and incomplete. However, human life is chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, but also of comedy and of painting, to show us suffering without a thrill and death without a consolation.

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