The Brookings Cafeteria

"Happiness." "Contentment." "Subjective well-being." Can we measure how happy people are and if so, what can we do with this information? In this podcast, , the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow and author of , explains how happiness/well-being research works and why it matters for public policy in the U.S. and globally. In the podcast, Graham explains two dimensions of understanding well-being, the "Benthamite/hedonic" and the "Aristotelian/eudemonic." She explained them : Those of us involved focus on two distinct dimensions: hedonic well-being, a daily experience component; and evaluative well-being, the way in which people think about their lives as a whole, including purpose or meaning. Jeremy Bentham focused on the former and proposed increasing the happiness and contentment of the greatest number of individuals possible in a society as the goal of public policy. Aristotle, meanwhile, thought of happiness as eudemonia, a concept that combined two Greek words: "eu" meaning abundance and "daimon" meaning the p