How happy are you with your life? Yes, it’s back to “happynomics”, because a new paper suggests that one of the oldest findings in the field may be an artefact of the way this question is often asked.

First, some background. Happiness – “subjective well-being” – is often measured by asking survey respondents how satisfied they are with their lives, taken as a whole. Sometimes this is a multiple choice question: “very happy, fairly happy, or not very happy?” The most influential paper in happiness economics, Richard Easterlin’s 1974 “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?”, extensively discusses evidence from surveys of this kind, in which very few American respondents said that they were “not very happy”. Almost half said they were “very happy”, the most blissful response available.

People, then, are generally happy with life – too happy, perhaps, for a three-point scale. Easterlin is often quoted as having proved that economic growth does not lead to happiness, but perhaps we should say he pointed out that economic growth might not eliminate misery.