Happiness

“For as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy” (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1098a18).  The notion of happiness as an ultimate good, and the question of what makes people blessed and happy has occupied much thought before and since Aristotle’s teachings.  Recently the academic literature on subjective well-being has blossomed, with many robust links being identified between various forms of financial economy (e.g. income, relative wealth), human capital (e.g. identify, purpose), and social relationships (e.g. family and friendships). Rarely, however, do ecological goods and services get included in these analyses.  Our goal here is to explore the ways in which ecosystem services generally, and cultural ecosystem services specifically, contribute to subjective human well-being.  We will introduce a general theoretical model that explores both the material (e.g. food, shelter) and non-material (e.g. freedom, inspiration) elements of happiness.  Then, by using various statistical tools (e.g. variance partitioning), we will deconstruct this relationship on a global scale, specifically exploring different regions of the world.  We are able to demonstrate the ways in which ecosystems and forms of natural capital are important to our well-being after accounting for the importance of other forms of capital such as built capital, social capital, human capital, and financial capital.  Likewise, we provide estimates of the degree to which factors which have historically been strongly tied to subjective well-being  in the literature (e.g. income) are in fact ultimately moderated or driven by the state of the ecological system.