Understanding and Consideration of the Concept of Happiness, what Impact in Economic Thinking?
The questions addressed are : what do we know, in the current state of knowledge, happiness, and its importance for human development, global and individual ? Can you outline a general approach ? How this approach is essential to determine our goals, social and individual ? To answer these questions the methodology of this article consists, firstly, to present the main empirical results on the subject. Many databases have emerged : the NBB, the World Database of Happiness, IBM, HDI and many others. Investigations have provided the opportunity to work on large amounts of data on the level of happiness felt by the population, and its causes. They complement, but lead ultimately to results often close. The second part analyzes the relevance and limitations of these investigations, in order to more precisely the emergence of a definition of happiness and its components. The purpose of the third part is to define the economic significance of these results. Indeed, many economic theories are based on a vision of happiness underlying, whatsoever for example in the calculation of individual productivity (efficiency wage theory), or in determining the choice (bounded rationality)… We conclude this work by a simple model of the impact of happiness in our choices.