Economics of Happiness: A Social Study on Determinants of Well-Being among Employees in a State University

This study aimed to elucidate the level of happiness and its influencing determinants among employees (teaching and non-teaching) of Visayas State University, Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines. With the aid of purposive sampling, the study engaged 162 employees as participants in the survey to gather richer information. The study utilized primary data, which were collected through a developed and structured questionnaires. The data were analyzed through descriptive analysis and econometric modeling. Results revealed that non-teaching employees are more likely happy working in a university. It was found out that the predictors of happiness in working in a university are: age, years in service, permanent status, opportunities for promotion, and fair administration. Employees found their respective jobs as challenging, enjoyable and rewarding. However, results showed that income is not a determinant of employees' happiness. Furthermore, employees who are socially oriented and physically healthy are more likely happy workers.

HAPPINESS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

This article is about the relation between the concept of happiness and economic development. Today social values aimed at achieving profit, which causes a negative change in public attitudes due to their continued dominance over such qualities as justice, honesty, trust, love. Eventually, it becomes clear that such an economy has no prospects. As the only possible alternative is "Economics of happiness", in which it will be possible to equitable socio-economic development that will create opportunities to meet both material and spiritual aspects of life. Key worlds: economy of happiness, value, emotional well-being, life satisfaction, subjective economic well-being.

THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS IN ROBERT MICHELS BETWEEN BENTHAMIAN UTILITARIANISM AND CIVIL ECONOMY

The paper thematizes the problematic relationship between economy and happiness covered by economist Robert Michels (1876-1936) in his book “The Economics of Happiness” written in 1918. In this book Michels, as a true frontier scholar, provides, well in advance of the acquisitions of the modern “science of happiness”, an interdisciplinary reading of the different determinants of happiness and of their interactions, courageously refuting the monistic and reductionist paradigm of neoclassical economy dominant in his epoch. The hedonistic conception of happiness conceived by Michels echoes that formulated by Jeremy Bentham, but Michels, unlike the Utilitarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gives it an unexpected twist, by postulating heretically that happiness is the ultimate goal of economy and that wealth is only a means to achieve it. In establishing the primacy of happiness as the main purpose of economic activity, Michels follows in the footsteps of Neapolitan and Milanese Civil Economists of Enlightenment with whom he had other theoretical points of consonance which the paper highlights. However Michels’ conception of happiness differs from Civil Economists’ notion because it is primarily based on individual pleasure and not on relational goods, because it is disconnected from those components of gratuitousness which are immanent to sincere relational goods, because it is detached from the search for Common Good. Finally the paper illustrates the multidimensional and innovative public policies which Michels suggests for the achievement of happiness by invoking a wide range of integrated interventions to be carried out by the State and by the workers’ unions. Keywords: Happiness Economics, Benthamian Utilitarianism, Civil Economy