Is life satisfaction same as happiness as the indicator of policy-making?

Now many political leaders focus more on subjective well-being as alternative to GDP than ever before. However, happiness studies often use life satisfaction to be interchangeable with happiness as a subject well-being indicator. Moreover, Helliwell and Putnam (2004) said that the ‘life satisfaction’ measure seems marginally better than the ‘happiness’ measure for the purposes of estimating the effects of relatively stable features of social context. It may leads to the fact that the OECD, the European Union, United Kingdom and Bhutan apply life satisfaction rather than happiness as their subjective well-being indicators. However, Kahneman and Deaton (2010), for instance, stated that “high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness”. This leads us a question if life satisfaction is better than happiness as the indicator of policy-making.

We conducted small group interviews in seven regions and cities in Japan to examine if notion of life satisfaction and happiness are conceptually same. As a result, happiness claims relationship with family (including parents and children) and friends more. However, life satisfaction refers to individual issues and economic aspects such as income and job. In particular, Cantril's ladder life satisfaction is much connected to job. Our multiple regression analysis supports these results. Because political attention to subjective well-being aims at seeking alternative to GDP, measurement to correlate strongly with material condition is less meaningful for policy making. Our result reveals that happiness is more proper measurement for alternative to GDP than life satisfaction for policy purpose.