Is it transient? [only an idiot is happy all the time, yes?] Can your case be made more or less transient? [Can Mae make a difference? can she!]
And we are going to entertain the notion of measuring this?
Not me. And not Mae. What about you, econometrician (stick-in-the-mud)?
This elusive but well worth pursuing Happy person is someone who is motivated, inspired and an inspiration to others. She is both your best citizen and your best worker. So policies that make more people happy, more often for longer periods of time are worth pursuing. We can tell (like Mae) when you’re happy, but measuring it in the aggregate…I don’t think so.

For a good introduction, try:

Greene, W. 2003. Econometric Analysis, Prentice Hall: New Jersey

Oh thank GOD you cleared that up! Want to clue us in on the understanding?

More importantly, I doubt that this is the kind of experience people use to anchor their scale. I suspect if you asked people to nominate directly the times when they’ve been happiest, that things like holidays would figure pretty strongly. Also weddings and honeymoons, I imagine, which opens up some interesting issues for debate.

In that sense, even if the criteria were clear and non-relative, the “numbers” may obscure more than they reveal. But if you set the survey up correctly, it may still be useful to help determine whether happiness increases with income, etc.

(A methodological problem with the “video” example above is that respondents may have their own personal relative rankings of how happy all the people in the video are! So you might dictate that a “7” means as happy as this guy, but someone might think that the person dictated as a “6” actually looked more happy. You could try to work around this maybe, by having them perform the relative rankings of the 10 people themselves…)

A fair point, but there may be other examples of guidelines which are clear guidelines but not really numerical. Like for example, “watch this video. A 5 means you are as happy as this guy. A 7 means you are as happy as this woman. A 9 means you are as happy as this person.” etc.

Of course, people need to interpret that person’s happiness and compare themselves to it, which is arguably still an unclear task. But, also arguably, there is now more comparability among groups, because you have made the points of comparison clearer.

I’m not saying this is particular survey idea is a very good one. Just that one can imagine ways to make the survey less relative even without giving them really numerical instructions (like “how many times a day do you feel XYZ”)

Conchis’s replies have been bang-on. The assessments are made relative to peak happiness experiences, e.g. falling in love, which there’s no reason to assume change from generation to generation. (Do orgasms feel different for Americans now than they did in the 1950s?) The assessment then is of how close the rest of a person’s life is to that peak. One might have expected people with bigger houses, faster cars, and more entertainment options to be closer to the peak more of the time. If they say they’re not—if the extra wealth hasn’t improved their non-peak experiences—that’s informative.

Always tell them 9 or 10, or else they’ll assign you a lower priority and fix people who said “10” first. Delaying appendectomy could kill you.

Hmm. You mean in principle or just in practice?

In principle, this must be false. Clearly you could give people much more rigorous survey guidelines (e.g. “a ‘7’ means that you experience blah blah at least 20 times a day…”), such that the measurements were accurate and absolute, not relative.

In practice, that’s hard. Surely if you just say “pick a number!” without much explanation, who knows what you’ll get.

You are putting your finger on a problem, but the problem is this:

1) We don’t know how people interpret the survey question.
2) So, we don’t know what their criteria are in answering it.
3) In particular, we don’t know whether they answer using relative or absolute criteria.

You are positing that they answer using relative criteria, which is indeed a problem because it means that people in different groups do not have comparable scores.

The problem is not with the 1 to 10 scale, though. Those are just numerical endpoints, you can of course find a bijection between [1,10] and any other 1-dimensional numerical scale you wanted to use. It may be necessary to map ‘10’ to infinity. Oh well, you throw out a value.

Of course, we may someday find out that 1 to 10 is a little silly. That depends on whether we find something we really think is a great thing to measure and call ‘happiness’ (like, the percentage of time your left PFC activity is greater than right, or vice versa, I forget). Chances are if we find some actual thing we want to call the numerical measurement of happiness, the 1-10 scale will not be the most natural scale for it.

The problem with 1 to 10 is not the numbers, or the boundedness of the numbers, but rather the lack of explanation on how to give yourself a number.