Richard A. Easterlin, ‘Father of Happiness Economics,’ Dies at 98

Does getting a year-end bonus or raise make you happier? Does the lift it gives you tend to quickly fade, especially if others around you also won out in the annual compensation sweepstakes?

If the answer is that a boost in income doesn’t greatly improve your sense of well-being, then you are a proof point of the Easterlin paradox, the economic theory that more money, over the long run, won’t buy more happiness.

The paradox was put forth by Richard A. Easterlin, an economist, a demographer and a seminal figure in the field of academic research into happiness. The University of Southern California, where he was an emeritus professor, called him the “father of happiness economics” in announcing his death. He died at 98 on Dec. 16 at his home in Pasadena, Calif.

Mr. Easterlin’s work challenged both conventional wisdom and a core economic tenet that economic growth in a society leads to a general improvement in feelings of well being.

Economists, policymakers and ordinary citizens had long taken it as a given that increasing a nation’s gross domestic product — its total economic output — improves its people’s happiness.

But in the 1970s, Mr. Easterlin, then at the University of Pennsylvania, published research showing that even though incomes in the United States had risen dramatically since World War II, Americans said in surveys that they were no happier.