A panel of experts thinks the US government should be more in touch with Americans' feelings.
By gauging happiness, there'd be more to consider than cold hard cash when deciding matters that affect daily lives, according to a report this week from the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the government.
The panel of economists, psychologists and other experts assembled by the academy recommended that federal statistics and surveys, which normally deal with income, spending, health and housing, include a few extra questions on happiness.
"You want to know how people are doing?" said panel chairman Arthur Stone, a professor of psychology at New York's Stony Brook University.
"One of the things you may want to do is ask them."
Asking how people feel can be as important as asking how much they are spending, Stone said.
For example, economists have something they call the misery index which adds the unemployment and inflation rates but doesn't include how people feel. If you want to know misery, the question to ask is "how much suffering is going on," he said.
The panel suggests a series of questions to measure daily happiness and general well-being. These include asking how often a person smiled, was stressed, laughed or was in pain.
Sample questions ranged from a simple yes-no "Yesterday, did you spend time with friends or family?" to a more complex 1-10 rating for "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?"
Over the past decade, these types of questions have shown to be valid scientifically, said Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution economist who was on the panel.
The report said the answers can help governments shape policy on basic benefits, such as retirement age and pensions, care for the chronic and terminally ill, unemployment and working conditions. It cited a study by one of its Nobel Prize-winning panellists that showed people's feelings about commuting problems helped officials decide whether or not to create commuter toll lanes on highways.
In terms of collecting happiness data, the United States government "is a bit of a laggard" behind other industrial nations, said John Helliwell, an economist who co-directs an institute that studies well-being at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Happiness studies "keep reminding you that there is much more to life than income and housing," he said.
When governments and academics study happiness they find money isn't everything.
"Having no money is terrible for everything," said Graham, author of several books on the economics and measuring of happiness.
But after people make a comfortable amount of money, it doesn't add too much to happiness, she said.
That's what a study last week in the journal PLoS One found. It used worldwide surveys and found that as people made more money worldwide they got happier - but only to a point. That point is just shy of $US36,000 ($A39,741.68) a year per person, or $US144,000 for a family of four.
Once people reached that point, happiness measurements level off and even go down ever so slightly, said study lead author, Eugenio Proto, an economist at the University of Warwick.
