What makes people happy is not central to macroeconomics. But a lot of people think it ought to be central to policies designed to affect macroeconomies.
For example, some claim that income distribution or environmental quality affects happiness. While they surely do, it's not clear if they are major or minor influences.
However, in another social science they're pretty sure they've pinned down what influences "life satisfaction".
Psychologists describe our personalities in terms of 5 (big) domains and many (smaller) nuances. For the most part, these are considered immutable within a person.
Life satisfaction is readily predicted by focusing on three of those domains: being extroverted, conscientious, and emotionally stable. At the nuance level, being unsatisfied is associated with "feeling misunderstood, unexcited, indecisive, envious, bored, used, unable, and unrewarded".
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Fair enough. So here's the thing. Politicians talk a lot about policies to make peoples' lives better: higher tariffs to protect workers (Trump), containing rent inflation (Biden), and so on.
There are economic pros and cons to things like these. But do we envision them making people more ... conscientious, or less ... bored? If not, maybe we're not helping people as much as we think we are. Just food for thought ...
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