Another Reason Harper's Is My Favorite Magazine

Remember when I had that outstanding idea to do an in-depth study of happiness? Well, Harper's today published a single, almost contex-free sentence: "Scientists said that the best way to measure happiness is simply to ask people how happy they are."

First of all -- what the hell? I hope these scientists aren't behaviorists who have a theory of happiness, where X's happiness is equal to X's reported happiness. If they do, they are weird, alien scientists, who shouldn't be studying anything as anthropological as happiness. They should study magnetic field deflection or something bloodless like that.

If, like most of us, they think happiness is something other than reported happiness, then how could they posssibly know? I am having a really hard time thinking of an experiment you could perform, where the resulting data forced you to conclude that the best way to measure happiness is to ask people how happy they are.

Perhaps the scientists compared people's reported happiness with the results of a brain probe measuring their happiness-related brain waves, and found that they correlate highly. Okay. That's plausible. I don't believe that those two measurements would correlate highly, but whatever. The point is, in doing that experiment, you are tacitly assuming the brain probe is the best way to measure happiness. Aren't you? Is there any other way to do an experiment like this and get the result reported in Harper's? I'm pretty sure there's not. Scientists get it all wrong, from start to finish.