There are diminishing returns on comfort: that second Mercedes is much less satisfying than the first. The research suggests that happiness rises with wealth up to about $15,000 (€10,300, £8,000) a year, then levels off.

Here, keeping up with the Joneses must mean looking permanently serene, regardless of your mood.

The Himalayan Buddhist kingdom is the antithesis of rich, liberal, atheist Switzerland and measures its success not in gross national product, but gross national happiness. Yet the people of Bhutan do not vote at all and are still pretty content. The Swiss can vote six or seven times a year and it makes them very happy, according to the database. In the first category is the fact that equality, choice and money do not matter in the way we have come to believe. For Weiner, as for Prof Veenhoven, this seems like the kind of misguided quest that can only end in despair.īut The Geography of Bliss turns out to be an entertaining mix of the counter-intuitive and the blatantly obvious. Prof Veenhoven alienated fellow liberal sociologists when he argued that homogeneous societies were happier than diverse ones.

His starting point is the modish new academic field of 'subjective well-being' and the World Database of Happiness run by Rotterdam professor Ruut Veenhoven. Grumpy American journalist Eric Weiner (pronounced 'whiner') spends 400 pages trying to nail the word down in his search for the happiest country on the planet. But if that is true, how can the billboard near my parents' house assert that happiness is a foot-long hotdog? Happiness, of course, can be both things and neither - debased by copywriters and ignored by science, the word is meaningless as a signifier of a real emotional state. Happiness, Aristotle claimed, is the highest good.

The geography of bliss