Robert Frank - Hard Data: The highs and lows of happiness economics

Prof. Robert Frank is the H.J. Louis Professor of Economics at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management and a columnist for The New York Times. Frank’s books, which include Passion with Fever, Principles of Economics, have been translated to 24 languages. He is the co-recipient of the 2004 Leontief Prize for Advancing Frontiers of Economic Thought. His talk at The 2017 Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Festival during the socio-economics Moonshot focused on “Hard Data: The highs and lows of happiness economics”.

Robert Frank’s talk focuses on answering the question: is GDP a good measure of human welfare? His intake is that happiness depends on how much you have in relative terms, not in absolute terms; it‘s all a matter of context. He provides several examples to show that beyond people’s income or a countries’ GDP, a comparison against a local frame of reference is more pertinent and will have a greater impact on overall happiness.

In March 2017, the Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum welcomed some of the brightest and most interesting minds from the UAE and around the world to discuss four of the most important moonshot challenges facing our planet. The event was inspired by the world-famous Aspen Ideas Festival that has been taking place in Colorado since 2005, as a place for scientists, artists, politicians, business leaders, historians and educators to discuss some of the most fascinating ideas of our time. The 2017 Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum topics included: “System Shock: Calming the ‘politics of anger’”, “Beyond GDP: Targeting ‘all-in’ human welfare”, “Health: Extending the healthy human lifespan” and “Space: Living Sustainably beyond Earth”.