I agree with nearly all of your comment, so I will just focus on the area of disagreement.

While I agree with you that individual choice is inherently subjective I don’t think this means that happiness is inherently unquantifiable. I think that you and I could construct reasonably accurate indexes of how our own individual happiness varies over time (if we thought this was worth doing).

There is a much bigger conceptual problem with interpersonal comparisons of utility, but humans do communicate with each other about their happiness and the words they use seem to have common meaning. So I don’t agree that attempts to measure the average level of happiness of a group of people involves an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.

At the same time, I acknowledge that there are huge measurement problems in attempting to quantify average happiness and a great deal of confusion about the meaning of existing measures of subjective well-being.

It seems to me that exsiting subjective well-being measures are not entirely meaningless but many people, includng some economists, tend to misinterpret them.

The attempt to measure overall happiness is an attempt to quantify an unquantifiable characteristic. Marginal utility is not knowable or measurable. It is relative for each individual and not objective. It is an ordinal prioritizing of choices using all of the knowledge of that person. Using presumed positive and negative feelings measured by bodily reactions is accounting for a tiny part of the overall picture, and likely distorts reality to a significant degree.

Every individual has his or her own goals, circumstances, needs and assumptions about the future. Fleeting happiness of the moment cannot possibly be a determinant of a worthwhile, joy filled and fulfilling life overall.

Many people will put up with unpleasant situations now in return for some benefit that they may expect sometime in the distant future. That future could be early retirement, a special vacation, a college education, paying off the mortgage, or an infinite number of other possibilities.

Working long hours, even if current pleasure is not maximized, is proof positive that the individual doing the working values the benefits expected from the work more than the unpleasantness of the work. If that was not so, he or she would be doing something else.

You may be right that the happiness research may make some people happier if they follow its prescriptions. As a general rule, however, I think it is a serious error to think that people are too stupid to be able to weigh current costs against future benefits. They may think differently than we do, they may view activities and rewards in a different priority than we do. Only they, however, know the things that they do about their own life, their own priorities, their own skills, their own hopes and dreams.

It is not for someone else, whether a researcher, outside onlooker or government bureaucrat, to impose their own priorities on them.

The choices that an individual makes are only better if the new knowledge encourages further introspection as to what is really important for that person. If the person applies the findings of the study without further thought, he or she may actually end up less happy in the end, because longer term goals are not met.

Using the study results may be a real benefit only if it dispels some mistaken belief that distorted the decision making process for that person. In that case, the individual can make a new set of priorities, base on an updated understanding of reality.