Happiness

Hello. My name is Kostas Economides and I am a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the South of England (USE for short). Well, actually that is not true really as the names of individuals and institutions in this blog have been changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty!

People keep asking me about how I am getting on with Jenny. The answer is "Great" thanks - but I am not going to be posting about her on my blog.

I am also being asked if I have any news about how Richard got on with Bubbles. We know that he went back to her place for tea after they watched the football together at the Ship pub the weekend before last. Well on Friday we finally got to hear from him what happened. It turns out that Bubbles is divorced and has a daughter called Lindsay who lives with her. Every other weekend her ex-husband has custody and it was his turn to have the girl that weekend. But he had to return her to Bubbles at six o'clock. Bubbles was quite happy to have someone else with her when that happened. So Richard was there when young Lindsay was returned. The ex-husband was surprised to find Richard there and he wanted to hang around to find out more about him. But, says Richard, Bubbles was quite assertive and said that it was none of his business. The husband countered by saying that it was important to him to know who was around his young daughter. Richard said that he understood that, but he had only just met Bubbles and they didn't even know yet whether they would be seeing each other again. This seemed to satisfy the ex-husband and he left. However Richard said that he would be seeing Bubbles again over the Bank Holiday weekend. If the weather was nice Richard, Bubbles and Lindsay would be going out somewhere with a picnic.

Richard also said that before the ex-husband turned up he and Bubbles had had an interesting discussion about the overlapping research area in psychology and economics relating to studies of happiness. Happiness was indeed the research topic for Bubbles PhD where she was following up one of the points raised by the American psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and the question of why some people are happier than others.

Richard says that he has just read an interesting paper by the Nobel prize winning economist Daniel McFadden called "The New Science of Pleasure. Consumer Choice Behavior and the Measurement of Well-Being". One of Richard's research topics has been consumption functions so maybe there is something that they could work on together. So a shared academic interest and a shared interest in football. So maybe this relationship has legs, especially if Richard is not put off by Bubbles having a young daughter. We shall see.