Knowing what is good for you: Empirical analysis ofpersonal preferences and the “objective good”

This paper aims to test empirically if certain frequently used measures of wellbeing,which are regarded as valuable properties of human life, are actuallydesired by people. In other words, it investigates whether the “expertjudgments” in social science overlap with social consensus on what the “goodlife” is. The starting hypothesis is that there is an overlap between these two inthe case of basic needs. For the analysis, individuals’ self-reported lifesatisfaction is used as a proxy for “utility”, based on survey data, whichincludes about 30 000 individuals from 21 different European countries. Theresults indicate that the commonly used measures of well-being – labour marketsituation, health, housing conditions and social relations – significantlyinfluence people’s satisfaction, ceteris paribus. Next, the stability of preferencesis tested using Hungarian data from the 1990s. The results indicate that therewas only very limited change in the relationship between life satisfaction andbasic measures of well-being despite the landslide of societal and economictransformation.[...]