Part of the reward of becoming an agent of compassionate, life-affirming change, whether or not you get public acknowledgment, is the knowledge you are doing measurable good. There is nothing theoretical about your gift as an agent of change. It may usually be anonymous, but the contribution is quite real.

Research shows that the spread of happiness can be objectively measured and quantified. This work also begins to explain exactly what one needs to do to cause happiness to spread and what the social outcomes are of doing so.

There actually is a database of international research on happiness: the World Happiness Report. Published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the first World Happiness Report was published in April 2012. The latest was released April 23, 2015.

How Can We Measure Happiness?

To create the survey, teams of researchers review country by country survey data on well-being, including a ranking of national average life evaluations, based on Gallup World Poll data. But they place particular emphasis on each individual’s subjective evaluation of a series of questions rising from how much freedom a person […]