I see a sign reading "The End Is Nigh"

Will Wilkinson has done some very interesting writing on happiness and inequality.  His recent post on Landsburg on Kolbert on happiness has a great line regarding how people should interpret a specific genre of U.S. happiness research.

The fact of stable U.S. levels of self-reported happiness is an ideological Rorschach test; the way it is used tells you more about the person using it than anything else.