Not so dismal science

Economists start collecting data about "life satisfaction" as "measures of utility." Let me just say on behalf of non-economists... "You wern't already doing that?"

Anyway, the first result is that good government makes people happy:

Looking at the scatter plots, the correlation between life satisfaction and quality of government is remarkably linear. One interesting and seemingly robust result is that "countries with some element of proportional voting do have higher levels of life satisfaction."

No wonder we've all been so miserable of late.