In one way, the statistical equating of the quantity of happiness of 16- and 70-year-olds obscures the ways in which the quality of that happiness is completely different.
"The essence of a revolutionary process, peaceful and democratic, is to give our people, to all without exception, without exclusion of anyone because of class, skin color or religious beliefs, the greatest quantity of happiness possible".
He seizes upon Ecstasy's signal drawback this way: "It is as if there is a certain, finite quantity of happiness that Ecstasy can lead one to use up quickly".
Spicing his talk with quotes from his hero, Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century South American liberator, the president said that the "most perfect system of governments is one that gives its people the greatest quantity of political stability, the greatest quantity of social security, the greatest quantity of happiness.
His ethics, expressed in his Utilitarianism (1861), followed the formulations of Bentham in finding the end of society to consist in the production of the greatest quantity of happiness for its members, but he gave to Bentham's cruder (but more consistent) doctrines a humanistic and individualistic slant.
Kelly Johnston, a geographic information systems specialist at the lab who created the maps, explained that he tried to convert the qualities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into quantities that could be visualized in a map.
The upshot of 50 years of happiness research is that the quantity and quality of a person's social connections friendships, relationships with family members, closeness to neighbors, etc.—is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated.
The best predictor of happiness (and often health) is the quantity and quality of a person's social ties.
There isn't a limited quantity of success or happiness, meaning that if one person achieves something, the rest of us take an automatic step backwards.
The emerging science of happiness has found that most of our satisfaction, some 70%, is determined by the quantity and the quality of our relationships.
In other words, having too much of one type of happiness may undermine our ability to have enough of the others – so it's impossible for us to simultaneously have all types of happiness in great quantities.
