This chapter considers work and unemployment. Full-time workers spend at least a quarter of their waking life at work. But on average, they enjoy that time less than anything else they do. The worst time of all is when they are with their boss. Even so, people hate it even more if they are unemployed. This is not just because they lose money from being out of work. They lose a sense of contributing, of belonging, and of being wanted. The chapter reviews all these issues, focusing again on people under 65. It first looks at unemployment—how much it hurts, whether one can adapt to it, what legacy it leaves, the role of local unemployment rates, and what determines who becomes unemployed. It then turns to the quality of work.

This chapter turns to the Gallup World Poll to investigate the impacts of social norms and institutions upon a person's life-satisfaction. Social norms and institutions are public goods that affect all individuals living in a society. As such, their effects can only be studied by comparing life-satisfaction across societies, rather than across individuals. To that end, the chapter compares different nations. Countries differ in many ways apart from income and health. Perhaps the most important of these are in their ethical norms of behavior, networks of social support, openness and tolerance, personal freedom, the quality of government, equality, and levels of religiosity.

Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffers from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects.

Do we really need a global project called Action for Happiness? One of its main architects, Richard Layard, explains his thinking