Who Was the First Professor of Happiness?

Watson, Hart, Diener, or Veenhoven

The Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) recently announced that they’re appointing the “world’s first professor of happiness” – a chair with a special focus on happiness, well-being and welfare. As far as marketing goes, the announcement was a success. Many prominent outlets reported it as fact.

But is it true? No.

Happiness, well-being, and welfare are core questions in the Western philosophical tradition, ever since Socrates asked how one should live one’s life. Every philosophy undergraduate is taught the broad outlines of different answers to this question. Some, though not all, of these answers involve the concept of happiness.

My colleague Torbjörn Tännsjö is a well-known public intellectual in Sweden. He worked on happiness and related issues for much of his career, with an office located less than two miles from the SSE.

Maybe the SSE meant the first professor in the science of happiness, as opposed to the philosophy of the same?

The science of happiness is literally 100 years old. A historical survey published in 2011 traces its roots to the period immediately following World War I, when the emergence of psychometrics gave psychologists the confidence that personal traits like happiness could be scientifically measured.

If I had to pick a first happiness professor from this tradition, I’d pick Columbia University Professor of Education Goodwin Watson, whose 1930 paper “Happiness Among Adult Students of Education” was absolutely pioneering. If not Watson, I’d choose Duke University Professor of Sociology Hornell Hart, whose 1940 book Chart for Happiness was a landmark study. An honorable mention would go to University of Alabama Professor of Psychology Warner Wilson, who published a widely cited survey article as early as 1967.

It’s remarkable that the body of research already in the mid-60s was large enough to warrant a survey article. A Google Scholar search for “science of happiness” today yields 23,300 results. That’s a lot of scholars studying happiness.

Maybe the SSE meant the first person called “professor of happiness”?

A Google search for “professor of happiness” yields 1 570 000 results. Many accomplished academics have been called, or have named themselves, “professor of happiness.” Here are some particularly well-known ones: Tal Ben Shahar, Arthur Brooks, Ed Diener, Paul Dolan, Dan Gilbert, Ruut Veenhoven, and Laurie Santos.

These people are all very famous. Every happiness scholar worth their salt knows of them.

If I had to choose one name from this list, I’d choose one from each side of the Atlantic: Diener in the US and Veenhoven in Europe. Both are widely known and highly respected not just for the quality of their work, but also for the extent of their influence.

What if the SSE meant the first individual with “professor” and “happiness” in their official title?

Now we’re just talking about branding. Bragging that you have the first employee officially branded “Professor of X” is a lot like Jaguar bragging they’re the first company to produce an “E-type,” or Volvo advertising they’re the first to construct a “V90.”

But even so the SSE wouldn’t be the first. Veenhoven has both words in his official title, as (now Emeritus) Professor of Social Conditions for Human Happiness.

There’s no non-trivial sense in which the SSE just appointed the world’s first happiness professor, as far as I can see. If I were the SSE, I’d be concerned that deceptive marketing practices might do long-term harm to their brand, whatever the short-term gains. But they’re the ones with a Marketing Faculty, so presumably they know more than I do.

When I try to “sell” the science of happiness, by contrast, I emphasize its longevity – the fact that contemporary thought on happiness (when done right) reflects 2500 years of philosophical reflection in the Western World alone, and in addition a full century of systematic empirical study. Far from something we just made up, the science of happiness is a well-established epistemic enterprise dedicated to understanding what makes humans flourish and communities succeed.