I've been suspecting recently we might give quite different answers to this question. For eg, discussing with RobertWiblin, I found that he thought almost any life has net positive, which he takes as a reason to place greater restriction on abortion.

It seems vital we answer this question accurately. It bears on everything from vegetarianism (the logic of the larder arguments) through abortion laws and questions of the threat of human/total extinction to a comprehensible form of the repugnant conclusion.

I suspect I will see the 0 point as a fair bit higher than some, given some of the discussions I've seen.

I was going to pull a figure out of a hat and say that zero utility lies on about the 2nd percentile in Australia. So perhaps 98% of Australians (or citizens of an equivalent western country) have above zero utility. Firstly, here's what it wouldn't imply:
> that murder and its resultant suffering would become acceptable
here's what it might actually imply:
> if Australia's wealth is acccompanied by happiness, then compared to the rest of the world, we have few people living with below zero utility. Therefore, in sub-saharan african nations, for example, half of the population might live with negative utility.

I think restricting abortion so that the resultant babies contribute to total utility is a fundamentally bad idea. Firstly, it disrupts the mother's life; it takes freedom from the only party old enough to get upset about it. Secondly, it will not merely make more babies, it will make them arise at more inconvenient times.

Thirdly, and this is not an argument against the idea itself, but about its marketability: Don't air ideas that are "manipulative", that "use others as means", etc. It's suicide for utilitarianism to promote way-out ideas that it doesn't necessarily even support. Rather, try promoting something like a baby bonus ($3000 lump sum for parents to give an incentive for creating children). That one has already worked in Australia, you could try to extend it to similar countries.

I was thinking more of descriptions of a set of real sensations we might experience in a plausible day that might sum to zero.

As I suspected, though, I'm much more pessimistic. I don't think people tend towards happiness unless something's actively causing them to do so, and the mere lack of famine etc doesn't seem a sufficient something. I would guess that overall we tend to 0, and specific events tend us to go negative or positive. Given that people tend to compare themselves to others and that most of the wealth is concentrated at the top (therefore most comparisons will ultimately be unfavourable), I'd imagine there's a slight preponderance of negative experiences. So I would guess somewhere between 50-60% of person-days in the developed world are slightly negative.

I don't think that's anywhere near high enough to suggest murder, though - outright elimination of the biosphere maybe (although I think we're very gradually improving) - but what would murder ever achieve? Even if the rate were 99%, you'd just be freeing up resources for some other poor bugger to exist on. Meanwhile, murder usually causes a lot of suffering, even if it's done quickly, and perhaps more importantly the threat of murder would violently drag the happiness level even further down .

For reasons related to both the above points I completely agree on abortion - and I don't see any short-term reason to encourage procreation at all. Compare the benefit of offering $3000 for rearing a child (which presumably will tend to encourage families who either for financial or emotional reasons are less likely to be able to give their offspring a good start than those who would have reproduced anyway) vs giving the same $3000 to Fred Hollows, or similar.

Incidentally, if you do try to impose restricted abortion rights, you probably pay a hefty admin+enforcement cost for each baby that you prevent from being aborted, so again you have to ask whether that cost is worth trading off against all the other ways the money could be spent.

I find people's perception of whether the median person is happy is strongly affected by their own level of happiness. I am a supremely happy person so unsurprisingly I am biased towards optimism about life.

A day where it sums to zero? A day doing boring work while feeling hungry. You come home and it's noisy and uncomfortable and you only have bread to eat and don't sleep well.

Banning abortion and other birth control, if it could be enforced cheaply, would increase the birth rate. Just look at countries where birth control is unavailable. Sure, the mother wouldn't like it, but you have to compare their unhappiness having a children with all of the benefit (if indeed you think of it as a benefit) to the child from existing for 80+ years. In Australia we have more willing adoptive families than we have children for them to adopt.

Given we are total utilitiarians, the question really comes down to whether a higher population now increase or decreases existential risk. I'm sympathetic about the 'crash through' approach, which involves maximising population and GDP in order to get as much technological improvement as quickly as possible in order to 'race' to some future state in which existential risk is much lower (post-uploads/space colonisation). Hard to tell if that is a good strategy though.

Remember that higher population growth now means we'll have more people when we work out how to make people happy hedweb style.

"Given that people tend to compare themselves to others and that most of the wealth is concentrated at the top (therefore most comparisons will ultimately be unfavourable), I'd imagine there's a slight preponderance of negative experiences."

I would completely disagree that that has much impact. Most of the impact on happiness amongst the people I know is dependent on whether they have good reliable friends who respect them, are getting sexually satisfied, and whether they get exercise. I don't know anyone who dwells much on where they stand compared to the super-rich who they rarely/never meet. People want status in their social group much more than they want wealth.

You've seen this I assume: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/ ... p-for-gdp/

Maybe I'm also biased because Australia appears so high on quality of life indices:

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cach ... Cgiw&pli=1

RobertWiblin wrote:I find people's perception of whether the median person is happy is strongly affected by their own level of happiness. I am a supremely happy person so unsurprisingly I am biased towards optimism about life.

This rings true. Someone should do a study on it (unless you know of any?). In the meantime, we ought to allow for what seems like a very strong cause of bias in our beliefs. I’m quite grumpy, and suspect over any given recent 3 month period, say, I would come out slightly net-negative (though going by your description below, I’d prob be comfortably net positive). It varies a lot, according to situation, though - I lived in Melbourne for a while and generally felt much more upbeat at the time (which supports your view on Australia).

A day where it sums to zero? A day doing boring work while feeling hungry. You come home and it's noisy and uncomfortable and you only have bread to eat and don't sleep well.

The problem is, there’s a lot of info missing here. I should have asked about a net-0 period of no more than a few minutes, so it was easier to give a comprehensive description.

But I’d strongly disagree with what you’ve written, as far as it goes. It seems to me like you’ve given a group of pretty negative states and assumed all else being equal. It’s interesting how we could productively discuss whether a state is negative or positive. One obvious option is comparison of preference.

Take a state of existence, such that you’re experiencing a constant happiness C and possibly + variable happiness V (where V can be negative).

Let’s keep E and C abstract, and play with V. Say V = B (1 minute of boredom). Would you prefer to experience C or C + V? (to ensure a valid comparison, we should probably say that the alternative is C + 1 minute of existence with C)

C seems pretty obviously preferable to me, but we can try changing V, such that V is something very obviously good or bad. Say V = T (the torture of having your eyeballs scraped raw by a rusty blade). I imagine we can agree that we prefer C to C + V.

Now suppose (i) V = T + Bx. Is there any positive value of x, such that you’d prefer C + V to C?

We can sort of do this in reverse, to check we reach consistent conclusions. Say V = S and S = the sensation of great sex with a partner for whom you’ve real affection. Presumably we’re happy that C + V is now preferable to C.

Now suppose (ii) V = S + Bx. Is there any positive value of x such that you’d prefer C to C + V?

To me, it’s clear that the answer to (i) is no, and while I feel less emotionally attached to it, my answer to (ii) is yes. Similarly, for every single one of the sensations you described in your day, if we substitute it for B above, I would give you the same answer.

This method will run into problems when we disagree on the answers to (i) and (ii), but I suspect you’d agree so far? Anywhere we do disagree, it would seem like we must (to be consistent with the idea of total utility) simply mean something different by what we describe as ‘boredom’, or whatever state the disagreement arises over.

It would be interesting to find out if we can even very roughly agree on numeric values for common everyday sensations using such comparisons.


(I'll try to reply to abortion stuff later)

The relationship between a "net 0" day and abortion to me seems tenuous. It seems to me that a person's life has to be taken as a whole, and then the net utility has to be summed over their life and beyond depending upon the reach of the consequences of their life. Otherwise very strange situations occur. For example, if a person becomes very sick in the short term, but is a very high achiever and can be expected to continue to be, they will have days in the short term that can fall below "net 0" depending on the definition, but longer term it could be expected that the person would have a very positive total. For example, Michaelangelo is very sick with tuberculosis, but can be cured. But in the interim he will be bedridden, and sum up many days with very much lower than his usual utility. Even if it is determined that this becomes a negative utility, we should not kill him because he is draining utility in the short term, because in the longer term the total will be diminished.

In the same way we can think of potential babies. The long term potential benefit of the baby is a very large unknown, and would require some very very detailed models to quantify. This potential factor is so very large because of the expected lifespan of a baby, it makes the few months of discomfort or bliss of the potential mother a vanishing quantity in the equation generally. If the pregnancy becomes very difficult and has complications, then that factor will become larger relatively of course. Without being able to predict the utility of the baby's life in total though, with reasonably accurate models, the decision to abort or not to abort is more akin to a random decision with no basis in reason. And if we just say, it doesn't matter long term, we just know that right now on this day, the baby is giving below "net 0" utility, but the pregnant mother is very aggrieved to the point the sum of utility is overwhelmingly poor on that day, it would seem to be just forming a decision by looking at a random point in a noisy long term chart of utility over time.

Is there really interest still in the idea of "total utility"? I was under the assumption there just were too many practical reasons against it for it to really be a valid model.

Hi Larry, welcome on board. I agree with you in practice, but not in theory - total utility seems to be the most plausible criterion I've seen, and the most popular utilitarian yardstick. Without knowing what PoV you're coming from, I don't know how to justify that. But most utilitarian alternatives seem to fall apart pretty fast.

I think you're dead on about practical applications, though - uncertainties stack up much faster than I think Robert's brand of util accounts for, so we should treat many future outcomes as having roughly equivalent probability almost regardless of our actions.

The relationship between a "net 0" day and abortion to me seems tenuous. It seems to me that a person's life has to be taken as a whole, and then the net utility has to be summed over their life and beyond depending upon the reach of the consequences of their life.

The idea is that a single day is easier to think about. If you take the average utility of a single day, and multiply it by the number of days, that's the total utility. The consequences of them existing would be happening for everyone who currently exists. The question comes down to if we are underpopulated, about right, or overpopulated.

I was under the assumption there just were too many practical reasons against it for it to really be a valid model.

Got any other suggestions?

I think zero utility is when I'm barely staving off boredom.

DanielLC wrote:I think zero utility is when I'm barely staving off boredom.

Can you be more specific, both in terms of sensations and the circumstances which might provoke them? (also what else would have to be equal that might not be - eg you not being hungry, etc)

Arepo wrote:total utility seems to be the most plausible criterion I've seen, and the most popular utilitarian yardstick

It seems to me, maybe I am uninformed, but if this theory is applied, in all cases it will settle over time to a point where every person in existence will settle to a point just a fraction above "net 0" at all times, This is due to the fact that if one person is significantly above "net 0" it will be appropriate to take just enough resources from him to reduce his happiness to create another person that is just above "net 0" until everyone is just above that point, and no higher. The more utility each person creates will have no effect but to encourage creating another person to absorb it. If the total falls to a level below 0, then no more people will be created until there are enough resources to raise the total above 0 again. So yes I see the effect on population control, but it has an effect of capping everyone's happiness at zero.

Is this the idea then? I think if the zero point is never changed then there is no possibility of raising people's happiness with a better system. If average utility is used, maximizing the happiness of an average person, then it is desirable to increase the happiness over time, by implementing more effective creation of utility for each person, and more efficient usage of resources. I think that was my concern. I wonder if it is addressed. If the zero point is targeted higher and higher over time, then that would address it?

larry wrote:It seems to me, maybe I am uninformed, but if this theory is applied, in all cases it will settle over time to a point where every person in existence will settle to a point just a fraction above "net 0" at all times, This is due to the fact that if one person is significantly above "net 0" it will be appropriate to take just enough resources from him to reduce his happiness to create another person that is just above "net 0" until everyone is just above that point, and no higher.

What you're describing sounds a lot like the effect Derek Parfit called the Repugnant Conclusion. Wikipedia has a pretty good piece on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_conclusion

Most total utilitarians take a view similar to Torbjörn Tännsjö's (mentioned in the 'objections and resolutions' section), and that's one of the discussions which the recognition of net 0 utility would be very important to.

I'd point out that maximising your total doesn't require spreading out your happiness over a large population - 100 utilons is 100 utilons regardless of where they're located (which can lead you to the exact opposite conclusion/problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster - although surely both outcomes can't be repugnant?).

There might well be good instrumental reasons for seeking a certain distribution though - we don't seem to have evolved to be capable of persistent happiness, so after a while resources thrown at have severely diminishing returns. Similarly, we seem to react negatively to inequality, so we'll have fewer sources of frustration if no-one seems far more priveleged than we do. But conversely, it costs a lot to breed, raise and sustain a human, and there are often much cheaper ways of improving some existing person's wellbeing (see eg here).

If average utility is used, maximizing the happiness of an average person, then it is desirable to increase the happiness over time, by implementing more effective creation of utility for each person, and more efficient usage of resources. I think that was my concern. I wonder if it is addressed. If the zero point is targeted higher and higher over time, then that would address it?

Average util can make a lot of total util's problems disappear, but it has serious problems of its own that, IMO, completely destroy it as a sensible system. For example, if you have a population of 9 people with happiness 10, and 1 person with happiness 5 (where 0 is still the neutral point, so they're all pretty happy), for 9.5 average, AU says that if no better option is available, someone should murder the guy with happiness 5. This can be true even if they all like him very much, so that killing him reduces each of the survivors' happiness to 9.9, and even if the thought of being killed is enough to plunge his happiness down momentarily such that it drags the total average happiness over the whole group's lifetime down a further notch to 9.7.

This is obviously counterintuitive, but it also seems completely self-defeating in a system that's supposedly about increasing happiness and reducing suffering. Everyone in this scenario seems to have to suffer in order to satisfy the AU principle.

Very informative post thank you.

larry wrote:if you have a population of 9 people with happiness 10, and 1 person with happiness 5 (where 0 is still the neutral point, so they're all pretty happy), for 9.5 average, AU says that if no better option is available, someone should murder the guy with happiness 5.

I would think that if people realize when they become negative contributors with respect to what they consume in order to maintain their happiness that they can be targeted for murder, they would then begin to dislike the system. Such that if the 9 people conspired to murder this one, then they could realize if this continues, all people below average will be murdered until there is only the most happy person still standing. Every other person then would have been murdered. They realize they will be killed then, and this will reduce each of their numbers significantly. So that the average will possibly be lower than before the murder. i.e. before the murder the average is 9.5, but then they conspire to kill the other person, and they become miserable thinking they are next, and each of their numbers becomes 7.5, for an average of 7.5 rather than 9.5.

But like I said this is all very informative, I would like to see what the board's consensus on the best system is and if it is documented on a post somewhere. I have read through the posts but I didn't see anything like that, I probably missed it by scanning through. A system that I would envision would be a hybrid I would say. It would maximize the average happiness, but have multipliers to keep the distribution tight by minimizing the sigma, so that it would be difficult for outliers on the lower end to get too miserable, as a multiplier would increase to throw more resources towards them to pull them toward the average. I would assume that is akin to social welfare programs in our system for the poor. Then it would also use a sum figure that is extended over a person's lifetime and beyond to take into account the results of their entire life. How could that ever be done, but that to me would be the most accurate way. I have not thought it through that thoroughly, but that is why I searched for an answer and ended up here.

Thanks again for the time.

I think you're looking for the topic Average vs Total.

Why is keeping the distribution tight important? I know inequality aversion is a common belief, but it doesn't make much sense to me.

You might find some of the links in this thread useful. In particular, if you're interested in competing forms of utilitarianism, you might want to check out Toby Ord's whirlwhind tour to some of the disputed questions.

If you're really feeling adventurous, he's put his entire PhD thesis up on the web for us - it discusses what he considers a new variant of util, comparing it to rule and act util (it's orthoganal to total and average util questions, i think). Link at the top of this thread (download it now if you're thinking he might read it later - he'll probably have to take it down if it gets published). He works closely with some of the biggest names in consequentialist philosophy, so while I'm still working through it, I suspect it's going to be pretty thorough.

Oh, thinking about it, are you familiar with prioritarianism? It sounds a lot like the kind of thing you describe. I think it's got more intuitive appeal than regular util, but it seems too arbitrary to me. Still, it tends to be pretty closely allied with util in practice (hence the description of this forum).

Oh great! Thanks for the link, I missed that.

DanielLC wrote:Why is keeping the distribution tight important? I know inequality aversion is a common belief, but it doesn't make much sense to me.

I think you may very well be right, I imagine if the system is analyzed carefully, there is probably not a need for a factor such as that, I haven't thought about it enough. I added it as a sort of forced empathy, for some reason I just have the nagging fear that people are not as empathetic as I am, and it just seems intuitive, but it may not be really desired. My initial fear is for the people at the very bottom fringe, and that the masses can exploit a single/few persons to raise their happiness, for example, like the Romans did with gladiators in the arena, or for example kids on a playground picking on the runt for sport. But this is probably along the lines of the murder example, that was postulated by Arepo. Once you begin eliminating/persecuting the few to make a large reduction of their happiness in order to raise the the masses a little resulting in an average increase, then it begins to actually eat at the average as people realize the system becomes a danger to themselves as they can very well be targeted, and the entertainment they receive from the action doesn't outweigh the negative of the victim, plus their creeping dread that they could be next.

I think something along the lines of discrimination against a minority can, though, occur in the system. If the minority is definitely identified, and everyone knows they are not part of that group, then possibly they will not feel remorse in exploiting that minority to raise the average. For example there are 100 people, and 1 is a midget. The system decrees that the midget is taunted for entertainment, and since the other 99 are not midgets they will never be taunted, so they have no fear of retribution. It just seems non-ideal.

But, in reality, you would think that the effort expended to perform such things which create the low outliers would likely be replaceable by some other entertainment that didn't target anyone and yet raised the average by at least the same amount or more. I would like to think of an example where the sigma reduction is obviously needed, but I am not sure I can. But I will think about it some more.

Anyway I got off topic, sorry. This is very interesting though, thanks for responses.

"(1) Almost all humans are surprisingly happy almost all the time. 90% of Americans report themselves to be "very happy" or "fairly happy". Also, almost everyone thinks that they are happier than the average person. To a first approximation, almost everyone is near the maximum on the happiness dimension, and this has been true throughout history as far back as we have reliable records. (This may be because our ancestors preferred happy people as sexual partners, driving happiness upwards in both sexes through sexual selection)." - Geoffrey Miller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(evolutionary_psychologist)

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/story/86.html

Hmm, to believe that 90% of Americans self-report their happiness to be high doesn't really fill me with confidence.
> Americans are far better off than average and for cultural reasons (e.g. value of optimism), self-reported happiness
> could be higher than actual happiness.

A concerning quote from that edge article is:

once they reach a certain minimum standard of calorie intake and physical security, further increases in material affluence do not increase their happiness very much.

What minimum caloric intake do they refer to and how many among the world's population meet it?

Agree with Ryan. If surveys claim that average people are that happy, I find that more of an indictment of the surveys than anything else.

Is there any other way of telling if people are happy? From what I can tell, your opinion of the average person's happiness only tells of how happy you are. We can't easily give someone a brain scan and use that information to calculate their utility. If this is the only way we can guess, we are equally likely to be overly optimistic as overly pessimistic, and we have no choice but to accept this value.

What makes you confident that your perception, which is biased hugely by projection and availability bias, is better than the general concensus of happiness research? How else would you suggest resolving our disagreement about the happiness of most people?

Partly that I think I'm more intelligent, and better at honest self-reflection than the majority of people they surveyed (or if I'm not, they can't have surveyed a very representative sample), partly that I can think of numerous reasons why such surveys would be very likely to overrepresent people's happiness (people overstating their happiness level, precisely because of the reason Geoffrey Miller gives - that it's evolutionarily advantageous to do so, and also their being more likely to take part in such a questionnaire if they're happy) and few incentives for bias in the other direction.

And partly that I'm not aware of any such consensus. Judging by this graph, there's a wide variance between countries. A few random clicks around countries on this survey suggest less variation but an average vote of about 6/10, where 5 is net zero. I have no idea how anyone could infer that 'almost everyone is near the maximum on the happiness dimension' from such data. I'm not sure what that would even mean. What is 'the maximum' and why is it relevant to anything? It's either an obviously false claim about the impossibility of one entity having >N hedons where N is roughly what most modern humans have, or it's a claim that we're rarely much happier than our resting point of happiness - which would imply nothing about whether our resting point was roughly positive, neutral or even strongly negative.

At this point I'd like to mention that I'm not alone in contradicting him

Geoffrey Miller wrote:the happiness research shows that increases in numbers of sexual partners and social status do not boost overall long-term happiness

RobertWiblin wrote:Most of the impact on happiness amongst the people I know is dependent on whether they have good reliable friends who respect them, are getting sexually satisfied, and whether they get exercise

As for how I'd suggest resolving our disagreement, I think someone should find a forum populated by people with an interest in happiness and start a thread proposing that we look for a way to assess it, perhaps by coming up with a simple method of comparison that would allow us to compare our preference for certain states, to see if we can find a consensus about which states are net positive/negative, and perhaps by how much.

If anyone were to do that, though, it would only work if the other forummers actually responded to the proposed method by either applying it or proposing a better one, rather than having orthogonal discussions about how many people report being happy

If we can reach a rough consensus about everyday situations then we could get a much more accurate picture of happiness by multiplying the situations by the plausible quantity we might expect to experience them in an average year. I think it could be a very interesting and useful serious research project tbh, and not one I can hope to cover comprehensively here - but there's no reason we couldn't make a start.

"few incentives for bias in the other direction."

Desire for sympathy and assistance among certain groups perhaps? I imagine that availability bias pushes out estimates down - simple everyday pleasures like listening to music and eating nice food don't spring to mind when we are asked to think about our lives. Catastrophes and depression tend to be more memorable events.

"more intelligent, and better at honest self-reflection than the majority of people they surveyed"

How does intelligence help with this? From what I've read it negatively impacts happiness which might help to explain your negativity. Even perfect self-reflection here would only give you a single data point.

The method you suggest sounds good.

Not sure how to mesh that database with Miller's statement.

Arepo, you are also less happy than most people. That kind of ruins any advantage you have. Also, how do you know you're better at self-reflection? Also, how do you know that they didn't survey a representative sample?

Regarding the original question:

One useful way of thinking about where to draw the line for utility 0 is Tännsjö's test. When having a total experience at a certain time, ask yourself if you'd prefer being unconscious at that time or not (everything else equal).

Regarding the surveys (the standard method for measuring cognitive measures of happiness such as Life Satisfaction, LS):

Some indicators that the method is (at least somewhat) reliable:
-Very high response rate (about 99%)
-The results correlate well with estimates by friends and family of the happiness of the respondee
-Correlations between measured happiness and frequency of laughter and smiles
-Some fMRI studies finding correlation with activation in "pleasure centers" in the brain
-Correlations with things like good sleep and lenght of life (a difference of 8 years between happiest and unhappiest, in one study)


Regarding the causes of unhappiness for some of Rob's friends:

The qoutes may not be incompatible, it depends on the correlation between number of sex-partners. Since (I take it) someone who has a stable partner is more likely to have sex more often than most people who are single and have several partners over time more partners need not imply more sex.

Furthermore, in the classic study of 900 women in Texas, measuring affective happiness (by the measure affect
balance, using the Day Reconstruction Method, DRM) happiness was clearly highest during sex.

Unfortunately, the further DRM studies included in Kahneman and Kreuger's National Time Accounting (2009) do not include the activity sex. However they do include exercise, which ranks among the highest activities for affect balance (and which plausible also has positive long term effects.).


"How does intelligence help with this? From what I've read it negatively impacts happiness which might help to explain your negativity."

Interesting. Have you seen studies finding specifically a negative correlation between happiness and *intelligence*? How strong? I've seen some which have found a fairly weak negative correlation with education.

Thanks for the info Jesper. These surveys are problematic, but some method for asking people how they feel still seems to be the best thing we have at the moment.

Definitely recall seeing reported second hand that controlling for everything else IQ reduces happiness. Possibly the intelligent have higher expectations for their lives, and may also find it hard to 'zone out'.

Don't know the paper though.

Seems it might have no effect:

http://mahalanobis.twoday.net/stories/876383/

www2.eur.nl/fsw/research/veenhoven/.../Intelligence&Happiness7.rtf

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong and it was education.

One useful way of thinking about where to draw the line for utility 0 is Tännsjö's test. When having a total experience at a certain time, ask yourself if you'd prefer being unconscious at that time or not (everything else equal).

This seems to make sense.

Some indicators that the method is (at least somewhat) reliable:
-Very high response rate (about 99%)
-The results correlate well with estimates by friends and family of the happiness of the respondee
-Correlations between measured happiness and frequency of laughter and smiles
-Some fMRI studies finding correlation with activation in "pleasure centers" in the brain
-Correlations with things like good sleep and lenght of life (a difference of 8 years between happiest and unhappiest, in one study)

Yes, although these only indicate the reliability of the survey in making comparative judgements of happiness. They don't allow us to fix our zero point.