In pursuit.

EVERYONE wants to live a happy life, but nobody, it seems, knows quite how to do it. John Stuart Mill captured the elusiveness of happiness when he argued against its direct pursuit. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," he wrote, "and you cease to be so."

There is little doubt that the pursuit of happiness in modern civilization is tied to the pursuit of income. But can money buy really buy happiness?

In this age of telephone surveys, we no longer must abandon the study of happiness to philosophers. Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven has made a career out of happiness. His official job title is "professor of social conditions for human happiness," and he directs the World Database of Happiness, an exhaustive compilation of over 1,500 high-quality surveys about self-reported happiness around the world. Using sophisticated statistical techniques, Veenhoven has converted the results of the various surveys into a standard measure--how much people enjoy their life as a whole, on a scale from 0 to 10--and reported the average happiness in 90 countries from 1995 to 2005.

The nearby chart plots Veenhoven's happiness index and compares it with the economist's favorite measure of well-being, gross domestic product per capita. Each point depicts happiness and income for a given country. The U.S., for example, has a per capita income of $34,344 and a happiness index of 7.4.

The chart makes a compelling case that money can indeed buy happiness. The higher a country's income, the more likely its citizens are to tell surveyors that they are happy. But money is not the whole story. Some countries--such as Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico-are far happier than we might expect, given their income. Others--such as Ukraine and Zimbabwe are far unhappier than their circumstances suggest they should be.

What do the places that are unusually unhappy have in common? One key factor appears to be that they have very weak rule of law. And the unusually happy places? They tend to be countries with a high degree of religiosity. The five countries with the most surprising happiness given their income are predominantly Catholic.

So you might have a higher chance of being happy if you have a high income, but you can be happy in poverty as well, which brings to mind Viktor Frankl, who wrote 60 years ago that "we who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

The data suggest that religion helps individuals divorce their happiness from their worldly affairs. Money buys happiness, but you can get it for free if you shop wisely.

[GRAPHIC OMITTED]