Wellbeing: Busts Hurt More Than Booms Help

If the number of retweets of a link is any indication, there seems to be a lot of interest in this paper:

Busts hurt more than booms help: New lessons for growth policy from global wellbeing surveys, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Michael I. Norton, Vox EU: Wellbeing measures allow us to distinguish higher incomes from higher happiness. This column looks at new welfare measures and macroeconomic fluctuations. It presents evidence that the life satisfaction of individuals is between two and eight times more sensitive to negative economic growth than it is to positive economic growth. Engineering economic ‘booms’ that risk even short ‘busts’ is unlikely to improve societal wellbeing in the long run. 

To say it another way, "policymakers seeking to raise wellbeing should focus more on preventing busts than inculcating booms."