Economics: The UN-Dismal Science?

I recently read an interesting post on Marginal Revolution (link: Are Economics Students Happier?) regarding a recent study on the happiness of students studying Economics compared to other social sciences. The journal itself can be found here; it's very interesting if you want to get a feel to what modern experimental behavioral economics is all about.

At any rate, the authors concluded that:

"In our sample, studying economics has positive effects on self-reported well-being while studying social sciences has negative effects on individual well-being compared to economics. This is good news to anybody involved in teaching economics. Additionally, an important finding is the strong positive effect of income on subjective well-being. Despite the findings of modern behavioral economics that well-being depends on more than money, an increase in income is still an important driver for individual life satisfaction, at least for low income levels. We also found that happiness is also positively affected by positive career perspectives, which may also be interpreted as a measure of future income. Furthermore, we found it interesting that more conservative students appear to be less happy in our survey. To conclude, while income and future job chances are the main drivers of happiness for students in our sample, studying economics also increases students’ life satisfaction."

So studying economics might make you a happier person. Somehow, the dismal science just got a bit brighter.