Can Trusting Society Make Us Happier?

INTRODUCTION

　　You may feel happy when you chat with your friends or go out with your partner. You may feel deep happiness when a person you like has done something well or a person loves you. These situations should sound natural. However, can you indeed measure the level of your happiness? Utilizing the GDP index is no longer a suitable way, rather an old-school and non-sense approach that ignores significant ideas like work-life balance. Today, there are already some indexes regarding the level of happiness advocated in Europe, America, and Asia. However, as many would assume, we cannot measure the level of happiness easily just by calculating some net numbers. So, how do we measure the level? And why is happiness important to us? What affects the level of happiness and how to achieve it? To answer these questions, I take a specifically empirical, sociologically based approach to the study of happiness. In this article, I use data from the OECD Better Life Index, World Happiness Report, and Edelman Trust Barometer.