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58 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1851 (2016-2017)
Buying Happiness: Property, Acquisition, and Subjective Well-Being

handle is hein.journals/wmlr58 and id is 1913 raw text is: BUYING HAPPINESS: PROPERTY, ACQUISITION, AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING DAVID FAGUNDES* ABSTRACT Acquiring property is a central part of the modern American vision of the good life. The assumption that accruing more land or chattels will make us better off is so central to the contemporary preoccupa- tion with acquisition that it typically goes without saying. Yet an increasing body of evidence from psychologists and economists who study hedonics-the science of happiness-yields the surprising con- clusion that getting and having property does not actually increase our subjective well-being. In fact, it might even decrease it. While scholars have integrated the insights of hedonics into other areas of law, no scholarship has yet done so with respect to property. This Article maps this novel territory in three steps. In Part I, it summarizes recent findings on the highly conflicted effect of the acquisition of both land and chattels on subjective well-being. In Part II, it explores the implications of these findings for four leading normative theories of property law, showing that in different ways the evidence produced by happiness studies undermines the core em- pirical propositions on which these theories rest. Part II also explores the potential of subjective well-being as a framework for assessing the optimal regulation of ownership. Finally, Part III investigates how * Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center; J.D., Harvard Law School; A.B., Harvard College. Thanks to Emily Berman, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Marcilynn Burke, David DePianto, David Kwok, Peter Linzer, Jonathan Masur, James Nelson, Michael Olivas, D. Theodore Rave, Jessica Roberts, W. Keith Robinson, Joe Sanders, Greg Vetter, Kellen Zale, participants in the 2015 Texas Legal Scholars Conference and the 2015 Central States Law School Association Annual Meeting, and faculty workshops at the South Texas College of Law and the University of Houston Law Center for thoughtful sug- gestions about this project. 1851

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