How painful is a colonoscopy? How is it similar to raising children (parents may be able to venture a guess on this one)? And what does it have to do with measuring the well-being of a country?

Happiness is a funny thing. It s not a chemical in our blood. It s not a spot in our brain that lights up under the gaze of an MRI. We have no account of it that goes up and down as we get a new job or a loved one takes ill or our favorite team wins the World Series.

At the same time, happiness is or at least should be something in which we re quite interested. What makes it go up? What makes it go down? We ll do quite a bit to obtain money, and the government will do quite a bit to try to ensure economic growth. But that money is ultimately supposed to bring us satisfaction, joy, contentment. And, yet, how do we know whether or not it has?

The modern science of happiness research is giving us new ways of answering these questions. With refinement, we may even be able to develop useful measures, such as a measure of Gross National Happiness (a concept pioneered by the king of Bhutan in the 1970s). Still, the subjectivity of the task poses serious hurdles.

Let s go back to that colonoscopy. How unpleasant is a colonoscopy? Well, it turns out that it depends on how and when you ask the patient. If you measure their pain moment-to-moment, you get one answer. If you ask them after the procedure, you get a different one. In a 2003 study (wistfully titled Memories of a Colonoscopy ), psychologists found that adding an extraneous and less painful segment to the very end of the procedure made people remember the entire procedure as having been less unpleasant (which, in turn, made them more likely to be willing to submit to future colonoscopies).

What does this have to do with kids or how happy we are in our lives? Well, if we take a moment-by-moment approach to measuring happiness, it turns out we really hate children. In fact, we spend most of our days doing things that make us miserable. Work? Hate it. Commuting? Hate it. And, yes, spending time with our kids we also hate that, according to study after study that break down our days by hours and minutes and ask us how we feel about the activities in which we engage. Kids are stressful, and the more kids the more stress.

But is moment-to-moment happiness, the kind measured by these day-reconstruction methods, really what we mean by happiness?

People do, after all, continue having children and plenty will even tell you that it s the best, most important, most wondrous thing they ve ever done in their lives. While one must leave open the possibility that there s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance involved here ( Having kids has reduced my disposable income, exterminated my free time, and made me lose my hair It must be super-fulfilling! ), it turns out that kids do increase happiness in another way. And that s when you look at people s self-reported life satisfaction.

Life satisfaction, which is often measured by having people rate their overall happiness on a scale of 0-10, is easier to measure over large populations (you can include it on a survey, as opposed to recruiting a group of individuals to study in depth). While the answers to these types of questions can be swayed by trivial factors the weather on the day you ask, if the person s favorite team has just suffered a loss, if he or she found $100 on the street earlier that day these factors should mostly wash out over large samples surveyed over multiple time periods.

And what do we find from large-scale, international surveys of life satisfaction? According to two new working papers from John Helliwell and Christopher Barrington-Leigh, economists at the University of British Columbia, we find that money matters to happiness but not entirely in the way one might think. Money does matter quite a bit when it comes to the difference between poverty and Western levels of prosperity. The difference in happiness between Denmark and Zimbabwe is large, and it s mostly (though not entirely) explained by per capita income.

But once you ve reached a level of prosperity such as that in the developed world, income starts to pay diminishing returns. For instance, in Ireland, according to Gallup, 97.5% of people report having a network of friends they can count on; in France, this number is a bit lower, at 93.9%. The difference that living in a country with an Irish level of having friends makes in happiness, though, as calculated by Helliwell and Barrington-Leigh, is equivalent to roughly a 20% boost in income. Similarly, they ve found by looking at data from the Canadian General Social Survey, feeling like one belongs to one s community, province, or country can have a much bigger impact on happiness than variations in one s income.

The science of measuring happiness, particularly in a way that could be used to track the progress of a nation or to compare nations, is still in its infancy. But, for Westerners at least, one lesson is starting to look clear: While the chase after money may yield more moment-to-moment pleasure, it s community and social bonds that leave us satisfied.

Ryan Sager writes the blog Neuroworld at TrueSlant.com.