Is it worth reading more on the pscyhology of well-being? In preparation for my next book, I've been reading around in the psychological literature on happiness. This week I polished off Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi's Flow and Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener's Happiness. They were both modestly illuminating, not least because of their insistence that more money does buy happiness, albeit with diminishing marginal happiness returns. But not much more than that.

The Diener/Biswas-Diener book put me off to start out with by its repeated description of the latter co-author as 'The Indiana Jones of positive psychology', but the occasional sidelight on his research methods which include having been branded in a Masai initiation ceremony and eating microwaved cockroaches eventually persuaded me the title might well be justified.

However, my main gripe about both books is the apparent methodology of psychology. The typical pattern is that a generalisation is made, followed by 'For example,…' and the description of a single experiment. The conclusion drawn in most cases seemed to me much more than the specifics of the experiment could support. I appreciate that eventually enough experimental results pointing in the same direction can provide strong support to more general conclusions, but in neither book do the references include the kind of meta-survey articles of experimental results that one comes across in the medical literature. And there is very little of the statistical analysis of cross-section or time-series data sets that I'm familiar with as an econometrician.

Of course these are both pretty popular books, so it might well be that the evidence is simply submerged in the interests of attracting readers – although if so I would still have liked some references to wherever it can be found. Am I being too grumpy? Are there better overviews of the positive psychology relevant to an economist's take on well-being. If so please tell me, as I've read plenty of these books by now and at the moment think they've added not much to the excellent survey articles by Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors.