Happiness studies are booming in the social sciences, and some governments are moving toward a policy based on quantitative measures of a nation's overall well-being, meant to supplement traditional measures of wealth and productivity. That’s a twilight territory. Obviously, you have to be sufficiently relieved of suffering, physical and mental, for happiness to be even possible. While it's true that money can't buy happiness, it can buy many necessary pre-conditions of happiness: food, shelter, medicine, security. Your work, as a profession and source of income, must be fulfilling both individually and socially. There’s danger of making pleasure the central focus of a happy life. Another danger is to confuse happiness and coping with unhappiness. And the happiness of human love to other individual and possibly all humankind ascends the happiness on the level with supreme moral and religious values.

So, do you have a right to be happy? The idea that happiness can be a human right is queer. A right to happiness is simply unwork- able: no society can, nor should it try to, enforce that right.. Some commentators reach for the famous lines in the second section of the United States Declaration of Independence,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalien- able Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness",