Happiness and economics Economics discovers its feelings Dec 19th 2006 From The Economist print edition Not quite as dismal as it was ECONOMICS is “not a ‘gay science’,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1849. No, it is “a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.” Carlyle was a fine one to talk...