Would You Trade an Oscar for Marital Bliss?

Professional success has nothing on personal happiness—just ask Sandra Bullock. She won big at the Oscars, but she lost big at home. That's no fair trade, writes David Brooks for the New York Times. A growing body of research shows that professional success "exists on the surface of life," he writes. Interpersonal relationships, meanwhile, are "much deeper and more important" predictors of happiness.

This new way of thinking is gaining traction thanks to a wave of books like 'The Hidden Wealth of Nations' by David Halpern and 'The Politics of Happiness' by Derek Bok. Now, says Brooks, our institutions must catch up. "Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side."
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