In recent years, Somerville has gained national fame for its efforts to make improving residents’ happiness and well-being a main goal of city policy. It seems like an obvious goal for a city, but in fact it’s an unusual priority. We’re used to evaluating public policy based on less emotional metrics, like whether it would improve efficiency or boost productivity.

Now a trio of professors is arguing that federal regulations should be reorganized around similar aims. Right now, our nation’s law system is set up to consider costs and benefits in financial terms—and assumes people are rational economic actors, who will act to optimize money or its equivalent. But in fact, recent happiness research shows that’s not always true, which means our laws may sometimes be driving at the wrong ends. In their new book, “Happiness and the Law,” three coauthors propose a new method for evaluating laws called “well-being analysis,” which, they say, could lead to adjustments in laws that overvalue money and undervalue the things that really make us happy.

“The reason we have law is because we think it will improve people’s lives,” says John Bronsteen, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and, with Christopher Buccafusco and Jonathan Masur, a coauthor of the book. “If we have a new way of understanding how people behave, let’s use that to make the law better.”

Read more at The Boston Globe