What Do People Want?

We acknowledge support from NIH/NIA grants R01-AG065364 to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and R01-AG051903 to the University of California Los Angeles. We are grateful to Dmitry Taubinsky and participants at the 2025 ASSA Annual Meeting, at Hebrew University, at SigmaCamp, at the International Society of Quality-of-Life Studies 2025 Annual Conference, and at the Workshop in the Honor of Richard Easterlin (Paris School of Economics) for helpful comments and discussion; and to Amir Adar, Tal Asif, Yehonatan Caspi, Colby Chambers, Arshia Hashemi, Dominic Kassirra, Mattar Klein, Dimitriy Leksanov, Rosie Li, Lev Maresca, Josef McCrum, Tuan Nguyen, Jeffrey Ohl, Shenhav Or, Ofri Piltz, Yonatan Rahimi, Becky Royer, Hannah Solheim, Pierre-Luc Vautrey, and Shira Zadik, for outstanding research assistance. This work utilized the Summit supercomputer and the Alpine high performance computing resource at the University of Colorado Boulder. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or other funding bodies. The authors received IRB approval from the relevant institutions and have no material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix

• May 22, 2025