Great post. Several quibbles:
The wealth → happiness current data is changed every year. Last study had a monotonic positive relationship between wealth and happiness to $60K/y. Will Wilkinson had this a while back.
Parenthood also has a complex relationship with happiness. In general, it appears to decrease young folks happiness, and increase older folks happiness, as of the last thing I read. Read Will Wilkinson and Bryan Caplan here.
The Kahneman TED video: ( http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html ) on happiness, suggesting that experienced happiness and remembered happiness are effectively ENTIRELY different things is an important caveat here. I actually think it’s probably the most important thing to be known about happiness.
You also don’t address very well (and probably shouldn’t in a how-to) the serious methodological difficulty of happiness research. Rating happiness on a Likert scale is a weak way to rate happiness, and one prone to intra- and inter- personal comparisons with ones self and reference group...whether or not one has a buzzer.
For instance, my move from Chicago to California has allowed a great deal more outdoor/sun time, which increases happiness...but after a couple years, I’ll have forgotten the reference group of Chicago, and will rate my daily happiness based on my current baseline, not my current Chicago-including reference. .
1 more bit to remember:
Commuting really really sucks. Least happy part of almost everyone’s day, who does it. Minimizing commute is a not-inconsequential path towards increased happiness.