Nattavudh Powdthavee is an assistant professor in economics at Nanyang Technological University. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick, UK, in 2006. Since then, he has been researching and publishing almost exclusively in the field of his passions: the economics of happiness. His research findings appear regularly in the press, including international newspapers such as the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the London Times. He is also an author of the book "The Happiness Equation: The Surprising Economics of Our Most Valuable Asset", and has been a guest blogger for Nature.com.
His talk "If the Best Things in Life are Free, Then Why Aren't We Happy All the Time?" focussed on why even though we claim to know the things that do make us happy are free, we still spend much of our effort and time pursuing the things that we claim to know to have small or no effects on our happiness.
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