Tim Kasser wants to be happy. If you live in America, odds are, so do you.

There's a crucial difference between you and Kasser, though. After two decades of poring over and contributing to academic research on what makes people happy or unhappy, anxious or depressed, Kasser can predict what's likely to keep him content and what isn't. He makes life choices based on those studies; he thinks if you did the same, you might end up happier. And he thinks it's time the government helps you get happy.

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The research tells Kasser that Americans are cash-wealthy, time-poor and not as happy as they could be. So he teaches two-thirds time at Knox College, where he's been a psychology professor since 1995, devoting the extra nonteaching hours to research, writing, personal projects and time with his wife and two sons. The studies say a sense of community is important to well-being, so he works at this tiny college bordering the small, western-Illinois town of Galesburg, where he knows people he passes on the street and where, when you have a new baby, staff and faculty deliver food to your house for the next two weeks. The literature suggests that living simply will probably increase his feelings of contentment. So he lives on a farm eight miles from the school, raising goats, growing fruit and vegetables and taking long hikes in the woods.

With longish hair and a patchy beard, an untucked shirt hanging over his jeans, Kasser looks less like a professor than a grad student or a gas station attendant or, for that matter, any what-you-see-is-what-you-get Midwesterner. He's the kind of guy who will readily acknowledge to the university president's wife that he hasn't cut his hair in months or combed it in years. It's no surprise he wrote a book that examines how materialism is hazardous to America's mental health.

Kasser doesn't want to be the exemplar of the perfect, blissful, anti-consumer life. He owns (and plays) an expensive piano, and he enjoys drinking orange juice, even though it travels from Florida to Illinois via methods he knows are ecologically damaging. Once in a while, a bitingly sarcastic comment does pop into his head and exit his mouth. Just the same, Kasser is well aware of the well-being consequences of his every action: Is coaching his son's soccer team a good way to bond with his child and volunteer for the community or another chore in a slammed schedule in need of breathing room? Should he fly to New York to give a speech promoting his ideas on making America happier, or would it be a huge mistake, depriving him of quality time with his family (and, again, impairing the environment)?

"This is the constant background hum of my life," he says. "There are days I wish I didn't pay attention to it all. But I'm built to ask these questions."

What was once an internal monologue has broadened far beyond Kasser's research subjects and daily affairs. He has haltingly begun to wonder aloud about what kinds of laws, and even what kinds of political systems, might make people happiest, venturing outside the laboratory and classroom to assume a role that once made him very uncomfortable: political activist.

Kasser is among the loudest in a growing chorus of academics who are boldly — and, some say, prematurely — asking governments to transform the conclusions of the maturing body of happiness science into real-world public policies. They're pushing targeted regulations like limits on advertising to children. They want welfare programs to emphasize mental health. More generally, they hope governments will begin to make decisions with an eye toward citizens' life satisfaction. Governments in Europe and elsewhere have already put these concepts into practice, but even as Americans embrace the research personally by scooping up self-help books, happiness-oriented government in the United States remains far from a reality.