George MacKerron

I’m an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Sussex, an Associate at CEP Wellbeing, LSE, and an Affiliate at the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre.

• I developed and run Mappiness, the world’s largest geo-located ESM study. Read our chapter in the 2020 UN World Happiness Report or our papers in Global Environment Change, the Economic Journal and others.
• I teach Behavioural Economics for BA/BSc and MSc, and a PhD research methods module in programming.
• Key research interests include wellbeing and behaviour, environmental quality, and spatial analysis.
• Work in progress looks at wellbeing in relation to Internet use, terrorism, environmental valuation (with Statistics Norway and others), and loss aversion in the context of football scores.
• I did my PhD at LSE, with prior degrees from Imperial and Cambridge. See my CV for details.

See me speak:

World Government Summit, 2019

Peaks, valleys, and our happiness

20 mins

Talks at Google, 2017

Happiness quantified

55 mins

TEDxBrighton, 2011

Mapping happiness

17 mins

I’m a full-stack geo/web/app developer and data scientist.

• I started doing web development in 1995. I’ve done work for the BBC, the University of Cambridge and Neon/Databricks, amongst others.
• For data I use mostly spatial SQL, Python and Stata (in Jupyter Notebooks).
• Otherwise I code mainly in TypeScript (here’s an example), PostgreSQL, Ruby, Objective-C and a little Rust.
• I make open-source software (I contribute too), and I’m sometimes available for freelance and consulting work.