What can an economist teach us about misery?  I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, by eminent researcher George Loewenstein. The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor. He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering s...