An Economist's Thoughts on Happiness
Yale’s business school just published an interesting interview with Betsey Stevenson-my favorite economist.
Yale’s business school just published an interesting interview with Betsey Stevenson-my favorite economist.
No. Let me follow up on yesterday’s post, with more data testing Nicholas Kristof‘s assertion that Costa Rica is the happiest nation in the world.
My recent Marketplace commentary focused on the recent Sarkozy Commission report, which re-examined the usefulness of the usual economic indicators, like Gross Domestic Product (or GDP).
The report raises many of the usual shortcomings of GDP. And I agree with each of their criticisms. Much of this was summarized 40 years ago, in a famous Bobby Kennedy speech:
I’m currently back home in Australia for a couple of weeks, and just want to give a heads-up to the locals that I’ll be giving a talk at ANU this Wednesday.
You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your conventional wisdom about what makes you tick–what makes you happy, healthy and whole–turned out to be wrong? How would you find out? You’d probably start by…
One of the things I’ve learned from Levitt is that you need a thick skin if you are going to write about controversial topics. And since Betsey Stevenson and I wrote about “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” we’ve been called everything from left-wing fools to right-wing tools. But it can be a real kick in the guts when you learn that someone you thought you admired turns out to be simply dishonest. And that’s how I felt when I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “takedown” of our research in today’s LA Times.
Interdisciplinary research can take you to some unexpected places. You may have heard about a paper that Betsey Stevenson and I wrote a while back, documenting that the average level of happiness among women has trended downward relative to that of men. It’s an interesting fact, and we aren’t quite sure whether it tells us about the reliability of happiness data, the women’s movement, or other changes in men’s and women’s lives.
Latvia has been particularly devastated by the economic crisis. The Latvian Blondes Association recently staged a “Blonde Weekend,” complete with a 500-woman parade, in the hopes of raising the nation’s spirits.
We’ve blogged repeatedly in this space about happiness. An essay in The Boston Globe describes some interesting new happiness research with diverse policy implications.
The Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) has just announced that this year’s winner of its annual prize in labor economics is happiness researcher Richard Easterlin. This is a wonderful prize. Dick was the first economist to start taking subjective well-being data seriously. While this sort of research is now pretty mainstream, I have to imagine that it . . .
We keep reading that someone has done the maths and found the third Monday in January to be the most depressing day of the calendar year.
So which day is the happiest?
A regular blog reader, Mitch Kosowski, sent along an interesting question: “Is ignorance truly bliss? Are people with lower intelligence happier than those with higher intelligence?” Let’s start with a quick literature review. Here are the findings reported by Simpson, L. (2001): Lisa Simpson: “As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of . . .
In a New York Times Op-Ed on Saturday, Sonja Lyubomirsky wrote that subjective well-being has remained high during the recession. But she’s dead wrong. Here’s the gist of her piece, titled “Why We’re Still Happy” : Research in psychology and economics suggests that when only your salary is cut, or when only you make a foolish investment, or when only . . .
If those riding intellectual fads are sometimes guilty of sloppy reasoning, imagine what happens when two fads collide. That’s what happened when the British Medical Journal elected to publish a study analyzing 1) happiness in 2) social networks. The study, by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, concludes that happiness is contagious within social networks. According to the authors, your happiness . . .
One of the things that I have learned (the hard way) is that looking sensible on TV is harder than it looks. That’s why I was happy when Nightline decided to interview my co-author Betsey Stevenson rather than me for a segment that ran last week summarizing our research on the relationship between income and happiness. Freakonomics readers have already . . .
My last post showed that people with relatively extreme political views tend to be significantly happier than moderates. I’ll admit I have a harder time relating to political zealotry than I do to political views that simply oppose my own. I have definite opinions — especially on issues like regulation, taxes, and freedom — but I’ve looked at a lot . . .
The press is calling it the Dow Jones Industrial Average of American well-being. Every day, since January of this year, pollsters have called 1,000 Americans to quiz them on their health and happiness. The first set of results from this unprecedented survey were released on Wednesday, as the inaugural report of The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and they find that 47 . . .
I’ve been enjoying Arthur Brooks‘s musings on the relationship between personal politics and personal happiness. And so I was interested to read an interesting piece in The Times (of London), assessing how my own recent research with Betsey Stevenson on income and happiness fits into the broader political debate. And I’m a sucker for an article that can relate economic . . .
My last three posts have shown that conservatives are generally a lot happier than liberals; that religion is a major factor in this; and that worldview matters a lot as well. But I have employed some minor sleight-of-hand in all this, lumping together “liberals” into a big group and “conservatives” into another. This is not the only way to separate . . .
In my last post I showed the large happiness differences between religious Americans and secularists, and argued that this is a big part of the reason conservatives are so much happier than liberals. But I also noted that religion and other lifestyle distinctions still only explain about half the gap. In this post, I’ll look at the role of divergent . . .
Arthur Brooks — who has appeared on this blog a few times — has just published a new book, Gross National Happiness. He has agreed to blog here periodically on this subject and we are very pleased to have him. Last week I posted on the happiness difference between conservatives and liberals. Non-partisan survey data clearly show a large, persistent . . .
What good is G.D.P., anyway? While my postings this week have shown that it is correlated with happiness, I have not spent much time asking just precisely what it is about our subjective experiences that is correlated with higher G.D.P. In fact, the analysis in my previous posts, focused almost exclusively on simple responses to surveys asking people how happy . . .
Arthur Brooks, the Louis A. Bantle Professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, made his first appearance on this blog when he found that religious conservatives are more philanthropic than secular liberals. He has appeared a few more times since then. He has just published a new book, Gross . . .
Continuing on the theme of the relationship between income and happiness (previous posts: 1, 2 , and 3), let me show you what Betsey Stevenson and I learned when comparing the happiness of rich and poor people. Let’s begin with the most recent data from the 2006 General Social Survey, which asked: “Taken all together, how would you say things . . .
Yesterday I noted that there is powerful evidence from the recent Gallup World Poll that rich countries are happier than poor countries. Today, I want to show you how this fact remained hidden in the data for several decades. (And I don’t mean to suggest that we are the first to discover this, but rather that those who noted this . . .
Following yesterday’s post, I promised to describe the new evidence that rich countries are happier than poor countries. The simplest way to make this point is with a chart, using data from the Gallup World Poll. This amazing new dataset contains detailed data on subjective well-being for 132 countries in 2006. (Amazingly, Gallup plans to continue to field this poll . . .
People who punish others the least earn the biggest rewards in repeated interactions, according to a new study published in the journal Nature and authored by Martin Nowak, director of the evolutionary dynamics lab at Harvard University. At the same time, we are happiest when we’re spending money on others instead of on ourselves, says another team of researchers out . . .
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the science of happiness, including on this very blog.. But could leading a happy life be largely a matter of genes? The U.K.’s Daily Record reports on a finding by Edinburgh University psychologists that “inherited genes control up to half of the personality traits that keep us happy.” Those with the “happy” . . .
Author visits all 22 countries ranked “happier” than the U.S. (Earlier) Scientists study the key to artists’ improvisation Bigger computer monitors may lead to greater worker productivity Will hefty cash prizes stimulate “revolutionary” science? (Earlier)
Personal unhappiness may boost spending. New Web site lets users create their own carbon tax. (Earlier) Artificial sweeteners may cause more weight gain than sugar. (Earlier) Does all corporate culture have to be evil?