Category: Happiness & well-being

Does religion make you happy?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

I recently read Arthur Brooks’ new book, Gross National Happiness. It’s a liberal-conservative version of Richard Layard’s social democratic Happiness: Lessons from a New Science a few years back. Two economists reading the happiness literature and finding it (mostly) supports what they already thought about the world.

One of Brooks’ arguments is that religion is good for happiness (he calls this chapter ‘Happiness is a gift from above’). Certainly the reported statistics are striking, with 43% of those who attend church regularly describing themselves as ‘very happy’, compared to 23% of those who attend church never or rarely.

I had a look at a similar question in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005, and there is a smaller but still large gap between the proportion of people who go to church one a week or more who are ‘very happy’ (defined as 9-10 on a 0 to 10 happiness scale) and those who never go, 33% to 23%.

Will Wilkinson is, however, critical of Brooks’ attempts to generalise this beyond the US experience. He points out that very secular European countries have very high happiness scores, and unlike the US they have been getting happier as they secularised.
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Seeking closure after decades?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

“I would say to all members of the family of the crew of HMAS Sydney, our Government sends our condolences for the loss of these brave young men.

“This is a day … which begins a process of closure for many families of the crew of the Sydney. [emphasis added]

– Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the discovery of the wreckage of HMAS Sydney, which sank in November 1941, with the loss of 645 lives.

Grief can, of course, last for a lifetime. On my occasional strolls through cemeteries (the Melbourne General Cemetery is just up the road, with the graves of several of my 19th century ancestors and relatives) I find the decades-old graves with fresh flowers sad but touching.

But beginning a process of grieving sixty-six years after death? Many people have criticised the spread of the ‘therapy culture’ into ordinary language. The idea that we cannot recover from the death of someone we love until their body or grave is found seems unsound to me. Fortunately those bereaved by the loss of HMAS Sydney were from a (seemingly) more resilient era.

It is one of the paradoxes of the time that though there is less objective cause for the extremes of ill-being than there was in the 1940s, more people are reporting such ill-being. There is a debate about whether or not the statistical trends record real changes or just different descriptions of ordinary feelings.

But surely promoting the idea that grief can’t be put into the background until a body is found can only be bad for well-being, postponing the adjustment to loss that most people feel as time passes? We should not encourage people to spend 70 years with disabling grief, on the idea that bodies or graves are necessary for ‘closure’.

Do Aboriginal Australians suffer from ‘existential aimlessness’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

According to The Age‘s report, one passage in particular of Brendan Nelson’s ‘sorry’ speech seemed to upset the crowds watching the broadcast:

Alcohol, welfare without responsibilities, isolation from the economic mainstream, corrupt management of resources, nepotism, political buck-passing between governments with divided responsibilities, lack of home ownership, under-policing and tolerance by authorities of neglect and abuse of children that violates all we stand for, all combine to still see too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living lives of existential aimlessness. [emphasis added]

I associate ‘existential aimlessness’ with European intellectuals rather than Aboriginal Australians, but I think I understand what Nelson is getting at. This is that the dismal physical conditions and limited life prospects of many Aborigines must lead to a disproportionate number suffering from the psychological maladies that flow from meaninglessness and hopelessness. But the literature on well-being and ill-being suggests caution in inferring mental states from living conditions.

For example, the 2004-05 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey asked various well-being questions of its respondents. 7% said that they felt ‘without hope’ all or most of the time, and another 13% said that they felt that way some of the time. But 62% said that they felt that way none of the time.
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Happiness gender gaps

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

In happiness research, the recorded differences between men and women are small. In Australia, however, women are on average slightly happier than men, though the difference can be tiny – 0.2 on a 0-10 scale in the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, the most recent data I can find.

In the United States, according to this recent paper (pdf) by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, there used to a be a happiness gender gap favouring women, but now it favours men. Compared to 35 years ago, men are on average happier and women unhappier. As Stevenson and Wolfers say, this is a curious result. At least on most of the conventional measures, those were better years for women than for men.

According to The New York Times report of the research:

A big reason that women reported being happier three decades ago — despite far more discrimination — is probably that they had narrower ambitions, Ms. Stevenson says. Many compared themselves only to other women, rather than to men as well. This doesn’t mean they were better off back then.

But wouldn’t men face the added problem also of having to compare themselves to women? Boys now do worse in the classroom than girls, yet statistics reported in the Stevenson and Wolfers paper show that that same trend is apparent in school kids as it is in adults. Though competition with women is less tough in the workplace than in education, men have lost a lot of relative status since the 1970s without, it seems, any negative consequences for their average subjective well-being.
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Can economic growth reduce life satisfaction?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Last week Andrew Leigh linked to this paper by Angus Deaton which, using poll data from 132 countries, came up with findings contrary to previous subjective well-being research:

Average happiness is strongly related to per capita national income; each doubling of income is associated with a near one point increase in life satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10. Unlike most previous findings, the effect holds across the range of international incomes; if anything, it is slightly stronger among rich countries. Conditional on national income, recent economic growth makes people unhappier… (emphasis added)

I’m not as convinced as Andrew that this is a good paper. The ‘life satisfaction’ question doesn’t actually directly ask whether people are satisfied with their lives, but instead asks them to imagine a ladder where the bottom represents the ‘worst possible life for you’ and the top the ‘best possible life for you’. The respondents are then asked where on the ladder they feel they stand at the present time. It would be quite possible to be dissatisfied with your life and to think that it won’t get any better, so low on a conventional life satisfaction rating but high on the imaginary ladder (personally, I’d put myself higher on the ladder than I would rate myself for life satisfaction). This could possibly explain why rich countries do well in the survey, since when things are already going well there is less scope for a better life.

And perhaps someone can explain the statistics to me, but I can’t see that Deaton has the data to show that ‘recent economic growth’ makes people unhappier. Continue reading “Can economic growth reduce life satisfaction?” →

Does capitalism make us happy?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

‘. . . Somewhere between Plato and Prozac, happiness stopped being a lofty achievement and became an entitlement.’
Richard Schoch, The Secret of Happiness: Three thousand years of searching for the good life.

Has 200 years of liberal capitalism made us any happier?

That’s the question being asked in the 2007 Ross Parish Essay competition, open to people under 30. The deadline for entries is 17 September, with prize money and publication in Policy for the first and second prize winners.

Judging is so impartial that the joint winners a couple of years ago were members of the Greens and Opus Dei respectively.

Status, left and right

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

Though leftism is diverse, a common thread is a concern with equality. This makes it in part an ideology of status, with political programmes that seek to eliminate status differences or moderate their impact. This is one reason leftists remain concerned with income inequality long after absolute poverty has been eliminated, try to obstruct institutions that reproduce status differences (eg private schools), and favour anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws for groups that have historically had low status.

Almost everyone is status-conscious to some extent, but levels of concern with it vary a lot. Politically, I suspect that people with relatively high levels of status concerns are disproportionately attracted to leftism and to hierarchical conservatism (in Australia, conservatism tends to be populist, but in countries with more aristocratic traditions status-oriented individuals could go left or right). On this theory, those with relatively low levels of status concern would be disproportionately on the liberal/libertarian right, in which individual freedom is prized – who cares what other people think, I am going to do what I want, either alone or with like-minded people.
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Do more people feel better off now than when Howard was elected?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 53 Comments

According to an article in this week’s Bulletin, more people (36.5%) feel that they are not better off than before John Howard was elected PM than feel that they are better off (32.6%). The question seems to have been badly worded, with the apparent options being ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘the same’ – the magazine interpreted ‘no’ as ‘worse off’, but without spelling this out clearly some people who think things haven’t changed much could have answered ‘no’.

Even so, only a third thinking they are better off seems low. Income distribution analysis suggests that the benefits of prosperity have been spread through all socio-economic groups. And it’s been a good eleven years for technology-driven improvements: the internet and mobile phones particularly, but also home entertainment. Unemployment is at a 30-year low, and workforce participation at an all-time high.

There are theories that explain why perceptions lag objective statistics on issues like this, particularly when the question asks the respondent whether he or she feels better off. The happiness research has made much of the process of adaptation. When our objective standard of living improves we feel better for a while, but after a while we get used to it. Psychologists such as Danny Gilbert argue that we are not very good at recalling past emotional states. But Gilbert’s theory also suggests that because we can’t remember how we felt, we use theories of how we would have felt instead. Do people’s ‘theories’ of 1996 suggest that things were better then than now?
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Shock, horror – young people satisfied with their lives

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

A Newspoll survey of 18 to 24 year olds, commissioned by the Dusseldorp Skills Forum and reported in today’s Age, would have provided useful extra information for Cassandra Wilkinson’s new book Don’t Panic: Nearly everything is better than you think, a rebuttal of misery merchants like Richard Eckersley and Simon Castles (the Australian Literary Review has an extract from Wilkinson’s book).

Overall, 95% of those Newspoll surveyed regarded themselves as satisfied with their life overall, with nearly half ‘very satisfied’ – not quite in Danish life satisfaction territory, but up there with the Dutch and the Swedes. 88% are confident that things will work out ok in their working lives and careers, and 86% are confident that they will be financially secure. Of those currently in the workforce, 84% of full-timers and 78% of part-timers are satisfied with their job overall. Of those at university, 46% say it is better than they expected, while 15% say they are disappointed. About a third think that their standard of living will be better than that of their parents; most think it will be the same while 9% think that it will be not as good.
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Inequality and happiness

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The evidence on higher levels of happiness in Nordic countries has been long and persistent. Could it have something to do with them having less social inequality (less envy and resentment) and more ethnic cohesion (although that is changing)?

– Fred Argy commenting on my Happy Danes post.

As Will Wilkinson’s excellent recent paper on happiness research notes, it’s hard to find consistent results on the well-being consequences of income inequality. As Will argues, one reason for the mixed findings is that the effects of various factors on happiness are ‘culturally and ideologically mediated’. So the impact of income inequality will depend on how intrinsically important equality is seen to be, how justified the differences that are perceived to exist are seen to be, and how people perceive their own prospects. If people in Nordic countries value equality highly, and that is what their society produces, that might help explain why they do well in happiness and life satisfaction surveys.

This does not, however, mean that their model can be easily transposed elsewhere. Other countries with fairly low income inequality like Germany consistently do quite poorly in surveys of happiness and life satisfaction. A 2003 paper by Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch (can’t find a link) showed income inequality and happiness inequality trends over the period 1975 to 1995 and found that while income inequality rose in the US and Britain happiness inequality was stable or falling.
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