Last year the new economics foundation came up with the very dubious Happy Planet Index. But there are more reputable sources of international comparisons of happiness and life satisfaction, such as the European Social Survey and the Eurobarometer.

Recent research based on the European Social Survey found very high levels of life satisfaction in Denmark. The researchers say:

One of the most consistent trends is that those [countries] with the highest levels of happiness also reported the highest levels of trust in their governments, the police and the justice system, as well as those around them. Happier people also tended to have plenty of friends and acquaintances, as well as at least one very close friend, or a partner.

Seeing this research reminded me of an article in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal (which seemed devoted to amusement; another article was on whether good-looking medical students are more likely to become surgeons) called ‘Why Danes are smug’, a quasi-academic satire of life satisfaction research.

The hypotheses dismissed include: ‘blondes have more fun’ (there are more blondes in less happy Sweden; they could have added that there are lots in significantly less happy Germany as well); good health (on objective indicators, the Danes rank 13th among the 15 old EU countries); climate (‘colder and cloudier version of the balmy English weather’); marriage (high rates of marriage but correspondingly high rates of divorce); and alcohol consumption (high, but heavy drinking is usually associated with lower well-being, unless the Danes ‘were drunk when they participated in the Eurobarometer surveys’).

Some hypotheses not completely dismissed:
Continue reading “Happy Danes” →

Our friends at the Australia Institute have put the results of their happiness survey online, with a few points worth noting.

As reported in the SMH at the weekend, nearly 40% of Australians think that the overall quality of life in Australia is getting worse. I offered a couple of theories as to why on Saturday: the information bias concerning what’s happening to other people, and the cognitive difficulties we experience in comparing over time. But perhaps partisan sentiment also plays a part in these judgments. Labor voters were nearly twice as likely as Coalition voters to think that things are getting worse (51% versus 26%), just as Labor voters are much more pessimistic than Coalition voters about their standard of living over the next six months. To some extent this could be confusing cause and effect – people may have become Labor voters because they think things are going downhill. And perhaps Labor voters are more likely to genuinely believe that things are not as good as they used to be (less union power etc). But when unexpectedly asked to make judgments without being offered any assisting factual information it would not be surprising if people resorted to their party allegiance to help them give an answer – if my party is in power, things must not be going too badly, but if the other lot is in then things must be getting worse.

Very usefully, there is a surprisingly rare direct question about what factor the respondent believes ‘is most important to you with regard to your own happiness and well-being’. Only 4% rated ‘money and financial situation’ as the most important thing, with ‘partner/spouse and family relationships’ the clear winner on 59%. When asked about aims over the next five years back in 2005 money did somewhat better, with 22% nominating a higher income as their first choice. The results aren’t inconsistent: if you are already happy with your family life, more money might be what you need to improve well-being overall, even if it is not the most important factor contributing to your happiness.

My favourite question, however, was this:

If there was a legally available drug that could be bought over the counter, that made you feel happy, and did not have any side-effects, do you think that there would be occasions when you would take it?

This is putting to the general public a version of a question that has been put to many philosophy students, most famously via Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine that would make us happy, even though we would not actually be doing anything. As Wikipedia puts it:

Nozick seeks to attack hedonism by means of a thought experiment. If he can prove that there is something other than pleasure that has value to us and affects our well-being, then hedonism can be seen to be defeated.

And the answer from the Australian public? Overwhelmingly, they would not take the happy pill, with 73% saying no. The only partial exception are the Ecstasy-taking 18-29 year olds, with 18% saying ‘definitely yes’ and another 21% saying ‘yes, probably’. I often think the public gets it wrong, but on this question I agree with the majority.

To me, happiness research is looking rather like the social capital research of the 1990s – intellectually interesting, but yielding very little in the way of worthwhile policy recommendations. But the Australian population, long inclined to looking towards the state, does not agree. According to a new poll reported in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

77 per cent agreed with the proposition that a government’s prime objective should be promoting the greatest happiness of the people rather than the greatest wealth.

I’m briefly quoted in another story in the today’s happiness coverage disagreeing with the idea that happiness should be an objective of government. This isn’t because there is nothing at all happiness research can tell us about policies conducive to well-being, but because I think there are a range of reasons why, given Australia’s current situation, this objective is not likely to lead to long-term changes in average national happiness:

1) Few significant and lasting benefits for most people. On a 0-10 scale, about three-quarters of the Australian population will rate themselves as 7 or above in happiness or life satisfaction surveys. They are happy already, and while various positive events or changes in their lives could give them a boost, they are likely to adapt back to their genetically-influenced set range. Many of those below 7 will be suffering temporary setbacks, from which they will recover in any case. The main scope for improvement is among the people enduring persistently low levels of well-being.

2) Not easily accessible by policy. People without partners tend to have low well-being (pdf, p.11), particularly in the middle years of life. But what can government sensibly do about this? For a start, there is some reverse causation – not surprisingly, people who were unhappy to begin with find it harder to form relationships. So the government’s job will be to match Australia’s least attractive personalities with mates, and be more succesful at it than all the traditional methods plus the new online search tools. Even the left’s quixotic faith in the state’s capacity to do good isn’t likely to extend to thinking government can achieve anything here. Short of re-introducing arranged marriages, I can’t see that there is much scope for even massaging the statistics. And if divorce laws were tightened, it probably would not increase happiness – people would be unhappy in marriage rather than unhappy in divorce.

3) Redundant additional arguments. There are some causes of ill-being that can be affected by government policy, such as removing causes of unemployment or providing medical assistance to those suffering from illnesses that affect their well-being. But governments are already trying to alleviate these problems. Another argument for trying to remedy them is redundant; the only interesting issues surround how we should go about dealing with these issues.

4) Dubious arguments. Many of the various odds-and-ends policy ideas for improving happiness collected in documents like the Wellbeing Manifesto are not clearly supported by research. For example, it proposes a maximum 35 hour working week, when the research (pdf, p.5) does not show even those working much longer hours than that with low average well-being and, as reported in yesterday’s Australian, most people settle into hours that suit them over time. Nor do I know of any research showing that restricting advertising would have any discernible effects on well-being, or that stopping ‘turning universities into businesses selling degrees and make them the critic and conscience of society’ would help – indeed, it would probably reduce the number of people capable of carrying out the ‘secure, rewarding jobs’ the manifesto, in all its banality, thinks are a good thing. Being a ‘critic and conscience’ of society no doubt appeals to the kind of people who write well-being manifestos, but demand for such services is limited.

Governments should focus on what they can realistically achieve. Given the nature of the instruments they have available to them, this means that their activities will be biased toward the material – redistributing money, creating incentives etc. Changing how people feel is much tougher, and attempts to do so are likely to join the long lists of failed government policies.

According to the latest Sensis consumer report 32% of us are ‘more stressed’ than we were a year ago, and 22% of us are ‘less stressed’, creating an overall trend toward greater stress. On the other hand, 28% of respondents in the Sensis survey report being happier than they were last year, while only half that proportion, 14%, felt less happy than twelve months ago.

But as Daniel Gilbert argues in his book Stumbling on Happiness, we are very bad at remembering our past emotional states. When researchers keep contemporaneous records of how people feel, and then ask them how they felt at earlier points in time, the respondents often misreport their own previous state of mind. This, he argues, is because rather than using direct recall of our emotions we use theories of how we would feel in particular circumstances, which are often wrong or neglect factors that would have affected us at the time.

The Sensis survey also asked its respondents why they felt less or more stressed or less or more happy, and we can see here mostly plausible theories as to why they may feel differently to a year ago. Leading the stress factors is a ‘heavier workload’, followed by ‘financial concerns’, a rather catch-all ‘everyday life’, and ‘more study’. It might be the case that these things have actually caused more stress, but also that because we are working harder, or facing high interest and petrol bills, we assume that we must be more stressed than we were before.

For the question on happiness, it seems to be that while more money is a minor factor explaining why people think they are happier than a year ago (9% ‘better financially’ perhaps plus 15% ‘new job/promotion’, though there other reasons beside money for a new job improving happiness), it is a big factor explaining why people feel less happy than twelve months ago (25% ‘cost of living’, 12% ‘financial worries’, 11% ‘petrol prices’, or nearly half – 48% – of all nominated reasons). This could be because of loss aversion, our tendency to feel losses more intensely than gains. But it could also be that in identifiying what has changed over the last year some respondents note their added financial pressures and assume that these have made them less happy than in the past.

Without keeping records of particular respondents it is hard to sort out exactly what’s going on here, but the large discrepancy between those who say they are happier and those who say they are less happy is a little suspicious, given what else we know about subjective well-being measures.

Subjective well-being tends to be quite stable over time at the population level – that is, the averages will be very similar from survey to survey. For example, in the Australian Unity Well-being Index (pdf) it varied through 14 surveys only by 3.1 points on a 0-100 range, and usually no more than 1 point survey-to-survey. In the HILDA survey, which does actually track the same respondents, their annual report (pdf) indicates that through three surveys the life satisfaction average varied by .1 on a 0-10 scale. So while about a quarter of respondents did show a significant shift in life satisfaction over a 12 month period, the ups and downs tend to cancel each other out to get the same average. The Sensis result would seem to suggest that ups significantly outnumber downs, pushing average happiness up. It could be that this is in fact the case, that the last 12 months have been a good year. But memory playing tricks is also a likely explanation.