This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.
Why are we happy? The World Happiness Project has some answers.
For nine years an international consortium of economists and statisticians have gathered together data from many countries on how individuals rate their life satisfaction, reporting their findings in a World Happiness Report. Each year they focus on a particular issue; the 2021 report is on the impact of Covid. That is another column – this one is more about some general issues of the determinants of happiness.
People self-rating their happiness/life satisfaction may seem a bit arbitrary. However, there is a lot of evidence that this subjective score can be used for population research purposes even if the individual score may be a bit volatile.
A YouGov poll of people from 22 countries asked almost 10,000 individuals to self-rate their life satisfaction on a 0 to 10 scale. They averaged about 6.5. (Had it been in the survey, New Zealand would have been about 7.5; there would have been a couple of countries above us.)
The econometricians then evaluated some of the factors which determined individual scores. Some were personal factors such as age. The older you were, the happier you were. The difference between an 18-24 year-old and someone over 65 was 0.6 points on the scale so the elderly were about 10 percent happier on a 6.5 score. When I first worked with such surveys, they showed young adults were happier that those in the middle of their lives – say 40-year-olds. That curvature effect seems to be disappearing. Does that mean our young are increasingly more miserable? Why?
The gender factor once more showed males saying they were about 0.1 points less happy than females. This is a common finding.
You may not be surprised that people living alone scored 0.4 points lower. This is found in other surveys which ask about marital status; as a rule, married people are happier than unmarried ones. Remember, these are averages and some people living alone will have communities of families and friends and be quite happy. For others it will be a greater trial. The same averaging applies to the married.
Allow a wry smile that parents are happier than non-parents with reported scores sitting 0.25 points above non-parents. There are times when it may not seem that way but on average ...
The research I am reporting was part of a review on the effects of work on wellbeing, so it was particularly interested in unemployment, finding the unemployed scored themselves a whopping 1.3 points – say 20 percent – lower. Those who ceased to look for jobs and were described as ‘inactive’ were only half that.
We might ponder about a couple of possible conclusions. The first is that if unemployment rises, there is a perceptible reduction in the country’s happiness.
Second, perhaps we could reduce the trauma by making unemployment less stressful. That is one of the purposes of the proposed social unemployment scheme. There are people who are unlikely ever to be unemployed and are vociferously antagonistic towards such a scheme. Not everyone of course, and the objectors also have to ignore that by making the worker move more easily between jobs and upgrading their skills, the scheme will benefit the labour market mobility and productivity. Perhaps those opposed to it have neoliberal attitudes.
Such results depend on what is asked and the quality of the responses. Unfortunately the survey did not ask about income. So I just mention here that when it is asked for, it seems that those with higher incomes are happier. But the effect is not as great as the effects from other factors which I reported above: a higher income does not seem to add as much to happiness as, say, being ‘married’.
The one exception to this income effect is that those really at the bottom – say the bottom fifth – are markedly unhappier and a state income transfer would improve their wellbeing much more that it would reduce the happiness of those who would pay the extra taxation. (Since public policy is not to raise taxes, this option for raising the nation’s happiness is not being contemplated.)
The reason I have focused on this quantitative study is not only because it is the only one in the report – there is plenty of descriptive data – but because it was able to incorporate two other effects which are less commonly investigated.
The first was trust in the health system. Trust it and one is 0.35 points (say 5 percent) happier on average. That is not quite as good as being married, but near enough. (You can have both.)
The second was trust in the government. That scores an extra 0.25 points.
What struck me was that in America – which is in the sample of 22 countries – there are strong political pressures to distrust the government and – as we have seen with Covid – to distrust medical advice. On the standard happiness rankings America is only 19th – ten places behind New Zealand in the Gallup survey of 149 countries. (Those above us are Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Norway – all countries to which we pay little attention when developing public policy.) We could get down to the US level by doubling the unemployment rate and the divorce rate and then some.
The constant redisorganisations of the health system must be reducing our trust in it, for the rhetoric rarely tries to reinforce it. Ironically, at the moment National’s health spokesperson, Shane Reti, expresses more trust in our health system than the Minister of Health, Andrew Little. Perhaps everyone, or their friends, needs a bout in hospital which would enhance their trust in the health system. Certainly that is the feedback I get from those who have engaged with my local one.
There is a stream in our public political rhetoric which discourages trust in government. Admittedly, especially if you are opposed to the current government, it is a fine balance between providing a critique of it and undermining the New Zealand government in general. To go down the latter path is the way to an unhappier nation.
Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.
82 Comments
It is frustrating to see increasing levels of partisanship developing in NZ along the lines of US rhetoric, hopefully this gets kept to the fringes.
It certainly does seem more and more apparent that your happiness is strongly influenced by your relationships with others, about the only upside over the last 2 years is re-assessing priorities and spending more time with those closest.
It is. Frustrating also to see how much some of these appear likely to have been driven by overexposure to Facebook propaganda originally targeted at others.
I would like to see us invest significantly as a country in Participatory Democracy, as well as supporting shared and community initiatives that connect people of different viewpoints.
So true that for most people happiness depends having friends and good relationships. How much of that has been destroyed by JA?
Consider the new 24 day isolation rules for contacts (and contacts of contacts...), which will do wonders for relationships than require 1st person presence. It is a lockdown by another name. A rolling lockdown as well. A lockdown fuelled by it's own participants. Imagine how many people will be at home, instead of at work or at school. Even supermarkets will not be uneffected by virtue of the number of people who use them and the workers who come into cantact with them. Think of elderly people in retirement villages where a social life depends on their weekly gatherings?
Is it possible you could be just out of one 24 day isolation-lockdown and immediately become a contact of someone else, and have to repeat all over again. Is it possible?
This is what I understand. If I am wrong about anything, please let me know.
I guess the issue for me is the constant cries of deliberate intent. Boomers as people aren't different from many others, most of the problem lies in how they're a demographic anomaly in terms of size - 3 boomers for every gen z.
All the partisan stuff gen xploited keeps hammering isn't conducive to reasoned discussion and considered conclusions.
Hmmmmm - We have known about the Limits to Growth for 50 years. It's not rocket science; every litre you or I burn, can NEVER be burned by any future anyone. Ever. Worse, we don't mitigate the burn, leaving that to them, but not leaving them the energy to do it.
I suggest that ignorance is no excuse - that applies to Easton too.......
The young have every right to be p-ss-d - our generation dropped the ball.
Every generation blames the one before. The hippies thought they were starting a movement, turned out they mostly ended up becoming self interested in the 80s.
The young have inherited the best set of circumstances of any humans ever, will they be able to see past their individual self interests and harness what they have for the benefit of all future humans?
Or will the tail keep wagging the dog.
Most people are living lives that'd be the envy of Renaissance era Princes.
That's been lost on many. I think the relative prosperity and security of those initial post war decades has created a false impression of just how perilous existence is.
Relax, everything's out of control.
Pa1nter,
will they be able to see past their individual self interests and harness what they have for the benefit of all future humans?
I often agree with you, but not this time. I think my grandchildren face immense issues, some of which are in large part down to us. My generation didn't start climate change but we have certainly contributed massively to it. We had free tertiary education while many now leave with substantial debts. We could buy a reasonably priced house and didn't think of it as an investment. We inherited a significantly less polluted world and then there is as pdk never tires of reminding us-quite rightly- of limits to growth.
Of course as a 76 year old I envy their youth, but I really believe that they face greater problems than we did.
"... finding the unemployed scored themselves a whopping 1.3 points – say 20 percent – lower. Those who ceased to look for jobs and were described as ‘inactive’ were only half that."
For tens of thousands of years humans lived in collaborative small settlements or nomadic tribes, and everyone had a role - something they did that contributed to their wellbeing and that of the collective. Roles included childcare, hunting, building, farming, entertaining people with music, or combinations of lots of different things. This gave individuals a sense of purpose.
It is only in relatively recent times that we have started to tolerate involuntary unemployment and all of it's pernicious impacts on our individual and collective wellbeing. Involuntary unemployment is not an unfortunate accident, it is a design feature of modern economies. This is based on the ludicrous view that we need a certain level of unemployment to prevent wage inflation (and, more quietly, the balance of power shifting to workers). Last month Adrian Orr gave a speech in which he basically said that unemployment was too low and we needed more people out of work to prevent inflation.
How did humans end up with such an inhuman economic model?
Is economic the only "inhumane" thing? is the ability to build and fly gigantic airplanes, submarines, bullet trains etc "human"? we are living in a time that we (collectively), have an insane impact on our environment, we have insane abilities. We are on the journey of becoming something other than what we have been for sure! when I was a kid (about 30 years ago) i was so amazed by Sifi movies where people talked to each other over phone while seeing each other on screens. I thought that surely is impossible.
And people who decided not to work (unless your where rich) would not be permitted do that, they did not have them and their children subsided, they would be left to die, or in case of a slave beaten until they worked.
I think unemployed people should be less happy, that's their motivation for working. That is a far more humane way of dealing with it than leaving them to die, or forcing them to work. But it now seem now if you are unemployed you can't suffer any negative consequences at all because its in inhuman. I understand that their are unemployed people that through no fault of their own are unemployed, but less happiness seems to be reasonable price to pay.
I've always enjoyed New Zealand for its rural roads, spectacular wild scenery, low population density and gentle climate. Just unfortunate that the human development and a growing population are doing so much damage. Still we absolutely must have more humans crammed in cheek by jowl in every city for...some reason?
The sprawl has been the result of a set of local policies that favoured expensive single family dwellings on large plots of land. Where in Continental Europe they would favour five or six story building with low cost apartments.
There is nothing natural or inevitable about suburban sprawl, it's a consequence of not doing any actual urban planning.
I'm aware of that, but given we can't build density cheaply as it is, it's optimistic to assume that we would have built the same number of houses locally if we didn't have the sprawl to begin with. There's a high chance you'd just have ended up with fewer houses and all the flow-on effects of that.
We could have kept horticultural land while allowing people to build what they wanted on their own land further in. Just need to stop authoritarian NIMBYs from denying others the freedom to build on their own land.
Rob Adams, City Architect of the City of Melbourne, notes that for every 1 million population you can enable to live around the existing infrastructure routes in Melbourne - instead of expanding at the fringe - Melbourne would save an estimated $110 billion. Meaning a saving of $550 billion in accommodating their projected population increase to 2050. That is a drain on the wealth of taxpayers too.
There is a high cost to sprawl and the authoritarian NIMBYism that prevents intensification.
Painter - that is 100% incorrect.
It's the same rabbit-hole Parker fell into.
Cities are nothing more than heat engines; they need inputs and need to output - both energy, and materials. They are a linear (and therefore temporary) arrangement. Draw-down applies, as does entropy.
Cities have a footprint much, much bigger than themselves, indeed there is only human demand and more than half of all humans are city-domiciled. Who TF do you think eats all that farm produce? Consumes all that mined material? Exhudes all that waste?
Sorry, but you are SO far behind the discussion you could be a politician. Or a journalist.......
Bollocks. The US has 4x our energy-use. Take that away and they were 'full' about 1870.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Chan…
Try getting informed, and try getting an original pen-name, eh?
That’s factually incorrect: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&coun…
Let’s be generous and say they use two times as much; who cares? Technology improves, and carrying capacity increases.
(Also note that their electricity consumption is decreasing.)
"Technology improves, and carrying capacity increases"
Mutually exclusive items. Technology can only be applied to efficiencies, and they run up against hard thermodynamic limits. Carrying-capacity is always depleted (read Catton's Overshoot, rather than reciting self-justifying mantra - I look forward to a reasoned rebuttal).
The last was a joke; reasoned and rebuttal of Limits to Growth are mutually exclusive.
As some commentators demonstrate.
Most technology applies only to efficiencies, yes. But some is Schumpeterian; it changes or eliminates the material inputs. The thermodynamic limits of solar PV or nuclear fission aren’t even with talking about.
Is there a good summary? 300 pages is tldr to be honest
The older you were, the happier you were. The difference between an 18-24 year-old and someone over 65 was 0.6 points on the scale so the elderly were about 10 percent happier on a 6.5 score. When I first worked with such surveys, they showed young adults were happier that those in the middle of their lives – say 40-year-olds. That curvature effect seems to be disappearing. Does that mean our young are increasingly more miserable? Why?
Intuitively, because we have set up our economic policy in a way that serves to make young people's wages and savings worth less and older folks' assets worth more. We've used housing and education to saddle our younger folk with ever greater debt then lived up large off what they've paid us. Debt-driven wealth where others pay our cost.
It's served to make building a viable and stable family life that much harder than it used to be too.
Added to that, our default response to pollution and climate change has been "Yes, it's important, but any response should not be allowed to inconvenience me".
Reasons are young people less happy than they used to be?
1. Economic - Student loans and accommodation costs
2. Marry later
3. Leave home later
4. FOMO - to many opportunities causes stress
5. Less sex
5a. pollution causing reduced sperm counts and sex drive
5b. women having more control in relationships - for both cultural, educational and economic reasons
5c. proliferation of pornography
5d. social interaction via social media
Any other suggestions?
What do you mean, not practicing and not trying?
At what?
There's a massive amount of creating and achievement going on - including in areas that are practice related (e.g. see young musicians on YouTube out-achieving earlier generations because of their greater access to learning resources). Likewise, chess masters and grand masters at a younger age have been growing in number.
Fair enough. Practice is an oft underappreciated joy. Being able to look back on those well-utilised hours after a decade and appreciate one's possession of an advanced skill in exchange.
Difficult for many adults to appreciate if it's new, too. When we leave childhood we get used to being good at things and lose our sense of being accustomed to the process of learning. As Yuval Noah Harari highlights, though, this is the superpower of the 21st century.
The people who own multiple houses are very happy because they have been made uber wealthy for doing nothing. The people who own one house are happy because they have been given a few hundred thousand for doing nothing. The people who were poorest in society have been punished for not being able to afford an asset. The government regards them as being not worthy. Hence, https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/rising-cost-of-living-in-aot…
If that's the only thing you take away from the substance of that post then you're not here for a discussion, you're here for a butt-covering exercise. How many more years at the helm do the current mob need of failure after failure before you'll accept some scrutiny? Tribalism is how we got into this mess.
Bingo.
With Australia’s overwhelmed hospital system I have put off going to an ED to have my foot and ankle x-rayed after a fall several weeks ago, for which I am still feeling most of the immediate effects.
No one wants to go where SARS-CoV-2 gathers or to add extra pressure to a health system that in the past you could be relied upon to be readily available, even if slightly inconvenienced by a little wait to give way to more urgent patients.
Its not MPs who are made to suffer greatly from a “let it rip” philosophy. Unless it’s close to election time. “muwah ha ha laugh, evil fingers tapping and sarcastic grin”.
I can't speak for others but my love for my wife grows deeper every day, We didn't rush into marriage, and were firm friends for years beforehand. We complement each other, and whatever skills one lacks the other either possesses or steps up to learn. We continually grow for the sake of the relationship, never settling into a rut. We share burdens and give the best of ourselves for each other every day. When we exchanged our wedding vows, we made sure we meant it.
It wasn't always like this, of course - having young children is a massive strain on what is a previously selfish relationship between two people. We've both had our health challenges, and we've been dirt poor at times. But things improved, and we've always been there for each other. I annoy her at times, as she annoys me, but the root of our marriage remains strong, and we still share the same dreams and visions for the future.
If only she wasn't a bloody Ford fan.
Drugs are great are they not ? Perhaps look at where we stand in the world usage of anti-depressants. Article below is 1 in 8 and that's back in 2018, usage will have only increased, especially over the last 12 months.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/one-in-eight-kiwi-adults-prescribed-antid…
Well now nether this column nor that Herald article features how NZdr’s use of anti-depressants stacks up per capita internationally. Now starting with the simple premise that depressed people are not happy people that statistic in itself, must be a reasonably viable gauge in determining the ratio between happy & unhappy people.
ps.quick check. Forbes some time ago, had NZ coming in 8th in the world for that sort of useage per person on average
Not so bad in comparison to Australia…2 versus 10. Interesting to not see the US on this list but I assume its harder to obtain this data from a mostly privatised and expensive to use health system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_antidepressant_con…
Have plenty of children and be happy.
Here's some good news,
Benefit increases going to more than half of families with children
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