Brookings: Topics - Subjective Well-being

Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Many scholars have argued that once “basic needs” have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple datasets, multiple definitions of “basic needs” and multiple questions about well-being, we find no support for this claim. The relationship between well-being and income is roughly linear-log and does not diminish as incomes rise. If there is a satiation point, we are yet to reach it.

Introduction

In 1974 Richard Easterlin famously posited that increasing average income did not raise average well-being, a claim that became known as the Easterlin Paradox. However, in recent years new and more comprehensive data has allowed for greater testing of Easterlin’s claim. Studies by us and others have pointed to a robust positive relationship between well-being and income across countries and over time (Deaton, 2008; Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008; Sacks, Stevenson, and Wolfers, 2013). Yet, some researchers have argued for a modified version of Easterlin’s hypothesis, acknowledging the existence of a link between income and well-being among those whose basic needs have not been met, but claiming that beyond a certain income threshold, further income is unrelated to well-being.

The existence of such a satiation point is claimed widely, although there has been no formal statistical evidence presented to support this view. For example Diener and Seligman (2004, p. 5) state that “there are only small increases in well-being” above some threshold. While Clark, Frijters and Shields (2008, p. 123) state more starkly that “greater economic prosperity at some point ceases to buy more happiness,” a similar claim is made by Di Tella and MacCulloch (2008, p. 17): “once basic needs have been satisfied, there is full adaptation to further economic growth.” The income level beyond which further income no longer yields greater well-being is typically said to be somewhere between $8,000 and $25,000. Layard (2003, p. 17) argues that “once a country has over $15,000 per head, its level of happiness appears to be independent of its income;” while in subsequent work he argued for a $20,000 threshold (Layard, 2005 p. 32-33). Frey and Stutzer (2002, p. 416) claim that “income provides happiness at low levels of development but once a threshold (around $10,000) is reached, the average income level in a country has little effect on average subjective well-being.”

Many of these claims, of a critical level of GDP beyond which happiness and GDP are no longer linked, come from cursorily examining plots of well-being against the level of per capita GDP. Such graphs show clearly that increasing income yields diminishing marginal gains in subjective well-being. However this relationship need not reach a point of nirvana beyond which further gains in well-being are absent. For instance Deaton (2008) and Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) find that the well-being–income relationship is roughly a linear-log relationship, such that, while each additional dollar of income yields a greater increment to measured happiness for the poor than for the rich, there is no satiation point.

In this paper we provide a sustained examination of whether there is a critical income level beyond which the well-being–income relationship is qualitatively different, a claim referred to as the modified-Easterlin hypothesis. As a statistical claim, we shall test two versions of the hypothesis. The first, a stronger version, is that beyond some level of basic needs, income is uncorrelated with subjective well-being; the second, a weaker version, is that the well-being–income link estimated among the poor differs from that found among the rich.

Claims of satiation have been made for comparisons between rich and poor people within a country, comparisons between rich and poor countries, and comparisons of average well-being in countries over time, as they grow. The time series analysis is complicated by the challenges of compiling comparable data over time and thus we focus in this short paper on the cross-sectional relationships seen within and between countries. Recent work by Sacks, Stevenson, and Wolfers (2013) provide evidence on the time series relationship that is consistent with the findings presented here.

To preview, we find no evidence of a satiation point. The income–well-being link that one finds when examining only the poor, is similar to that found when examining only the rich. We show that this finding is robust across a variety of datasets, for various measures of subjective well-being, at various thresholds, and that it holds in roughly equal measure when making cross-national comparisons between rich and poor countries as when making comparisons between rich and poor people within a country.

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Authors

Betsey Stevenson
Justin Wolfers

You Can Never Have Too Much Money, New Research Shows

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

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Global Love Rankings

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:47:00 -0500

Valentine’s Day and the Economics of Love

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 02:04:00 -0500

On Valentine’s Day, even a dismal scientist’s mind turns to love. It’s a powerful feeling, with a value that goes far beyond the millions of chocolate boxes and bouquets that will be delivered this Feb. 14.

Survey data from the Gallup Organization, where Justin works as a senior scientist, allow us to take a uniquely deep look at the state of love around the world. In 2006 and 2007, Gallup went to 136 countries and asked people, “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?” It’s the largest such dataset ever collected.

The good news: Ours is a loving world. On a typical day, about 70 percent of people worldwide reported a love-filled day. In the U.S., 81 percent felt love, as did 81 percent of Canadians and 79 percent of Italians. Germany and the U.K. were less loving, with slightly less than 3 in 4 people reporting feeling loved. Surprisingly, the same was true of the supposedly romantic French. And if you’re in Japan, please hug someone: Only 59 percent of Japanese said they had experienced love the previous day.

Across the world as a whole, the widowed and divorced are the least likely to experience love. Married folks feel more of it than singles. People who live together out of wedlock report getting even more love than married spouses -- an interesting factoid for conservatives worried about the effects of cohabitation. Women get more love than men, particularly in the U.S.

Young Love

If you’re young and not feeling all that loved this Valentine’s Day, don’t despair: You’re not alone. Young adults are among the least likely to experience love. It gets better with age, ultimately peaking in the mid-30s or mid-40s in most countries before fading again into the twilight years.

Money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience the feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about 4 percentage points more likely to be loved. Perhaps having more money makes it easier to find time for love.

That said, the data aren’t necessarily telling us that money can buy you love. It’s possible that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.

What’s perhaps more striking is how little money matters on a global level. True, the populations of richer countries are, on average, slightly more likely to feel loved than those of poorer countries. But love is still abundant in the poorer countries: People in Rwanda and the Philippines enjoyed the highest love ratios, with more than 9 in 10 people providing positive responses. Armenia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, with economic output per person in the middle of the range, all had love ratios of less than 4 in 10.

Fun facts aside, we think there is a deeper and more consequential purpose to the study of love. Think about what love means to you. To us, it means caring about others and being cared for. Love is valuable, even if it is absent from both our national accounts and our political discourse.

In the language of economics, love is a form of insurance. It involves bonds of reciprocity that provide support when we’re feeling down, when we’re sick and when times are tough.

More broadly, love has the power to mitigate the free-rider and moral hazard problems associated with social (and private) insurance. Bailing out a bank might encourage executives to take bigger risks in the future, but helping loved ones down on their luck has fewer incentive problems because our loved ones typically care for us in return. Such mutually beneficial relationships make us all more resilient in times of crisis. This is why the household remains one of the most powerful institutions for organizing not just families but also our economic lives.

If we can find more love for our fellow citizens, our society will function better. Hard as this may be to achieve in an era when trust in government, business and one another is low, it’s worth the effort. When you expand the boundaries of trust and reciprocity, you expand the boundaries of what is possible.

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.

Publication: Bloomberg

Where Do You Stand in the Global Love Ranking?

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 01:52:00 -0500

Paris and Rome may be famous for romance, but it’s Filipinos who get the most love. That, at least, is a conclusion that can be drawn from a global love survey conducted by the Gallup Organization.

In our latest column for Bloomberg View, we mine the unique Gallup data for insights into the nature of love and its relationship to nationality, age, money and economic development. The survey, conducted in 136 countries, posed the question: “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?”

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we thought readers might be interested in seeing the full ranking. So here goes. The first number after each country name is the percentage of respondents who said they had experienced love the previous day. The second (in parentheses) is the sample size for the country.

Philippines 93% (2193)
Rwanda 92% (1495)
Puerto Rico 90% (495)
Hungary 89% (1002)
Cyprus 88% (988)
Trinidad and Tobago 88% (506)
Paraguay 87% (1986)
Lebanon 86% (970)
Costa Rica 85% (1985)
Cambodia 85% (1961)
Nigeria 84% (1965)
Guyana 83% (486)
Spain 83% (998)
Mexico 82% (989)
Tanzania 82% (1941)
Ecuador 82% (2126)
Jamaica 82% (534)
Venezuela 82% (997)
Cuba 82% (978)
Brazil 82% (1038)
Laos 81% (1947)
Argentina 81% (1985)
Belgium 81% (1015)
Canada 81% (1006)
Greece 81% (996)
U.S. 81% (1224)
Denmark 80% (1003)
Portugal 80% (995)
Netherlands 80% (993)
Vietnam 79% (1901)
New Zealand 79% (1775)
Italy 79% (1000)
Colombia 79% (1994)
Madagascar 78% (998)
Uruguay 78% (1969)
Turkey 78% (985)
Dominican Republic 78% (1976)
United Arab Emirates 77% (961)
Saudi Arabia 77% (978)
Chile 76% (1982)
Malawi 76% (1997)
Ghana 76% (1986)
South Africa 76% (1968)
Australia 76% (1199)
Panama 75% (1995)
Zambia 74% (1971)
Kenya 74% (1965)
Namibia 74% (996)
Nicaragua 74% (1988)
Germany 74% (1214)
Ireland 74% (992)
Sweden 74% (993)
U.K. 74% (1200)
Switzerland 74% (986)
Montenegro 74% (800)
Austria 73% (984)
France 73% (1217)
Kuwait 73% (934)
Finland 73% (993)
El Salvador 73% (2000)
Pakistan 73% (2253)
Zimbabwe 72% (1989)
Honduras 72% (1947)
Peru 72% (1982)
Egypt 72% (1024)
Serbia 72% (1474)
Bosnia and Herzegovina 72% (1896)
Sierra Leone 71% (1986)
India 71% (3140)
Taiwan 71% (984)
Bangladesh 70% (2200)
Belize 70% (464)
Croatia 69% (958)
Macedonia 69% (1000)
Mozambique 69% (996)
Bolivia 69% (1948)
Liberia 68% (988)
Iran 68% (963)
China 68% (7206)
Slovenia 68% (1000)
Haiti 68% (471)
Norway 67% (992)
Sri Lanka 67% (1974)
Poland 67% (939)
Guatemala 67% (1988)
Uganda 66% (1961)
Sudan 66% (971)
Israel 66% (957)
Kosovo 65% (983)
Thailand 65% (2377)
Jordan 65% (998)
Albania 64% (855)
Guinea 62% (952)
Botswana 62% (999)
Angola 62% (957)
Burkina Faso 62% (1876)
Malaysia 61% (2115)
Mali 61% (984)
Niger 61% (1925)
Palestinian Territories 61% (991)
Romania 61% (937)
Senegal 61% (1805)
Indonesia 61% (2013)
Afghanistan 60% (1128)
Hong Kong 60% (789)
Cameroon 59% (1967)
Japan 59% (1138)
Nepal 59% (1965)
Bulgaria 59% (927)
Slovakia 58% (991)
Singapore 58% (3002)
Czech Republic 58% (992)
Mauritania 57% (1960)
Benin 56% (974)
South Korea 56% (2056)
Myanmar 55% (1047)
Latvia 54% (1942)
Togo 54% (988)
Estonia 53% (1800)
Lithuania 50% (1863)
Russia 50% (4667)
Chad 49% (1915)
Yemen 48% (959)
Ukraine 48% (1930)
Ethiopia 48% (1913)
Azerbaijan 47% (1824)
Tajikistan 47% (1847)
Moldova 46% (1937)
Kazakhstan 45% (1871)
Morocco 43% (1011)
Belarus 43% (1992)
Georgia 43% (1904)
Kyrgyzstan 34% (1969)
Mongolia 32% (928)
Uzbekistan 32% (962)
Armenia 29% (1954)

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.

Publication: Bloomberg

Image Source: © Eduard Korniyenko / Reuters

Does Access to Information Technology Make People Happier?

Carol Graham and Milena Nikolova — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:55:00 -0500

Access to information and communication technology through cell phones, the internet, and electronic media has increased exponentially around the world. While a few decades ago cell phones were a luxury good in wealthy countries, our data show that today over half of respondents in Sub-Saharan Africa and about 80 percent of those in Latin America and Southeast Asia have access to cell phones. In addition to making phone calls and text messaging, cell phones are used for activities such as accessing the internet and social network sites. Meanwhile, the launch of mobile banking gives access to these technologies an entirely new dimension, providing access to financial services in addition to information and communication technology. It is estimated that in Kenya, where the mobile banking “revolution” originated, there are some 18 million mobile money users (roughly 75 percent of all adults). Given the expanding role of information technology in today’s global economy, in this paper we explore whether this new access also enhances well-being.

Neither of the authors is an expert on information technology. The real and potential effect of information technology on productivity, development, and other economic outcomes has been studied extensively by those who are. Building on past research on the economics of well-being and on the application of the well-being metrics to this particular question, we hope to contribute an understanding of how the changes brought about by information and communication technology affect well-being in general, including its non-income dimensions.

Our study has two related objectives. The first is to understand the effects of the worldwide increase in communications capacity and access to information technology on human well-being. The second is to contribute to our more general understanding of the relationship between well-being and capabilities and agency. Cell phones and information technology are giving people around the world – and particularly the poor – new capabilities for making financial transactions and accessing other services which were previously unavailable to them. We explore the extent to which the agency effect of having access to these capabilities manifests itself through both hedonic and evaluative aspects of well-being.

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Authors

Carol Graham
Milena Nikolova

Image Source: © Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters

How Can We Most Effectively Measure Happiness?

Carol Graham — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:34:00 -0400

Editor's Note: At a Zócalo Public Square* event, several experts were asked to weigh in on the following question: How should we most effectively measure happiness? Here is Carol Graham's response-

We must make it a measure that’s meaningful to the average person

Happiness is increasingly in the media. Yet it is an age-old topic of inquiry for psychologists, philosophers, and even the early economists (before the science got dismal). The pursuit of happiness is even written into the Declaration of Independence (and into the title of my latest Brookings book, I might add). Public discussions of happiness rarely define the concept. Yet an increasing number of economists and psychologists are involved in a new science of measuring well-being, a concept that includes happiness but extends well beyond it.

Those of us involved focus on two distinct dimensions: hedonic well-being, a daily experience component; and evaluative well-being, the way in which people think about their lives as a whole, including purpose or meaning. Jeremy Bentham focused on the former and proposed increasing the happiness and contentment of the greatest number of individuals possible in a society as the goal of public policy. Aristotle, meanwhile, thought of happiness as eudemonia, a concept that combined two Greek words: “eu” meaning abundance and “daimon” meaning the power controlling an individual’s destiny. Using distinct questions and methods, we are able to measure both. We can look within and across societies and see how people experience their daily lives and how that varies across activities such as commuting time, work, and leisure time on the one hand, and how they feel about their lives as a whole—including their opportunities and past experiences, on the other. Happiness crosses both dimensions of well-being. If you ask people how happy they felt yesterday, you are capturing their feelings during yesterday’s experiences. If you ask them how happy they are with their lives in general, they are more likely to think of their lives as a whole.

The metrics give us a tool for measuring and evaluating the importance of many non-income components of people’s lives to their overall welfare. The findings are intuitive. Income matters to well-being, and not having enough income is bad for both dimensions. But income matters more to evaluative well-being, as it gives people more ability to choose how to live their lives. More income cannot make them experience each point in the day better. Other things, such as good health and relationships, matter as much if not more to well-being than income. The approach provides useful complements to the income-based metrics that are already in our statistics and in the GDP. Other countries, such as Britain, have already begun to include well-being metrics in their national statistics. There is even a nascent discussion of doing so here.

Perhaps what is most promising about well-being metrics is that they seem to be more compelling for the average man (or woman) on the street than are complex income measures, and they often tell different stories. There are, for example, endless messages about the importance of exercising for health, the drawbacks of smoking, and the expenses related to long commutes. Yet it is likely that they are most often heard by people who already exercise, don’t smoke, and bicycle to work. And exercise does not really enter into the GNP, while cigarette purchases and the gasoline and other expenses related to commuting enter in positively. If you told people that exercising made them happier and that smoking and commuting time made them unhappy (and yes, these are real findings from nationwide surveys), then perhaps they might listen?

Read other responses to this question at zocalopublicsquare.org »

*Zócalo Public Square is a not-for-profit daily ideas exchange that blends digital humanities journalism and live events.

Authors

Carol Graham

Publication: Zócalo Public Square

Image Source: © Ho New / Reuters

The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being, Paperback Edition

Carol Graham — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2012 164pp.

- A Brookings FOCUS Book -

In The Pursuit of Happiness, renowned economist Carol Graham explores what we know about the determinants of happiness and clearly presents both the promise and the potential pitfalls of injecting the “economics of happiness” into public policymaking. While the book spotlights the innovative contributions of happiness research to the dismal science, it also raises a cautionary note about the issues that still need to be addressed before policymakers can make best use of them.

This paperback edition features a new preface. To purchase the original, hardcover edition, click here.

Praise of The Pursuit of Happiness:

"With great care and judgment, Graham clearly explains the complexities of defining, measuring, and targeting happiness in economic policy while still urging us to persevere. . . . A consummate work of scholarship."
—Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University

"The book is well written and very accessible, and is immaculately researched, avoiding bias and imbalance. . . . Far from being a 'dismal science,' Graham provides much reason for optimism for those people involved in this burgeoning field of economics."
—World Economics

"As acceptance of social science research on happiness continues to grow, a new question has naturally surged to the fore: Should happiness be a goal of public policy? In this eloquently written celebration of a new science, Carol Graham provides valuable new insight into the pros and cons of this issue."
—Richard A. Easterlin, university professor and professor of economics, University of Southern California

"Since 1776 the 'pursuit of happiness' has been the great world question. Here, reflecting on modern survey techniques and results, Carol Graham drills deeper. . . . [She] is opening up a whole new frontier in economic and social policy."
—George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carol Graham

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The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being

Daniel W. Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

ABSTRACT

In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to well-being. In this paper, we review the evidence to assess the importance of absolute and relative income in determining well-being. Our research suggests that absolute income plays a major role in determining well-being and that national comparisons offer little evidence to support theories of relative income. We find that well-being rises with income, whether we compare people in a single country and year, whether we look across countries, or whether we look at economic growth for a given country. Through these comparisons we show that richer people report higher well-being than poorer people; that people in richer countries, on average, experience greater well-being than people in poorer countries; and that economic growth and growth in well-being are clearly related. Moreover, the data show no evidence for a satiation point above which income and well-being are no longer related.

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The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being

Authors

Daniel W. Sacks
Betsey Stevenson
Justin Wolfers

Helping the Roma in Bulgaria: Recommendations to the Board of the America for Bulgaria Foundation

Ron Haskins — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Roma people, the largest minority group in Europe and in many European countries, trail other ethnic groups in almost every characteristic that defines well-being. Perhaps of greatest importance, the Roma are less educated than other ethnic groups. But they also suffer from excess health problems, high unemployment, poverty, and political weakness. The Roma population of Bulgaria is certainly no less disadvantaged than the Roma in other countries. An especially poignant example of Bulgarian Roma disadvantage is that the death rate among children under age 1, a prime indicator of children’s health in any nation, is 25 per 1,000 for Roma children as compared with 9.9 for children of Bulgarian ethnic origin. The mathematics of death almost before life gets started is a symbolic indicator of the Roma burden in Bulgaria. Similarly, research conducted for UNICEF by the University of York shows that the poverty rate among Roma children in Bulgaria is 92 percent, perhaps the highest poverty rate for any ethnic group in Europe. By contrast, the poverty rate among children of Bulgarian heritage is less than half as high at 43 percent.

It is not surprising, then, that over at least the past decade, the European Union (EU) and most European governments, joined by the Open Society Foundation, the World Bank, and other organizations, have created important initiatives to address all these problems. It is possible to think that now is an historic moment in which European governments and dominant ethnic groups, after eight or nine centuries of the most pernicious types of discrimination against the Roma, are finally, albeit often reluctantly, admitting the problems facing their Roma populations and their own role in creating and sustaining these problems. Equally important, most of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) governments, where discrimination against the Roma has been and continues to be particularly intense, are gradually adopting policies to address the problems.

To the extent that the moment of Roma opportunity has arrived, perhaps the most important force moving Bulgaria and other CEE nations in the direction of integration and inclusion is the EU. In the period leading up to the ascension of Bulgaria and other CEE nations to membership in the EU, all the new member states were required to meet a host of conditions required by the EU as the price of admission. Among these conditions were laws outlawing discrimination and requiring equality of educational opportunity. The CEE nations complied with the EU directive to pass such laws, but implementation of the laws in Bulgaria and other nations has been something less than aggressive.

Nor is EU ascension the only force driving the CEE nations to reduce discrimination against the Roma and other minorities. The Open Society, the World Bank, and a number of other private organizations, including several Roma nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), have initiated a sweeping program to promote inclusion of the Roma in the civil society of the CEE nations. Called the “Decade of Roma Inclusion” (2005-2015) the initiative is notable for getting all the CEE nations (plus Spain) to participate, to commit themselves to activities designed to promote inclusion and nondiscrimination, and to make a financial commitment to a fund administered by the World Bank to promote the initiative. As a part of the initiative, Bulgaria and the other participating nations originated ten-year action plans. The Bulgarian action plan, the purpose of which is to create a set of goals and activities that will promote Roma integration, includes proposals for education, health care, housing, employment, discrimination and equal opportunity, and culture.

An important part of the Decade program was the establishment of the Roma Education Fund in 2005. Eight nations (Canada, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK), as well as several international agencies including the Open Society, pledged a total of 34 million Euros to support Fund activities during the Roma decade. The major goal of the fund is to “support policies and programs which ensure quality education for Roma, including the desegregation of education systems.”

By joining the EU, Bulgaria and the other CEE nations brought themselves into a well-developed culture of inclusion and a complex system of interlocking laws and agencies that not only outlaw exclusion and discrimination, but provide funds to implement inclusion policies and to monitor the extent to which EU nations are aggressively implementing these laws. The laws and directives include the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, the Racial Equality Directive, and several others. It would be a mistake to conclude that every EU member, even the original 15 EU nations with relatively more advanced economies and longer histories as democracies than the CEE nations, faithfully implement every component of the various legal requirements of being an EU member. Even so, EU requirements and funds have initiated both profound legal changes and a host of programs to increase the social, economic, political, and cultural inclusion of the Roma as well as studies and evaluations that bring some light to the actual situation of the Roma and other minorities in member nations. Given the all but inevitable distance between the laws on inclusion and discrimination the CEE nations passed in order to join the EU and the actual implementation of those laws, studies commissioned by various EU agencies and NGOs illuminate the gaps between policies and implementation.

An excellent example of such illumination is a 2006 study commissioned by the Economic and Scientific Policy program of the European Parliament. The report is a hard-hitting assessment of the status of Roma throughout Europe with regard to their legal status and socio-economic conditions. The latter category includes assessments of Roma exclusion from employment, education, social services, health care, and community integration. The upshot of the report is that although there may be some progress in these important areas of integration, the Roma are still a second-class group throughout the CEE nations. Seemingly, good laws have not yet produced good results. Laws may be changed, but changing human behavior and culture takes longer.

CEE governments and their defenders are reluctant to admit the lamentable lack of progress in Roma integration. In part for this reason, the European Commission, based on extensive evidence from evaluations, surveys, and news reports of often ferocious discrimination against the Roma, felt the need to publish “An EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up to 2020” in April 2011. The need for a new framework is a clear signal that the EU Commission believes the CEE governments in general and Bulgaria in particular are not achieving the results the EU hoped for when it approved these nations for EU membership and is therefore trying to push the governments of these nations into further action.

Following publication of the Framework, the Open Society released one of the most thorough and provocative reports on the situation faced by the Roma in Europe and strategies that should be adopted to attack the wide range of Roma disadvantages. Appropriately entitled “Beyond Rhetoric,” the Open Society report includes entire chapters on two issues that I will examine in more detail below.

First, the Open Society strongly recommends that nations collect ethnically disaggregated data. Logically enough, the report holds that it is impossible to document the effects of policy initiatives on the Roma and other groups unless outcome data, including measures of health, education, housing, employment, income, and death rates by age, are collected for individual ethnic groups. So important are ethnically disaggregated data that the report goes so far as to recommend that, if necessary, governments should change their statistical systems to “incorporate ethnic data components into regular statistical surveys.” A second recommendation that deserves special attention is the report’s emphasis on early childhood education and care. Virtually every report about the Roma emphasizes the vital importance of education in fighting Roma exclusion, but the Open Society report strongly recommends that nations implementing the EU Framework should “give urgent consideration” to establishing an early child development fund to “support innovative early development programs and allow for scale up of what works.”

Beyond these specific recommendations, the Open Society report emphasizes that the EU Commission stated explicitly in its Framework document that “member states do not properly use EU money for the purpose of effective social and economic integration of Roma. As if this judgment, which seems to represent the views of many EU agencies, the World Bank, the Open Society, and many Roma groups themselves, needed additional reinforcement, a United Nations expert on minority issues visited Bulgaria this summer and called upon the government to “turn its policies on Roma integration into concrete action.” She went on to give what seems to represent the views of all these groups on the flaws in the Bulgarian government’s approach to fighting Roma exclusion: “Many policies seem to remain largely only rhetorical undertakings aimed at external audiences – official commitments that are not fulfilled in practice.” The result, according to the UN expert, is that “all the evidence demonstrates that Roma remain in desperate circumstances at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder.” In particular, she mentioned that the access of Roma children to quality education “remains overwhelmingly unfulfilled.”

If CEE nations are now entering a period in which governments will be working, often ineffectively or at a very modest pace, to improve the conditions of the Roma, judging by the efforts of other nations to reduce discrimination against minority groups and by the stately rate of progress so far in the CEE nations, it can be assumed that the fight for Roma equality in Bulgaria will be measured in decades. In the U.S., for example, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was largely successful. By the mid-1960s, vital court decisions had dismantled major parts of the system of legal discrimination against blacks and the federal government had enacted programs to ensure voting rights and other fundamental rights to blacks. To enhance the legal war on poverty and discrimination, the federal government also initiated an army of social programs designed to boost the education, health, employment, housing, and political participation of the poor in general and blacks in particular. Yet today, nearly half a century after achieving legal rights and the initiation of large-scale government inclusion programs, blacks (and Hispanics) still trail whites by large margins in education, income, housing, poverty levels, and health. Although achieving significant progress against discrimination may require decades or generations, discrimination will not diminish until strong legal, economic, and social forces are mobilized against it. Expecting a long struggle cannot be a reason not to begin.

If the history of making substantial progress in overcoming ethnic discrimination in the U.S. can serve as a rough comparison to the situation of the Roma in CEE nations, several factors are going to be vital in the fight of the Roma to overcome discrimination and exclusion in Bulgaria and throughout Europe. These factors include an antidiscrimination plan, aggressive implementation of the plan by all levels of government, leadership by the Roma themselves, educational progress by Roma children and young adults, political activism by the Roma people, a media committed to accurate reporting and fairness, and a civil society that reflects underlying public opinion favoring integration and opposed to discrimination. Most of these factors appear to be present in Bulgaria, often in rudimentary and brittle form, but present and in many cases moving in the right direction nonetheless. The progress that is just now beginning can be greatly enhanced by the efforts of groups that have the resources, the will, and the vision to roll up their sleeves and help promote Roma inclusion.

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Ron Haskins

The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being

Carol Graham — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2011 164pp.

- A Brookings FOCUS Book -

"Since 1776 the 'pursuit of happiness' has been the great world question. Here, reflecting on modern survey techniques and results, Carol Graham drills deeper. What does happiness mean? For example, is it opportunity for a meaningful life? Or, is it blissful contentment? And why does it vary, as it does, across individuals and around the world? How does the perception of happiness differ in countries as disparate as Cuba, Afghanistan, Japan, and Russia? Carol Graham is opening up a whole new frontier in economic and social policy."—George Akerlof, Daniel E. Koshland Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of California–Berkeley, and 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics

In The Pursuit of Happiness, the latest addition to the Brookings FOCUS series, Carol Graham explores what we know about the determinants of happiness, across and within countries at different stages of development. She then takes a look at just what we can do with that new knowledge and clearly presents both the promise and the potential pitfalls of injecting the "economics of happiness" into public policymaking.

This burgeoning field, largely a product of collaboration between economists and psychologists, is gaining great currency worldwide. One of a handful of pioneers to study this topic a mere decade ago, Graham is understandably excited about how far the concept has come and its possible utility in the future. The British, French, and Brazilian governments already have introduced happiness metrics into their benchmarks of national progress, and the U.S. government could follow suit. But "happiness" as a yardstick to help measure a nation’s well-being is still a relatively new approach, and many questions remain unanswered.

The Pursuit of Happiness spotlights the innovative contributions of happiness research to the dismal science. But it also raises a cautionary note about the issues that still need to be addressed before policymakers can make best use of them. An effective definition of well-being that goes beyond measuring income—the Gross National Product approach—could very well lead to improved understanding of poverty and economic welfare. But the question remains: how best to measure and quantify happiness? While scholars have developed rigorous measures of well-being that can be included in our statistics—as the British are already doing—to what degree should we use such metrics to shape and evaluate policy, particularly in assessing development outcomes?

Graham considers a number of unanswered questions, such as whether policy should be more concerned with increasing day-to-day contentment or with providing greater opportunity to build a fulfilling life. Other issues include whether we care more about the happiness of today’s citizens or that of future generations. Policies such as reducing our fiscal deficits or reforming our health care system, for example, typically require sacrificing current consumption and immediate well-being for better long-run outcomes. Another is whether policy should focus on reducing misery or raising general levels of well-being beyond their relatively high levels, in the same way that reducing poverty is only one choice among many objectives in our macroeconomic policy.

Employing the new metrics without attention to these questions could produce mistakes that might undermine the long-term prospects for a truly meaningful economics of well-being. Despite this cautionary note, Graham points out that it is surely a positive development that some of our public attention is going to better understanding and enhancing the well-being of our citizens, rather than emphasizing the roots of their divide.

Additional Praise for the book:

"As acceptance of social science research on happiness continues to grow, a new question has naturally surged to the fore: Should happiness be a goal of public policy? In this eloquently written celebration of a new science, Carol Graham provides valuable new insight into the pros and cons of this issue."—Richard A. Easterlin, University Professor and Professor of Economics, University of Southern California

"The Pursuit of Happiness is a consummate work of scholarship that adds important insights to the worldwide debate on economic well-being. Around the world, governments and citizens are realizing that the Gross National Product is often failing to steer our economies towards desirable ends. The search is on for more appropriate metrics and goals. Carol Graham, a pioneer in the field of 'happiness economics,' builds on a decade of her research to offer clear and careful suggestions for policymakers and scholars who aim to make happiness a central and explicit aim of public policy. With great care and judgment, and consistent clear thinking, Graham explains many of the complexities that will arise in defining, measuring, and targeting happiness in economic policy. Yet Graham urges us to persevere, and her new book will help the world to move forward on this new and promising economic course."—Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Special Advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on the Millennium Development Goals

“The book is well written and very accessible, and is immaculately researched, avoiding bias and imbalance. . . . Far from being a ‘dismal science,’ Graham provides much reason for optimism for those people involved in this burgeoning field of economics.”—World Economics

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carol Graham

Carol Graham is a senior fellow in Global Economy and Development and Charles Robinson Chair in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. She is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. Her previous books include Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and the Insecurity in New Market Economies (Brookings Institution Press, 2001, with Stefano Pettinato).

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More on the Easterlin Paradox: A Response to Wolfers

Carol Graham — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:11:00 -0500

Justin Wolfers’ column titled “Debunking the Easterlin Paradox, Again” dismisses Richard Easterlin’s work as just plain wrong. I argue here, as I have elsewhere, that where you come out on the Easterlin paradox depends on the happiness question (and therefore the definition of happiness) that you use, as well as the sample of countries and the period of time.

Richard Easterlin finds no clear country-by-country relationship between average per capita GDP and life satisfaction (among wealthy countries), despite a clear relationship between income and happiness at the individual level within countries. Easterlin also found – and continues to find, based on methods different from Wolfers’ – an absence of a relationship between life satisfaction and long-term changes in GDP per capita.

Different well-being questions measure different dimensions of “happiness”, and, in turn, they correlate differently with income (something they themselves show at the end of their last paper, and admit that the relationship between income and well-being is complex). The best possible life question – which Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson primarily use in the first work, and also in the second – asks respondents to compare their life today to the best possible life they can imagine for themselves. This introduces a relative component, and, not surprisingly, the question correlates most closely with income of all of the available subjective well-being questions. Life satisfaction, which they use in the second work, also correlates with income more than open-ended happiness, life purpose or affect questions, but not as closely as the best possible life question.

Wolfers and Stevenson used the most recent and extensive sample of countries available from the Gallup World Poll, and, as the measure of “happiness”, the best possible life question therein, and challenged the Easterlin paradox. In more recent work, with Stevenson and Dan Sacks (2010), referenced in this blog, the authors look at the relationship between life satisfaction and economic growth, based on the World Values survey and GDP levels and the best possible life question, based on the Gallup World Poll. They isolate a clear relationship between life satisfaction and GDP levels, and their statistical analysis is spot on.

Recent studies by Kahneman and Deaton (2010), and Diener and colleagues (2010), for example, find that happiness in a life evaluation sense (as measured by the best possible life question) correlates much more closely with income than does happiness in a life experience sense (as measured by affect or more open ended happiness questions). This holds within the United States (Kahneman and Deaton) and across countries (Diener et al.).

My own work on Latin America, with Soumya Chattopadhyay and Mario Picon, tested various questions against each other and finds a similar difference in correlation, with affect and life purpose questions having the least correlation with income and the best possible life question the most. My work on happiness in Afghanistan found that Afghans were happier than the world average (on par with Latin Americans) as measured by an open ended happiness question, and 20 percent more likely to smile in a day than Cubans. Yet they scored much lower than the world average on the best possible life question. This is not a surprise. While naturally cheerful and able to make the best of their lot, the Afghans also know that the best possible life is outside Afghanistan.

Thus the conclusions that one draws on whether there is an Easterlin paradox or not in part rest on the definition of happiness, and therefore the question that is used as the basis of analysis. Wolfers and co-authors find a clear relationship between GDP levels and life satisfaction and best possible life – clearly important dimensions of well-being. Yet in the same paper they find much less clear relationships when they use happiness, affect and life purpose questions.

There is also the question of the sample of countries, and whether one is examining cross section or time series data. The most recent debate with Easterlin is about the trends over time rather than cross-sectional patterns. Dropping the transition economies, as Easterlin does, may be a mistake, as Wolfers contends. But it is also important to recognize the extent to which including a large sample of countries that experienced unprecedented economic collapse and associated drops in happiness alters the slope in the cross-country income-happiness relationship (making it steeper). Wolfers also criticizes Easterlin for relying on financial satisfaction data for his Latin American time series sample (because there is not enough life satisfaction data); financial satisfaction correlates closely, but not perfectly, with life satisfaction. Easterlin’s technique allows for the inclusion of a much larger sample of middle income developing countries, a sample of countries that one can imagine is very important to the growth and happiness debate. Wolfers and co-authors use far fewer Latin American countries because comparable life satisfaction data is limited. Either approach is plausible and, as with all work with limited data, is not perfect. But I would not go as far as calling one or the other “plain wrong”.

Finally, there is the simpler question of giving credit where credit is due. We would not be having this debate, nor would we have a host of analysis on well-being beyond what is measured by income, had Easterlin not triggered our thinking on this with his original study of happiness and income over three decades ago (and his patient and thoughtful mentoring of many economists since then). In the big picture of things, Easterlin had the idea.

Authors

Carol Graham

Image Source: © Jorge Silva / Reuters

Debunking the Easterlin Paradox, Again

Daniel Sacks and Justin Wolfers — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:10:00 -0500

I’ve written here before about my research with Betsey Stevenson showing that economic development is associated with rising life satisfaction. Some people find this result surprising, but it’s the cleanest interpretation of the available data. Yet over the past few days, I’ve received calls from several journalists asking whether Richard Easterlin had somehow debunked these findings. He tried. But he failed.

Rather than challenge our careful statistical tests, he’s simply offered a new mishmash of statistics that appear to make things murkier.

For those of you new to the debate, the story begins with a series of papers that Richard Easterlin wrote between 1973 and 2005, claiming that economic growth is unrelated to life satisfaction. In fact, these papers simply show he failed to definitively establish such a relationship. In our 2008 Brookings Paper, Betsey and I systematically examined all of the available happiness data, finding that the relationship was there all along: rising GDP yields rising life satisfaction. More recent data reinforces our findings. Subsequently, Easterlin responded in of papers circulated in early 2009. That’s the research journalists are now asking me about. But in a paper released several weeks ago, Betsey, Dan Sacks and I assessed Easterlin’s latest claims, and found little evidence for them.

Let’s examine Easterlin’s three main claims.

1. GDP and life satisfaction rise together in the short-run, but not the long-run. False. Here’s an illustrative graph. We take the main international dataset — the World Values Survey — and in order to focus only on the long-run, compare the change in life satisfaction for each country from the first time it was surveyed until the last, the corresponding growth in GDP per capita. Typically, this is a difference taken over 18 years (although it ranges from 8 to 26 years). The graph shows that long-run rises in GDP are positively associated with growth in life satisfaction.

This graph includes the latest data, and Dan generated it just for this blog post. In fact, Easterlin was responding to our earlier work, which showed each of the comparisons one could make between various waves of this survey: Wave 1 was taken in the early ‘80s; Wave 2 in the early ‘90s; Wave 3 in the mid-late ‘90s; Wave 4 mostly in the early 2000s. And in each of these comparisons, you see a positive association — sometimes statistically significant, sometimes not.

What should we conclude from this second graph? Given the typically-significant positive slopes, you might conclude that rising GDP is associated with rising life satisfaction. It’s also reasonable to say that these data are too noisy to be entirely convincing. But the one thing you can’t conclude is that these data yield robust proof that long-run economic growth won’t yield rising life satisfaction. Yet that’s what Easterlin claims.

2. The income-happiness link that we document is no longer apparent when one omits the transition economies. Also false. One simple way to see this is to note that in the first graph the transition countries are shown in gray. Even when you look only at the other countries, it’s hard to be convinced that economic growth and life satisfaction are unrelated. To see the formal regressions showing this, read Table 3 of our response. (Aside: Why eliminate these countries from the sample?)

Or we could just look to another data source which omits the transition economies. For instance, the graph below shows the relationship between life satisfaction and GDP for the big nine European nations that were the members of the EU when the Eurobarometer survey started. Over the period 1973-2007, economic growth yielded higher satisfaction in eight of these nine countries. And while we’re puzzled by the ninth — the increasingly unhappy Belgians — we’re not going to drop them from the data! And if you think Belgium is puzzling, too, then we’ve done our job.

3. Surveys show that financial satisfaction in Latin American countries has declined as their economies have grown. Perhaps true. But how are surveys of financial satisfaction relevant to a debate about life satisfaction? And why focus on Latin America, rather than the whole world? In fact, when you turn to the question we are actually debating — life satisfaction —these same surveys suggest that those Latin American countries which have had the strongest growth have seen the largest rise in life satisfaction. This finding isn’t statistically significant, but that’s simply because there’s not a lot of data on life satisfaction in Latin America! (Given how sparse these data are, we didn’t report them in our paper.)

What’s going on here?

Now it’s reasonable to ask how it is that others arrived at a different conclusion. Easterlin’s Paradox is a non-finding. His paradox simply describes the failure of some researchers (not us!) to isolate a clear relationship between GDP and life satisfaction.

But you should never confuse absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Easterlin’s mistake is to conclude that when a correlation is statistically insignificant, it must be zero. But if you put together a dataset with only a few countries in it — or in Easterlin’s analysis, take a dataset with lots of countries, but throw away a bunch of it, and discard inconvenient observations — then you’ll typically find statistically insignificant results. This is even more problematic when you employ statistical techniques that don’t extract all of the information from your data. Think about it this way: if you flip a coin three times, and it comes up heads all three times, you still don’t have much reason to think that the coin is biased. But it would be silly to say, “there’s no compelling evidence that the coin is biased, so it must be fair.” Yet that’s Easterlin’s logic.

There’s a deeper problem, too. The results I’ve shown you are all based on analyzing data only from comparable surveys. And when you do this, you find rising incomes associated with rising satisfaction. Instead, Easterlin and co-authors lump together data from very different surveys, asking very different questions. It’s not even clear how one should make comparisons between a survey (in the US) asking about happiness, a survey (in Japan) asking about “circumstances at home,” surveys of life satisfaction in Europe based on a four-point scale, and global surveys based on a ten-point scale. Easterlin’s non-result appears only when comparing non-comparable data.

If you want to advocate against economic growth — and to argue that it won’t help even in the world’s poorest nations — then you should surely base such radical conclusions on findings rather than non-findings, and on the basis of robust evidence.

A final thought

Why not look at the levels of economic development and satisfaction? The following graph does this, displaying amazing new data coming from the Gallup World Poll. There’s no longer any doubt that people in richer countries report being more satisfied with their lives.

Is this relevant? Easterlin argues it isn’t — that he’s only concerned with changes in GDP. But the two are inextricably linked. If rich countries are happier countries, this begs the question: How did they get that way? We think it’s because as their economies developed, their people got more satisfied. While we don’t have centuries’ worth of well-being data to test our conjecture, it’s hard to think of a compelling alternative.

Authors

Daniel Sacks
Justin Wolfers

Publication: The New York Times Freakonomics blog

Image Source: © Omar Sobhani / Reuters

(Un?)Happiness and Gasoline Prices in the United States

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:08:00 -0400

Gasoline purchases are an essential part of the American way of life. There were about 250 million motor vehicles in the United States in 2008 – just under a vehicle per person. Americans drive an average of more than 11,000 miles per year and gasoline purchases are an essential part of most households’ budgets. Between 1995 and 2003, gasoline prices in the U.S. averaged about $1.49 a gallon, with average prices rising above $2.00 in 2004. By the summer of 2008, gasoline prices had reached a national average of $4.11 per gallon. At that time, Americans earning less than $15,000 a year were spending as much as 15 percent of their household income on gasoline – double the proportion from seven years earlier. In addition, unpredictable fuel costs make planning monthly household expenditures difficult, which can be detrimental to individual welfare and even to the overall economy.

Gasoline prices fell in the aftermath of the 2009 economic crisis. Prior and during the financial crisis, rising gasoline prices were seen as a symptom of an uncertain economic situation, as well as evidence of the questionable sustainability of our future oil supply. Gasoline prices abated along with the decrease of economic activity that accompanied the onset of the recession, reaching their minimum in late December 2008. A few months later, as the economy entered a gradual recovery phase, gasoline prices also trended upward. In contrast to the previous period of great uncertainty about future oil supplies, however, these price trends were considered more positively as signs of the U.S. economic recovery.

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Soumya Chattopadhyay
James Coan
Carol Graham
Amy Myers Jaffe
Kenneth Medlock III

Some Lessons from Happiness Economics and Quality of Life Research for the Human Development Index

Carol Graham — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:19:00 -0400

Abstract

The introduction of the HDI sparked a major debate about the adequacy of income as a measure of development. Perhaps as a result, scholars have developed a number of novel measures of well being. Prominent among these is the use of happiness surveys to study well being in its various dimensions, ranging from well being within persons, to the determinants of well being across individuals, to the effects of contextual factors, such as the environment, political regime, and macroeconomic conditions. Sen’s capabilities approach to poverty, which underlies the HDI, highlights the lack of capacity of the poor to make choices or to take certain actions. Happiness surveys are a means to assess the well being of individuals who are constrained in their capacity to make choices or reveal preferences. This paper reviews what we know about measuring quality of life, based on extensive work with happiness surveys in Latin America, and how that accumulated knowledge can inform the debate the HDI originally sparked. It also discusses how the surveys can contribute to our understanding and measurement of empowerment. It discusses the promises – and potential pitfalls – of directly applying the findings to policy, challenges which are germane to measuring and comparing empowerment across countries.

Read the full report at the United Nations Development Programme » (pdf)

Authors

Carol Graham

Publication: United Nations Development Programme

Subjective Well-Being, Income, Economic Development and Growth

Daniel W. Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:11:00 -0400

Abstract
We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer individuals, and establish that this relationship is similar in most countries around the world. Turning to the relationship between countries, we show that average life satisfaction is higher in countries with greater GDP per capita. The magnitude of the satisfaction-income gradient is roughly the same whether we compare individuals or countries, suggesting that absolute income plays an important role in influencing well-being. Finally, studying changes in satisfaction over time, we find that as countries experience economic growth, their citizens‘ life satisfaction typically grows, and that those countries experiencing more rapid economic growth also tend to experience more rapid growth in life satisfaction. These results together suggest that measured subjective well-being grows hand in hand with material living standards.

Introduction
Does economic growth improve the human lot? 1 Using several datasets which collectively cover 140 countries and represent nearly all of the worldes population, we study the relationship between subjective well-being and income, identifying three stylized facts. First, we show that within a given country, richer individuals report higher levels of life satisfaction. Second, we show that richer countries on average have higher levels of life satisfaction. Third, analyzing the time series of countries that we observe repeatedly, we show that as countries grow, their citizens report higher levels of satisfaction. Importantly, we show that the magnitude of the relationship between satisfaction and income is roughly the same across all three comparisons, which suggests that absolute income plays a large role in determining subjective well-being.

These results overturn the conventional wisdom that there is no relationship between growth and subjective well-being. In a series of influential papers, Easterlin (1973, 1995, 2005a, 2005b) has argued that economistse emphasis on growth is misguided, because he finds no statistically significant evidence of a link between a countryes GDP and the subjective well-being of its citizens. This is despite the fact that Easterlin and others (e.g. Layard 1980) have found that richer individuals in a given country report higher levels of well-being. Researchers have reconciled these discordant findings, together called the Easterlin Paradox, by positing that well-being is determined by relative, rather than absolute, income. By this view, individuals want only to keep up with the Joneses. If true, the Easterlin Paradox suggests that focusing on economic growth is futile; when everyone grows richer, no one becomes happier. A related concern, voiced for example by Di Tella and MacCulloch (2010) is that subjective well-being adapts to circumstance. If correct, this argument implies that long run growth makes people no better off because their aspirations and expectations grow with their income. A third concern is that, even if well-being rises with income for the very poor, individuals eventually reach a satiation point, above which further income has no effect on well-being (Layard 2005). Yet in this paper, we present evidence that well-being rises with absolute income, period. This evidence suggests that relative income, adaptation and satiation are of only secondary importance.

Subjective well-being is multifaceted; it includes both how happy individuals are at a point in time and how satisfied they are with their lives as a whole (Diener 2006). In section II we briefly discuss relevant background information on the measurement of subjective well-being. Throughout this paper, we focus on life satisfaction, which is the variable that is both most often measured, and that has been the focus of much of the existing literature (even as economists have often referred to these satisfaction questions as measuring \happiness..) Although life satisfaction is the focus of this paper, we consider a variety of alternative measures of subjective well-being and show that they also rise with income.

In section III we demonstrate that richer individuals are more satisfied with their lives, and that this finding holds across 140 countries, and several datasets. Across each of these countries, the relationship between income and satisfaction is remarkably similar. Our graphical analysis suggests that subjective well being rises with the log of income. This functional form implies that a 20 percent rise in income has the same impact on well-being, regardless of the initial level of income: going from $500 to $600 of income per year yields the same impact on well-being as going from $50,000 to $60,000. This specification is appealing on theoretical grounds because a standard assumption in economics is that the marginal impact of a dollar ofincome is diminishing. Indeed, estimating well-being as a function of log income fits the data much better than the simple linear function of income emphasized by previous authors, and this hold whether we are making comparisons across individuals, across countries, or over time. All of our formal analyses therefore involve the log of income rather than its level, although we present scatter plots and non-parametric fitted values to allow the reader to assess the functional form for herself.

In section IV, we turn to the cross country evidence. Using larger data sets than previous authors have examined, we find an economically and statistically significant relationship between average levels of satisfaction in a country and the log of GDP per capita. The data also show no evidence of a satiation point: the same linear-log satisfaction-income gradient we observe for poor and middle-income countries holds equally well for rich countries; it does not flatten at high income.

Whereas Easterlin (1974) had argued that the relationship between well-being and income seen within countries was stronger than the relationship seen between countries, and that this provided evidence for the importance of relative income, our evidence undermines the empirical foundation for this claim. Instead, we show that the relationship between income and well-being is similar both within and between countries, thereby suggesting that absolute income plays a strong role in determining well-being, and relative income is a less important influence than had been previously believed.

In section V we turn to the time series evidence. While the within- and between- country comparisons cast doubt on the Easterlin Paradox, they do not by themselves tell us whether economic growth in fact translates into gains in subjective well-being. This question has challenged researchers for some time because of a lack of consistent time series data on subjective well-being. We analyze the time series movements in subjective well-being using two sources of comparable repeated cross-national cross-sections. Each data sets spans over two decades and covers dozens of countries.

In analyzing the time series data we can subject the relative income hypothesis to a test: if notions of a good life change as the income of onees fellow citizens grow, then we should see only a modest relationship between growth in satisfaction and growth in average income, relative to our point-in-time estimates. We present economically and statistically significant evidence of a positive relationship between economic growth and rising satisfaction over time, although limited data mean that these estimates are less precise than are those from the within- or between- country regressions. The magnitude of the estimated gradient between satisfaction and income in the time series is similar to the magnitude of the within- and between-country gradients. These results suggest that raising the income of all does indeed raise the well-being of all.

Finally, in section VI we turn to alternative measures of subjective well-being, showing that they too rise with a countryes income. We find that happiness is positively related to per capita GDP across a sample of 69 countries. We then show that additional, affect-specific measures of subjective well-being, such as whether an individual felt enjoyment or love, or did not feel pain, are all higher in countries with higher per capita GDP. Our finding that subjective well-being rises with income is therefore not confined to an unusual data set or a particular indicator of subjective well-being.

Taken together, these new stylized facts suggest that subjective well-being, however measured, rises with income. Other recent papers have noted this as well. Deaton (2008) finds that individuals in richer countries have both higher levels of subjective well-being and better health. Stevenson and Wolfers (2008), performing an analysis parallel to this one.albeit using slightly different methods2.report similar findings to those described here, and discuss in detail why previous researchers failed to identify the strong link between subjective well-being and income.

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Authors

Daniel W. Sacks
Betsey Stevenson
Justin Wolfers

Publication: The World Bank, Working Paper

Image Source: © Suzanne Plunkett / Reuters

Ross Hammond to Lead Center on Social Dynamics and Policy

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:00:00 -0400

Ross Hammond will be the new director of the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy at Brookings, Strobe Talbott announced today. Hammond is currently a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at Brookings.

The focus of the center, formerly the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, will continue to be on understanding the social dynamics that drive economic, political, and public health systems, but with a stronger emphasis on examining policy implications for issues such as obesity and public health preparedness.

The center’s research includes computational modeling to shed greater light on the complex determinants of chronic public health challenges, improve the planning and response to threats such as infectious disease outbreaks, and explore new policy options for combating corruption and distrust in government.

“I’m confident that with Ross’s significant experience and expertise the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy will continue to produce pioneering work at the intersection of simulation, modeling and public policy,” said Talbott. “The center’s new mission will make it even more of a resource for policymakers interested in how good data can drive good policy.”

Hammond has been at Brookings since 2006. His research focuses on modeling complex dynamics of social, economic, political, and public health systems using mathematical and agent-based computational methods. His work includes research with both the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR) and Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) networks, which have been cited by the Department of Health and Human Services for their innovation and contributions to the nation’s health.

He is also an expert member of the Network on Inequality, Complexity and Health (NICH), a new network created to apply systems science approaches to the study of health disparities. Prior to joining Brookings he was a National Science Foundation IGERT fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems. He received his bachelor’s degree from Williams College and his Ph.D from the University of Michigan.

Hammond succeeds Josh Epstein, who served as director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics since 2007.

After the Great Recession, America May Never Be the Same

William A. Galston — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The just-released report from the Pew Research Center, “How the Great Recession Has Changed Life in America,” is probably the most searching investigation of this question produced so far. Although some of the top-line findings have circulated widely, some of the less-noticed details are just as significant. Taken as a whole, the report suggests that the Great Recession will have a more-than-transitory effect on the outlook and psychology of most Americans, with significant consequences for our economy and society. Some key items:

Not surprisingly, nearly half of all homeowners report a decline in the value of their homes during the recession. What is surprising is how long they think it will take for prices to recover: about half estimate three to five years; about 40 percent expect it will take six years or longer. And because homes constitute the dominant part of middle class households’ net worth, this helps explain why these families think it will be quite some time before their overall financial condition returns to its pre-recession peak. Forty percent estimate three to five years, 13 percent six to ten years, and 10 percent longer than ten years (or never).

While it is true, as Stephen Rose has recently argued, that the net worth of U.S. households increased during recent decades despite record levels of debt accumulation, it is also true that upper-income households captured most of the gains. The Federal Reserve conducts a triennial survey of family finances, of which the most recent was completed at the end of 2007. From 1998 to 2007, the median net worth of all families increased by a modest $29 thousand, from $91 to $120 thousand. But mean net worth increased by almost $197 thousand, demonstrating the concentration of gains at the top. From other sources we know that overall household net worth declined by nearly 20 percent during the current recession, erasing the decade of modest gains for households at the median. And the Pew report provides evidence that middle-class families were hit harder than those in the upper tier. Among the top 20 percent, almost as many households report being better off as worse off since the onset of the recession. Among middle-class households, 45 percent report being worse off, versus only 21 percent who say they are better off.

We already knew that long-term unemployment is the worst it has been since the end of the Great Depression. But the Pew report dramatizes just how bad it is. During what was previously the worst recession since the 1930s (1981-82), the median duration of unemployment peaked at 12.3 weeks. In May of this year, the median duration was almost twice as high: 23.2 weeks. Today, 46 percent of all unemployed workers have been out of work for more than six months, versus 26 percent at the height of the Reagan recession.

The effects of the Great Recession on the labor market extend beyond unemployment. In 1999, the share of the working-age population that is working (the “employment rate”) peaked above 64 percent. In 2007, just before the current downturn, it stood at 63.3 percent. By this May, it had declined by a stunning 4.8 percent points, to 58.5 percent. (By contrast, the Reagan-era recession produced a decline of 2.9 percent points.) Today’s employment rate stands where it was in 1985, erasing a quarter-century of gains.

While this recession has been bad for everyone, it has been a catastrophe for men. In the fourth quarter of 2007, male and female unemployment rates were almost identical, at a bit under 5 percent. By the end of 2009, the rate for women was 8.7 percent–but for men it was 11.2 percent. (In the male-dominated construction sector, the unemployment rate surged from 7 percent to 20 percent.)

Most of the jobs lost during the current recession aren’t coming back. Fifty-two percent of currently unemployed workers lost their jobs for reasons other than temporary layoffs—a far higher share than in any other postwar downturn. This is not a cyclical downturn in the labor market. Returning to full unemployment will require many millions of new jobs in companies and even sectors that do not yet exist.

More than six in ten Americans report having cut back on spending since the recession began, and many expect this to continue after it ends. Pew finds similar patterns of behavior and expectation in the areas of borrowing and saving as well. It’s easy to forget that as recently as 1970 through 1985, household savings averaged 10 percent of disposable income. In the next two decades, the savings rate decline to almost zero before increasing modestly to about 4 percent by 2009. There’s a good reason to believe that this number will continue to increase: only 23 percent of workers say that they are very confident that they’ll have enough income and assets for retirement, versus 32 percent who report little or no confidence.

Among workers ages 50 to 61 who are currently employed, 60 percent say that they may have to delay retirement, as do even more--69 percent--of workers in this age group with incomes between $30 and $75 thousand. Young adults are already experiencing great difficulty finding jobs and starting careers; in a sluggish labor market, later retirements could make a tough situation even worse.

Despite all this, Americans remain congenitally optimistic: 62 percent expect their financial situation to improve over the next year; 61 percent believe that the damage the recession has inflicted on the economy will turn out to be temporary rather than permanent; 63 percent endorse the proposition that, “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress.”

But there are signs of doubt as well. As recently as 2002, 61 percent thought their children’s standard of living would be better than their own; only 10 percent thought it would be worse. Today, the optimists’ share has declined to 45 percent, while pessimists now constitute fully 26 percent of the population. And doubt tends to reinforce caution. We don’t have enough evidence to conclude that the Great Recession will generate the kind of long-lasting risk aversion that characterized the Depression-era generation throughout their lives. But we do have reason to believe that for some time to come, what Keynes famously called “animal spirits” will remain subdued, which suggests that we’re in for a slow recovery and historically high levels of unemployment for much of this decade. If the Pew report is on target, the “new normal” will be more than a slogan.

Authors

William A. Galston

Publication: The New Republic

Web Chat: The Economics of Happiness

Carol Graham — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Times are tough for many Americans, complete with job losses and financial stress at home and the conduct of two wars abroad. How does this turmoil affect the overall happiness and well-being of Americans? Carol Graham, an expert on inequality and subjective well-being, notes that while people across the globe have a surprising ability to adapt to adverse conditions, uncertainty and doubt are much more difficult for people to deal with. This is evidenced by the fact that average happiness in the United States – defined by a set of data that measure general well-being – dropped significantly with the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. Once stability was restored and uncertainty ended, happiness levels recovered quickly.

Carol Graham took your questions in a live web chat to explore how measures of happiness may be more novel barometers for well-being than more easily defined variables such as income or wealth. Seung Min Kim, assistant editor at POLITICO, moderated the discussion.

The transcript of this chat follows.

Seung Min Kim: Hi everyone. This week's chat deals with the economics of happiness -- how do the job losses and financial stresses, as well as two wars overseas, affect the well-being of Americans? Brookings's Carol Graham, an expert on inequality and subjective well-being, is here to talk about this topic.

12:31 [Comment From Shawn: ] Are people with more money generally happier?

12:31 Carol Graham: Money does matter to happiness, but it's not the whole story. Being destitute is bad for happiness and richer people are, on average, happier than poor people. However, after people have "enough" money (and enough varies across societies), all sorts of other things mediate the income and happiness relationship, such as how your income compares to your neighbors.

12:31 [Comment From Jennie: ] What are some common ingredients to a happy population?

12:34 Carol Graham: In the same way that money matters to individual happiness, societies that are wealthier are, on average, happier. But there are large differences between them as there are a lot of things that come with higher levels of income, such as better public goods, better health, and better quality government, that vary across countries of similar income levels. For the most part, countries with higher levels of freedom and democracy and more social capital are happier than those with less of these things. But there are also important cultural differences across societies that are linked to happiness levels.

12:34 [Comment From Rebecca: ] How has the economic crisis affected the happiness of Americans?

12:38 Carol Graham: The economic crisis had major effects on the happiness of Americans. Average national happiness levels are typically very steady; after the crisis set in, they dipped down a lot and fell steadily - almost tracking the fall in the Dow - until the end of March 2009, the point at which the bottom stopped falling out of the markets. At that point, while markets recovered sluggishly, happiness recovered much faster and by July of 2009 was higher than at pre-crisis levels. The same respondents still reported that their economic situation was worse than before. Thus they were happier with less income but only after the uncertainty surrounding the crisis abated. Typically, people are better able to adapt to unpleasant certainty than they are to uncertainty, and this crisis is a clear example.

12:38 [Comment From Eric: ] How do Americans tend to define happiness?

12:41 Carol Graham: When we use happiness questions in surveys, we do not define happiness for our respondents. The questions are open-ended (with possible answers running from very happy to not at all happy) and the first in the survey, so they are not biased by other questions. That is what makes happiness surveys such a good research tool and lets us compare the happiness of respondents across countries and cultures (and why we find such consistent patterns in the basic correlates). That said, people in different cultures conceive of happiness differently. While there is no one definition of happiness for Americans, as a society we typically place a lot of emphasis on individual effort and opportunity, and our conception of happiness likely emphasizes those objectives more than social harmony or the collective good, as some other societies might.

12:41 [Comment From Emily: ] What implications do measures of happiness have on policy decisions?

12:47 Carol Graham: At this juncture, measures of happiness have not yet directly entered the policy arena, nor is it clear that they should (we do not know yet). These measures - and the information therein - can surely inform policy and produce better decisions. Surely understanding that health, stable relationships and employment, and friendships are very important to happiness, and that uncertainty is bad for happiness can help us think about the appropriate emphasis that we place on, for example, economic growth versus other objectives. But directly making policy decisions based on happiness surveys is potentially risky for two (among other) reasons. The first is intertemporal problems: there are many policies that may reduce happiness today in order to increase aggregate welfare tomorrow (or for our children), such as reducing fiscal deficits or reforming the health system. Happiness surveys will tell us that they are reducing happiness today, but its not clear we should avoid the policies because of that. The second is that we have not had any sort of public discussion about what conception of happiness we care most about. Happiness as contentment versus happiness as the opportunity to lead a fulfilling life, for example, are two very different definitions of happiness which would each have very different policy implications.

12:49 [Comment From Chris: ] Are there validated 'near real time' metrics for population scale happiness or well-being?

12:53 Carol Graham: Danny Kahneman and Alan Krueger at Princeton have conducted extensive time-use studies in the U.S. and France, which measure the happiness of individuals as they go through their daily activities. They find that commuting time and time with children are some of the least happy times, while time socializing with friends and sex are the times of the day that people report to be happiest. That said, and as I noted above, different conceptions of happiness might place different weight than time use surveys would. Surely most people value the role of their children in the big picture of their lifelong happiness; that does not mean that every trip to a soccer practice during rush hour is a happy experience on a daily basis, for example.

12:53 [Comment From Chris: ] Have any major government statistical or economic agencies begun to include these in their suite of ongoing monitoring tools alongside more conventional metrics such as producer prices, labor force participation or inflation?

12:56 Carol Graham: A number of government statistical agencies are at least exploring the prospect. The British have an office for national well being indicators, and French President Nicholas Sarkozy led a major international research effort (the Sarkozy Commission) which has called for all countries to adopt broader measures of well being as indicators of progress. The CDC has called for the incorporation of well being measures into its health indicators in this country, and Bhutan has replaced GDP with GNH or Gross National Happiness. While all of these efforts are nascent ones, it suggests that broader measures of well being - many but not all of them based on happiness surveys - are being taken seriously and are entering the policy domain and discussions.

12:57 [Comment From Eric: ] How can something as subjective as "happiness" be quantified, so that one can make meaningful comparisons between countries?

1:03 Carol Graham: While conceptions of happiness vary across countries and cultures and people, we find that the answers to general happiness or life satisfaction surveys are remarkably similar across hundreds of thousands of people across countries (even of different development levels) and over time, at least in terms of the most basic variables determining happiness, such as income, health, stable employment, and stable partnerships. And with increasing econometric innovations, we are also able to control for unobservable differences across individuals that could bias responses and their relationship to these variables. Psychologists also find validation in the way people answer these surveys. Thus while there may be differences in the way people conceive of happiness when they answer these surveys, the patterns in terms of the variables that happy and unhappy responses are linked to are very consistent. Because of the large size of the samples that we have, we have confidence in quantitative analysis of the results. That does not mean, however, that we can really add cardinal value to, for example, the difference between reporting to be very happy versus just being happy. We can, however, talk about percentage changes and probabilities of moving from one category to the other.

1:04 [Comment From Aruna: ] I am a student of International Development and I have been looking at slum economies - about how people seek an ecosystem of happiness and social connections in some of the most squalid conditions imaginable. They also have profitable small industries within slums. This is another layer of perception. Don't you think?

1:06 Carol Graham: I have also done a lot - in fact most - of my work in developing countries. On the one level, the standard variables linked to happiness are remarkably similar. On the other, within those societies, people are remarkably able to adapt to extreme levels of adversity, to high levels of crime and corruption, and to worse norms of health, among other things. Thus the patterns in the very basic variables across societies and across people within them are very similar, regardless of development levels, but the effects of environmental and other conditions can vary a great deal, depending on what people's norms and expectations are.

1:07 [Comment From Terry: ] How do you persuade policy-makers to take happiness as a serious indicator or barometer instead of the more traditional economic indicators?

1:08 Carol Graham: I am not sure that actively persuading policymakers is the right approach. This is a new approach in economics and it is yielding incredibly interesting and policy relevant insights into what determines human welfare and well being. And policymakers are starting to notice it and see the utility in it. I think that is a more effective route than attempting to push the usage of an approach that is still a work in progress or a nascent science.

1:08 [Comment From Mark, Greenbelt, MD: ] Don't they have some sort of happiness index in Brunei? have you studied that? What's that about? I guess it helps that they' re one of the richest nations in the world.

1:12 Carol Graham: I have not looked at Brunei, but I have looked closely at Bhutan, which has GNH as a national indicator. One might worry that the focus on happiness rather than economic growth and progress would divert a country from development, but during the time Bhutan has had GNH they have reduced poverty, dramatically increased literacy, democratized, and opened up somewhat to the global economy. Its an amazing experiment. But they also achieved all of these goals under an enlightened monarchy. One could imagine a much less enlightened regime using the concept of gross national happiness to keep people without much information and with low expectations "content" without progress. The development process, for example, can be destabilizing and produce frustration and unhappiness in the short term.

1:12 [Comment From Sally: ] I've seen some research on the happiness levels of Democrats vs Republicans. Are there real differences? Or is that media hype?

1:15 Carol Graham: Indeed, many studies including my own research finds that Republicans are happier than Democrats, after controlling for income, religion, and a host of other things. Thus I ascribe this to very different philosophies: Republicans are more likely to believe that income and success are just rewards for hard work, while Democrats are more likely to believe that the system gives some people advantages over others and that there are injustices that need to be fixed. Having the former philosophy is, not surprisingly, linked to slightly higher happiness levels. What we do not know is the direction of causality - whether happier people are more likely to select such a view of the world, or whether having that view of the world makes them happier.

1:16 [Comment From Tom: ] Do you think it's a good or a bad idea for governments to track the happiness levels of their citizens?

1:17 Carol Graham: Tracking the happiness levels of citizens and how they vary across time - and across domains, for example as in the relative weight of health versus income versus marriage, has the potential to provide very useful information which can be compared within and across countries, as GDP data is. This does not suggest that the information should replace GDP data but it does suggest that it could provide useful complements to it.

1:19 [Comment From Jennifer Seiden: ] They always say 'money can't buy happiness,' but I think now that I've been poor, I'd be really good at being rich - and happy. Do you see differences in people who achieve wealth and those who are born with it?

1:21 Carol Graham: There are no direct studies that I know of that cover the effects of inherited versus achieved wealth. But we do know that many people derive great happiness from the process of achieving - the process of being immersed in work - consistent with Aristotle's concept of eudaemonia. We also know that the happiness affects of a change in status, such as a promotion, are much longer lasting than those of an income gain. All of this suggests that there is an additional and perhaps more lasting effect of the achievement component of income than of the owning component.

1:21 [Comment From Bill S.: ] What do you say to people who would argue this is frivolous research? What practical, real-world applications does this aid?

1:26 Carol Graham: If used inappropriately, for example in polling people about what policy today would make them happy, then I think surely the research could be accused of being frivolous. But we do not directly ask people what makes them happy. We take a measure of their general happiness in the first survey question and then see how variance in these measures correlate with a host of other variables of interest, ranging from income to employment status to commuting time. There are a host of questions that traditional approaches, which are based on the analysis of revealed consumption choices, cannot answer. In particular, we cannot measure the welfare effects of institutional arrangements that individuals are powerless to change (like economic volatility or inequality) with traditional approaches; we can with happiness surveys. We also cannot explain behaviors that are driven by norms, addiction, or self control problems, such as low expectations among the very poor or obesity or smoking, with optimal choice, revealed preferences approaches. We can measure the welfare effects of these at times perverse choices via happiness and well being surveys. That can hardly be a frivolous enterprise.

1:26 [Comment From Abbey Brumberg: ] If you had unlimited funding, what areas of happiness research would like to pursue at the moment?

1:28 Carol Graham: I am very interested in the well being effects of inequality and of macroeconomic volatility; in the effects of different health conditions on happiness (and in particular I am now studying obesity); and in the broader question of the implications of individual adaptation (for example to high levels of crime and corruption) for societies as a whole. I am trying to conduct research in all of these areas. Unlimited funding would be a great help!

1:29 [Comment From Timothy: ] Are there ways that happiness research could be used to inform strategies for 'winning the hearts and minds' of citizens in countries dealing with terrorism? Could happiness studies be used to gain, build and maintain the support of citizens in these countries?

1:31 Carol Graham: I do not think we can use happiness surveys to directly win hearts and minds. But we surely can use happiness surveys to understand what makes people happy or, more relevant, unhappy and frustrated, across and within societies. WE can explore the role of religion, conflict, income differentials, and a host of other things, which would in turn help us understand how and why insurgent groups might be supported by some parts of particular societies. I most recently did the first study of happiness in Afghanistan and it yielded a number of novel and at times counter-intuitive insights.

1:32 Seung Min Kim: Thanks everyone for chiming in this afternoon. Great conversation. Have a wonderful week!

Authors

Carol Graham

Happiness in an Age of Uncertainty

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:30:00 -0400

Event Information

April 15, 2010
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Instability in the global economy has produced increased interest in the study of happiness. Social scientists, pollsters and the media are increasingly asking if Americans feel happy, secure and hopeful about the future – or if instead they feel burdened by bad economic news. France and Britain are even considering the use of national well-being indicators, leading to speculation that happiness might become an overt national policy objective.

NOTE: The audio for this event is truncated at the very beginning, due to technical difficulties.

On April 15 – tax day in the United States – the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development programs at Brookings hosted a discussion focusing on happiness in the United States and around the world. Panelists discussed how the global economic crisis is affecting peoples’ sense of security and well-being, the challenges of measuring happiness, and, curiously, why Republicans are happier than Democrats in the United States.

After the program, the panelists took audience questions.

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Moderator

Panelists

Alan Krueger

Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist, U.S. Department of the Treasury

Eduardo Lora

Chief Economist, Inter-American Development Bank

Brookings: Topics - Subjective Well-being

Subjective Well‐Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?

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You Can Never Have Too Much Money, New Research Shows

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Global Love Rankings

Valentine’s Day and the Economics of Love

Where Do You Stand in the Global Love Ranking?

Does Access to Information Technology Make People Happier?

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How Can We Most Effectively Measure Happiness?

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The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being, Paperback Edition

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carol Graham

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The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being

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Helping the Roma in Bulgaria: Recommendations to the Board of the America for Bulgaria Foundation

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The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being

Additional Praise for the book:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carol Graham

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More on the Easterlin Paradox: A Response to Wolfers

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Debunking the Easterlin Paradox, Again

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(Un?)Happiness and Gasoline Prices in the United States

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Some Lessons from Happiness Economics and Quality of Life Research for the Human Development Index

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Subjective Well-Being, Income, Economic Development and Growth

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Ross Hammond to Lead Center on Social Dynamics and Policy

After the Great Recession, America May Never Be the Same

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Web Chat: The Economics of Happiness

Authors

Happiness in an Age of Uncertainty

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Transcript

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