Rich & Happy
Cato intern Jonathan Rick sends me this Washington Times article with news that Americans are slap happy, according to a Harris Poll conducted using the Eurobarometer questions. The new poll has it that Americans are happier than any other people in the world, except for the not-so-gloomy Danes.
The Times chooses to emphasizes high American sastisfaction and optimism relative to Europeans, at the expense of explicitly pointing out that European satisfaction and optimism are rising at a faster clip.
My favorite datum:
While 56 percent of Americans say things are better than in 2000, the number stands at 57 percent in Britain, 60 percent in Sweden and 63 percent in Ireland.
Compare:
The Irish economy, while quite small by EU standards, nonetheless outperformed all OECD countries in real GDP growth over the last six years by a wide margin.
[from Yahoo! Finance]
How did Ireland do it? Here’s Ben Powell:
The Celtic Tiger provides an excellent example of how real economic growth occurs - by utilizing market forces to free a flagging economy. After a stagnant 13 year period with less than two percent growth, Ireland took a more radical course of slashing expenditures, abolishing agencies and toppling tax rates and regulations. At the same time the government made credible commitments through EU treaties not to engage in deficit spending.
Ireland’s long history of free and open trade has also played a role in its recovery. However, only since freeing other aspects of its economy by lowering taxes, decreasing regulation, maintaining low inflation and providing a stable fiscal environment has Ireland been able to grow rapidly enough to surpass greater Europe’s standard of living.
A recipe for happiness?
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Rich and Happy
[Cross-posted at Happiness and Public Policy Cato intern Jonathan Rick sends me this Washington Times article with news that Americans are slap happy, according to a Harris Poll conducted using the Eurobarometer questions. The new poll has it that Amer…
Some people will never be happy unless they can be confident that there are other people less happy than them.
Sure, that is part of the sucess story of Ireland. Another fact is that the European Union has been shipping enormous amounts of money into the green island. Thus, free market liberalism is not the full story.
Travelling around Ireland a few years ago almost every construction project had an EU sign to it (i.e. “this construction is financed (wholly or partly) by the European Union).
“My favorite datum:”
“While 56 percent of Americans say things are better than in 2000, the number stands at 57 percent in Britain, 60 percent in Sweden and 63 percent in Ireland. ”
And just why is that your favorite datum? Because it may enable to fend off a conclusion you prefer not to reach?
C’mon — if the percentage of Americans who say they are “very satisfied” is 58 and the percentage of Europeans who say the same is only 31, then that is a HUGE DIFFERENCE. But the ironic downside for America is that, with far fewer unhappy people left, it’s going to be harder to show additional improvement (diminishing returns show up almost everywhere).
And even your ‘favorite datum’ is pretty thin gruel–only three of 15 countries in the EU had higher ‘improved since 2000′ measures than the U.S. and none at all had higher ‘expect life to get better by 2010′ measures.
This is a nice illustration of my problem with SWB research — it often seems political. Researchers (like most academics) appear to be substantially left of center and this seems to bias the work. Americans being (significantly) happier and more optimistic than Europeans is an…inconvenient result that needs to be explained away rather than a phenomenon that needs to be examined. So we have a number of measures pointing in the same direction (Americans more satisfied and optimistic) and even a sub-measure pointing in the same direction (Americans more positive about changes since 2000) so the ‘favorite datum’ worthy of highlighting is a selective sub measure that points mildly in the opposite direction (there are a few EU countries that have slightly higher scores than the U.S. in one measure).
That critcism aside, I’m interested in the topic and pleased to discover the blog (via Marginal Revolution). But where’s the preview button?
Slocum, The thing I liked about the datum wasn’t the fact that the US came in lower than European countries, but that Ireland came out highest. And it seems that this is likely explained by economic growth fueled by pro-market policies.
Sorry about the lack of a preview function. I’ll look into that.
Slocum, The thing I liked about the datum wasn’t the fact that the US came in lower than European countries, but that Ireland came out highest. And it seems that this is likely explained by economic growth fueled by pro-market policies.
Apologies for having misread you — it’s just that a lot of the SWB research seems to based on preconceived ideas of what best promotes happiness (e.g. income equality above a relatively low minimum which equality is promoted by statist government) and the problem is to get the data (or interpretation of the data) to fit the politics.