Happiness Stats
I’ve just received the full World DB of Happiness on CD from Rotterdam, which is really inexpensive. I’ve also been teaching myself to use R, the open source stats package. There’s a bunch of simple regressions I’d like to see, but which nobody seems to have done. So I shall do them! Again and again my degrees in studio art and philosophy come in handy. But, seriously, the free resources available online for teaching yourself statistics are truly incredible. When you’ve got a computer to do the math, it doesn’t seem to be that hard!
Here are some hypotheses I’d like to test:
- Steady rates of GDP growth keep SWB levels stable.
- Economies that experience one time negative growth shocks in period one, will see lower levels of SWB in period two.
- Countries with more volatile GDP growth will have lower avg SWB.
- If growth is consistently volatile, SWB will not be more volatile, just lower.
- Economies that experience decelerating growth in period one will see lower levels of SWB in period two.
- Places with a higher risk of political and economic instability have lower levels of SWB.
Basically, I’ve had it up to here with the claims that since GDP growth barely has a positive effect on SWB, growth doesn’t matter, and so policymakers can just feel free to screw around with policies that will reduce growth rates. We’ll see!
Oh, and if you know of any studies that test any of these hypotheses, plese fill me in….
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Will,
You rock. I’ll be looking forward to seeing your conclusions. Unfortunately, I doubt that policymakers will want to listen!
Forgive a guy whose too busy (lazy?) to do the back-reading on this one, but what’s SWB? Social Well Being? I was always fond of the term GDH (Gross Domestic Happiness)…
Ben, Subjective well-being.
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/washington_quarterly/v023/23.1inglehart.html
Good luck!
I’ll bet that most of your hypotheses are confirmed by correlational analyses, although whether you can attribute causation is another matter.
Let’s say that there is a lagged decrease in SWB following some negative growth shock (which there probably is, if only due to sharp rises in unemployment). What would this show? That growth is good per se? Not necessarily - perhaps only that when an economy which is structurally designed for growth fails to grow, things go bad.
I don’t think that many people (even us lefty types who sometimes get overexcited and make careless claims about incomce and SWB) really think we should just stop the whole economy, just like that. What we’d like to know is whether the economy could be structured differently and still hold together. In other words, could you keep all the good bits of growth - employment, rising incomes, etc - and yet ‘cap’ it somehow, share the spoils more equitably and (because I’m minded to believe in this kind of stuff) stop destroying the planet in the process?
Sam, the effect shouldn’t just be an unemployment effect, but a consumption effect. People habituated to a certain level of consumption will feel the burn when they have to tighten up. They’ll get used to it, yes, but that dip can’t be discounted. I think expected volatility will have less effect, since people will have already implemented consumption-smoothing strategies….
As far as restructuring the whole economy goes, I don’t think there’s a happiness-based case to be made for it. You can argue that happiness really doesn’t matter that much compared to not “destroying the planet”. And some fundamentalists argue that secular happiness doesn’t matter much compared to “salvation” or God’s will, etc. I don’t see either camp getting what they want politically within the constraints of liberal democratic politics.
A lot of people would resent that comparison, but I take your point.
I agree also about the likely dip. What noone knows is how long it would last and how pervasive it would be. And if the answer is “not long, and not very”, there seems to me a very sound happiness argument for going through the pain of reducing consumption now, the pay-off being security of long-term well-being, i.e. of future generations.
But there again, that makes sense to me because I see structural relationships between the consumption-focused economy, environmental degradation and well-being, such that our current actions are actively undermining the conditions necessary for future happiness. On this view, a consumption dip is ultimately inevitable - and thus it’s better to manage it now, voluntarily, than have it forced on us when we bang up against environmental limits.
I don’t know how things are in US politics right now, but you’ll be probably be dismayed to hear that the UK government are taking this kind of argument pretty seriously at present. And, oddly, some of it is coming from the liberal right.
Here, for interest’s sake, is an excerpt from a recent e-mail discussion I’ve been involved in, which describes the kind of concern I have about the structure of the economy:
“…the Reserve Bank [of Australia] raised interest rates by 0.25% to ward off rising inflation. The media are full of stories about how this hike, together with the steep petrol price rises, will push heaps of people close to, and even over, the edge financially because of high levels of household debt, which has risen dramatically in all our countries, I think. In a TV interview last night, the PM argued people were taking on increased debt because they felt ‘prosperous and secure’ (thanks to the government’s good economic management). There is something weird and significant here, but I’m not quite sure what it is. People feel prosperous and secure, so borrow to the hilt to enjoy the ‘good life’ marketers sell to them. This is good for economic growth (indeed, it drives it), but in doing so, consumers make themselves economically vulnerable, so affecting their wellbeing. And it certainly isn’t sustainable. Is this a deep flaw in neoliberal economics?”
To me, it sounds like it probably is. But then I’m a psychologist, and still ploughing my way through “Economics for Dummies”.
Hey Will,
Glad to see you’re getting into some of the empirics yourself! It’ll be interesting to see what you find. Some of these are things that I’d been thinking about doing for a while, but other projects have tended to get in the way (as has my general scepticism about the usefulness of country-level studies).
I suspect you’ll need to be a little careful with some of the volatility stuff (depending on the nature of the WDH data, which I’m not all that familiar with) - for example, artificial stability in average happiness could persist in spite of volatility in growth simply due to the nature of aggregation. But best of luck untangling the stuff.
conchis.
P.S. It still strikes me that strongest evidence against the “growth doesn’t matter” position seems to me to be that it’s contradicted by virtually all of the individual-level panel evidence - which is undoubtedly superior to the country-level stuff. But I accept that it perhaps doesn’t sell as well.