Happiness & Public Policy

A while back, Tyler Cowen linked to the recent Oswald and Blanchflower NBER paper, “Is Well-Being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle” (paywall) reporting its conclusion: “ceteris paribus, well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people’s mid to late 40s.” Tyler commented: “It’s a good thing I don’t believe in that nasty happiness research…” Over on Slate Joel Waldfogel reports on the paper in an article on “The Midlife Happiness Crisis” as if it conveyed interesting information about age and happiness, and seems to me to totally misunderstand the point of the paper:

[Blanchflower and Oswald] document how happiness evolves as people age. While income and wealth tend to rise steadily over the life cycle, peaking around retirement, happiness follows a U-shaped age pattern.

Both Tyler and Waldfogel seem to think this paper is telling us something about how happy you are likely to be at a various points in life. But that’s not what the paper is about. It is about the effect of age, per se, on happiness. That is to say, they’re filtering out various correlates of age, like wealth and health, which generally have large effects on life-satisfaction. So this is a study of how happy people are with their age at various ages. The paper, as far as I understand it, says that people are least happy with their age at middle age. It does not say that people are least happy at middle age. Sadly, this completely ruins Waldfogel’s Slate piece. This is largely the fault of the authors for not making this sufficiently clear. Here is a key passage from the abstract:

A robust U-shape of happiness in age is found. Ceteris paribus, well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people’s mid to late 40s. The paper also shows that in the United States the well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time. In Europe, newer birth-cohorts are happier.

By “ceteris paribus” here they mean controlling for the effect of most everything important to happiness other than how old you are, well-being reaches a minimum … in people’s mid to late 40s.” They simply don’t show that the well-being of successive birth-cohorts all things considered has fallen in the US. Newer cohorts are actually wealthier and healthier than older ones, which would predict increasing happiness overall. But B&O are controlling for the effects of things like wealth and health. So, basically, they’re saying Americans have become increasingly unhappy with being middle-aged, which is sort of interesting. Sort of.

In the paper they make clear note of what they’re not measuring–which is to say, overall life satisfaction–but they are far from fastidious in their use of terms like “well-being.” Here’s a couple of statements about what they’re filtering out in the attempt measure the effect of how many years we have been alive, in isolation from most everything else:

The paper’s concern is with the ceteris paribus correlation between well-being and age, so we later partial out other factors, such as income and marital status, that both alter over a typical person’s lifetime and have effects upon well-being.

[…]

an important issue is whether in happiness equations it is desirable to control in some way for health and physical vitality. There is here no unambiguously correct answer, but the approach taken in the paper is not to include independent variables that measure physical health. This is partly pragmatic: our data sets have no objective measures and few subjective ones. But the decision is partly substantive: it seems interesting to ask whether older people are happier once only simple demographic and economic variables are held constant.

Sorry to say, I don’t think this is very interesting. I don’t see why this is that useful to know, though I do suppose it would be interesting to find out why Americans (but not Europeans) increasingly think being middle-aged sucks. If you want to say something interesting about how happy people are at various ages, I like Easterlin’s approach [pdf], which takes things like satisfaction with health, finances, career, and family at different points in the life cylce into account. He finds that, all things considered, the happiest point of our lives is precisely when Blanchflower and Oswald find we’re least happy with our age. That is kind of interesting!

[Flickr photo courtesy of placinsun.]