Blanchflower (2020) on Unhappiness and Age

David G. Blanchflower, “Unhappiness and Age.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 176: 461–488, 2020. 

 • We “know” that happiness tends to hit a nadir around the age of 50 – but do unhappiness and related conditions such as stress and loneliness and pain reach a peak at about that time, too? 

• This article looks at tons of data (total "N" almost 14 million) from many, many nations, for the most part drawn from the third millennium CE. 

• The conclusion is stark: unhappiness and related measures tend to peak for people in their late 40s or so, mirroring pretty closely the results for happiness measures. 

• There are a host of analytical issues involving, for instance, the precise measure of reported “unhappiness” and the selection of control variables for regression analysis. Nonetheless, the main finding of a peak of unhappiness in midlife is quite robust to how these issues are handled, even across countries. 

• The impact of some life events is symmetric with happiness and unhappiness: unemployment decreases happiness and raises unhappiness; higher incomes increase happiness and lower unhappiness. 

• Oddly(?), being of male gender seems to decrease unhappiness and to decrease happiness. 

• There’s a lot of variance in unhappiness between countries. Ireland in 2014 reported a 12.1% rate of adult depression, while in Poland, it was 4.2%. But in both countries, the rate of depression was highest for 55-64 year olds. 

• Americans are outliers with respect to the amount of pain reported; in 2018, one-quarter of Americans report having suffered pain on the previous day, and prescription painkiller use is common. 

• Suicide rates tend to show a peak in middle-age, but then they eventually begin to rise again at older ages. 

• In the US in 2018, almost 10% of people say that their mental health was not good for at least 20 of the past 30 days. 

• There’s even a midlife peak in the belief that the country as a whole is getting worse. 

• The increase in unhappiness associated with midlife is on a similar scale to what happens with bad events, such as becoming unemployed or losing a spouse.

Helliwell, Huang, and Wang (2020), “Happiness and the Quality of Government"

John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, and Shun Wang, “Happiness and the Quality of Government.” NBER Working Paper 26840, March 2020 [pdf here]. 

• Happiness studies have become pretty standard parts of social science and governance in the last two decades. Helliwell, Huang, and Wang look at cross-country evidence concerning happiness and government quality; 150+ countries, 2005-2017, n≈1,500.  

• One common measure of subjective well-being is the Cantril ladder, where respondents are asked to imagine a ladder with eleven numbered levels, from zero on the bottom (worst possible life for the respondent) to ten on the top (best possible life for the respondent). 

• Life satisfaction (as measured, for instance, by the Cantril ladder) varies much more on a cross-country basis than do hedonic measures of happiness – and the long-run connection between public policy and life satisfaction seems more solid than the policy-emotions link. “Good government may or may not make you feel happy, but does… make you happier with your life as a whole [p. 5].” 

• Some empirical results: the quality of delivery of government services contributes to life satisfaction; the extent of democracy does not, though the quality of democracy is fairly highly correlated with life satisfaction. 

• Further, per-capita income is positively connected with life satisfaction; confidence in the government is closely connected to delivery quality, and significantly raises life satisfaction. 

• In cross-country comparisons, health care spending seems to be associated with higher life satisfaction, while military spending is associated with lower life satisfaction. 

• Conflict is bad for life satisfaction, though some of the connection arises from the harm that conflict imposes on per-capita income. 

• Well-being inequality reduces average life satisfaction; raising well-being for those with the least does not have to come at the expense of the well-being of everyone else.

WS on Hot States and Cold States (V)

Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, 
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition my violent love 
Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan, 
His silver skin laced with his golden blood; 
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature  
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,  
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers 
Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain, 
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make's love known?

(Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 896-906)

See also:

WS on Hot States and Cold States (I)

WS on Hot States and Cold States (II)

WS on Hot States and Cold States (III)

WS on Hot States and Cold States (IV)

Bosman, Hennig‐Schmidt, and van Winden (2016) on Power-to-Take Games

Ronald Bosman, Heike Hennig‐Schmidt, and Frans van Winden, “Emotion at Stake: The Role of Stake Size and Emotions in a Power-To-Take Game Experiment in China with a Comparison to Europe.” CESifo Working Paper Series No. 5858, April 19, 2016.

• In the two-player power-to-take game, Player A indicates what percentage of Player B’s monetary endowment Player A will claim. 

• Player B learns of A’s claim, and then can choose to destroy some or all of her own endowment. Whatever is left after the destruction, Player A receives the chosen percentage of it, while Player B retains the remainder. 

• Power-to-take is sort of a generalized version of the ultimatum game, and in particular, it allows Player B to have intermediate responses, in between accepting Player A’s suggestion or destroying the entire “endowment.”

• Three conditions: China Low (stakes), n=36; China High, n=36; and, EU, n=40. The results for the two China treatments are similar. 

• Take rates in China average more than 50%; while most people do not destroy any of their endowment, the average amount of destruction is considerable, more than 20%. Higher take rates lead to more destruction. 

• Higher take rates strengthen negative emotions in Players B, and it is possibly worse with higher stakes.

• Destruction decisions seem to be mostly driven by emotions.

• The results, including emotional responses, seem to be similar in China and Europe.