Easterlin and O'Connor (2022) on that Paradox

Richard A. Easterlin and Kelsey J. O'Connor, “The Easterlin Paradox.” In: Zimmermann, K.F. (ed.) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. [Working paper version here.]

• From the Abstract: “The Easterlin Paradox states that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income, both among and within nations, but over time the long-term growth rates of happiness and income are not significantly related.”

• That is, the Easterlin Paradox concerns a disconnect between cross-section and time series data linking happiness and (real) income.

• The life satisfaction (happiness) data used in Easterlin and O'Connor come from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the Gallup World Poll (GWP). This analysis takes place at the national level (so income is real income per capita within a country).

• The WVS question: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” 1 (dissatisfied) to 10 (satisfied); 67 countries, on average over 27 years, for this study, with about 5 observations per country.

• The relevant GWP item: Cantril ladder, 0 to 10, worst possible life (0) to best possible life (10); 123 countries, 12 to 15 years of annual data.

• A major point of emphasis for Easterlin and O'Connor is that the key for testing is to ensure that you have long time-series data, so that you are not just capturing a boom or a bust (during which the usual cross-section positive connection between happiness and income will prevail).

• Easterlin and O’Connor find that in their data, the Paradox essentially holds when the East European transition countries are not included. (The conditions of transition and the time-span of the data from transition countries are such that even more than ten years of data might essentially be capturing a long boom.) 

• With the transition countries included, or if shorter (10 years or less) time spans are employed, happiness and income do show a positive relationship. Even in these circumstances, however, the effect of changes in income on changes in happiness is small.

• The authors argue that an income reference point (typically, social comparison) is what drives the Paradox. As everyone's income rises, your reference point (other folks' income) shifts up, so your higher income does not bring more happiness. In a recession, alternatively, the relevant reference point is your own previous income, so people on average become less happy. (That is, the Paradox might hold even in the short-run during an expansion, but a recession will cause both happiness and income to fall.) 

• China, Japan, India – all have experienced tremendous income boosts without increases in happiness.

• The authors argue that the “threshold” claim (that increased income does increase happiness until you are fairly well-off, at which point more income doesn't lead to more happiness) also is wrong: the Paradox applies to rich and poor individuals, not just the rich.

• Public policies can still raise happiness! Promotion of employment and a social safety net are good for happiness.

Twenge and Cooper (2022) on the Happiness Class Divide

Jean M. Twenge and A. Bell Cooper, “The Expanding Class Divide in Happiness in the United States, 1972–2016.” Emotion 22(4): 701–713, 2022. 

• Signs of a growing class divide in the US include the data on income inequality, “deaths of despair,” and the rising mortality rate for non-college educated white Americans. 

• Has it become more true in the US that money and prestige buy happiness? Twenge and Cooper attempt to answer this question. 

• The data: the General Social Survey (GSS), 1972-2016, adults age 30 and above, n≈44,000. 

• “Class” here is of the socio-economic variety (SES), and is measured by income, education, and “occupational prestige” 

• The GSS happiness question: ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?’ 

• Income, education, and occupational prestige all contribute considerably to happiness – and for income, the effect does not taper off as income rises. 

• The connection between SES and happiness has increased markedly between 1972 and 2016 – though some of this increase can be traced to increasing marital differences between SES classes. 

• The larger happiness gap between SES groups is, for white people, caused by diminishing happiness for those in the lower classes, while the upper-class folks almost held their own in terms of happiness. 

• For Black people, lower-SES people showed a small decline in happiness between 1972-2016, but high-SES people saw a significant increase in happiness. 

• Has class become more salient as income inequality increases?

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.

Holz, List, Zentner, Cardoza, and Zentner (2020) on Nudging Tax Compliance

Justin E. Holz, John A. List, Alejandro Zentner, Marvin Cardoza, and Joaquin Zentner, “The $100 Million Nudge: Increasing Tax Compliance of Businesses and the Self-Employed Using a Natural Field Experiment.” NBER Working Paper 27666, August 2020 (pdf here). 

• The tax authorities send you a message… 

• ...maybe the message just happens to mention the upcoming tax filing deadline: the control arm 

• ...maybe the message also notes the potential for your tax evasion to be publicized – one treatment arm, designed to increase the salience of social penalties for being a tax cheat. 

• ...maybe, instead of highlighting the public nature of identified tax evasion, the message notes the potential for your tax evasion to result in imprisonment – another treatment arm, designed to increase the salience of criminal penalties attached to tax evasion. 

• And for each of the three arms noted above, we can take half of the letter recipients and also mention in the letter that the tax authorities are prepared to potentially view mistakes in tax declarations, even honest mistakes, as intentional. (The notion is to frame evasion as a sin of commission, not of omission.) Mistakes imply that you were trying to be a tax cheat! 

• This very natural field experiment is conducted in the Dominican Republic, circa 2019, n≈56,000 firms and n≈28,000 self-employed people; tax evasion reportedly is rife in the Dominican Republic. 

• The field experiment applies to business entities subject to the corporate income tax and to self-employed taxpayers subject to the individual income tax. 

• The various messages are sent shortly before the tax filing deadline. 

• The threat of public disclosure of tax evasion dissuades tax evasion for both firms and individuals. 

• The “prison” message also reduces evasion, and for firms, about twice as effectively as the “publicity” message. 

• Framing evasion as an active choice, a sin of commission, in itself (without publicity or punishment prompts), does nothing (or worse than nothing), and likewise is ineffective if it is paired with the publicity notice. 

• But the combination of “intentional” framing with the prison message doubles the impact of the prison message. 

• The effectiveness of the interventions seems to arise from a decrease (by 20%) in potential taxpayers who declare (falsely, presumably) that their income is below the minimum required for taxation. 

• Large firms drive the reduced tax evasion – there is little or no compliance gain from the smallest 60% of taxpayers.

Oswald and Winkelmann (2019) on Lottery Wins and Happiness

Andrew J. Oswald and Rainer Winkelmann, “Lottery Wins and Satisfaction: Overturning Brickman in Modern Longitudinal Data on Germany.” In: Rojas M. (ed.) The Economics of Happiness. Springer, Cham., 2019.

• The "Brickman" in the title refers to an influential 1978 article that first questioned the Easterlin claim that, in cross-section data, higher income leads to greater happiness, and in part used the happiness of lottery winners as evidence. Brickman et al. found almost no improvement in happiness for lottery winners. [The article is Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927.]

• The (usual) positive relationship that exists between income and happiness might not be causal. That is, more money might not mean more happiness -- it could be the other way around, that happier people earn more, or there could be some other factor that drives both happiness and income.

• Lottery winners to the rescue! The income windfall of lottery winners has a suggestion of exogeneity, it does not arise from unobserved personal traits.  

• The "rescue" provided by examining lottery winners might be limited, in part by the small numbers of such winners, and in part because lottery players might share relevant characteristics that are not possessed to the same degree by the rest of the population. This latter issue can be addressed by comparing only lottery winners, looking to see if winners who win more money are happier than those who win less money.  

• Another problem in terms of generalizing claims about money and subjective wellbeing (SWB) is that it is possible that the source of income, and not just the amount, matters for SWB.

• Lottery winning doesn’t seem to do much for health or for children’s health – perhaps because winners engage more intensely in risky activities like drinking alcohol. Mental health problems and mortality might increase for lottery winners.

• If your neighbor wins the lottery, you are more likely to buy a new car and engage in home renovation -- that is, you make significant expenditures on publicly visible goods. 

• Regular lottery players (in Germany) are drawn disproportionately from the less educated segments of society.

• A (biggish?) lottery win boosts satisfaction with your income, like would occur with a 20% increase in income – but the effect fades within a couple of years. A similar tale, with smaller magnitudes, applies to overall life satisfaction.

Andrew Eric Clark, “Four Decades of the Economics of Happiness: Where Next?” Review of Income and Wealth 64(2): 245-269, June 2018.

• Happiness data allow answers to the questions: (1) what promotes happiness; (2) what activities do happy people undertake?; and, (3) how can we value a public project?

• 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).

• Studies of the effect of income on happiness generally indicate diminishing marginal happiness from income, so that the happiness boost from an additional $1000, say, is greater for lower income people than for higher income folks.

• Another nearly universal finding is that unemployment is negatively correlated with happiness. 

• A graph of happiness as a function of age tends to be u-shaped, though the reasons for this relationship are not well understood. 

• The black/white happiness gap in the US – whites tend to have higher subjective wellbeing (SWB) – is shrinking.

• Marriage seems good for happiness (or at least positively correlated with it), and single people who are happy are more likely to get married.

• Children are not a sure-fire happiness booster, though people who are happier are more likely to have kids down the road.

• Aggregate unemployment is worse for national SWB than is inflation, basically (in that a 1 percentage point increase in unemployment lowers SWB by more than does a 1 percentage point increase in the inflation rate) but an individual suffers less from unemployment when the aggregate unemployment rate is high

• Something (like a bigger house) that raises your happiness might undermine someone else’s

• Adaptation (the hedonic treadmill) is limited with respect to unemployment, poverty, disability, lack of job security, and (for something that raises SWB) cosmetic surgery!

• Do happy teachers lead to better student performance? (Some evidence (p. 258) says yes.)

• Happiness promotes health – and voting for incumbents.

• Affective happiness versus life satisfaction: “Would you prefer to live a good life, or to remember having lived a good life? [p. 264].”

Sherman and Shavit (2018) on Creative Effort at Work

Arie Sherman and Tal Shavit, “The Thrill of Creative Effort at Work: An Empirical Study on Work, Creative Effort and Well-Being.” Journal of Happiness Studies 19(7): 2049–2069, October 2018 [pdf].

• Maybe work isn’t just a means to the end of having money? Could it be that there are some non-pecuniary benefits of work? 

• Sherman and Shavit suggest that workers might invest creative effort to build up their “hedonic capital.” 

• They survey 922 Israeli adults who are salaried employees (that is, not self-employed). The idea is to see if those who invest more creative effort at work (for the purpose of making work more enjoyable) have higher subjective well-being. 

• The authors check four measures (on 0-to-10 scales) of subjective well-being: overall satisfaction; meaning and purpose; positive feelings; and, negative feelings. 

• The results indicate that creative effort (self-rated on a 1-to-7 scale) at work improves subjective well-being (SWB) when SWB is measured as life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, or positive affect. 

• Creative and intellectual work raises SWB. 

• Good health and financial satisfaction raise SWB; income does not aid meaning and purpose. 

• Having children does not raise SWB but does add meaning and purpose. 

• There are U-shaped age effects on SWB and positive affect (that is, there's a trough in midlife), but not for meaning and purpose. 

• Good health, financial satisfaction, and religiosity all seem to reduce negative affect.

Lindqvist, Östling, and Cesarini (2018) on Lottery Wealth and Happiness

Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, and David Cesarini, “Long-run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-being.” NBER Working Paper No. 24667, May 2018 [pdf of a similar version here]. 

• Adaptation might suggest that the (exaggerated?) hedonic benefits from a monetary windfall will be short-lived. 

• Lottery data can help us identify the extent to which wealth causes increased happiness or life satisfaction, in both the short and the long run. 

• The authors look at Swedish lottery winners 5 to 22 years after their stroke of good fortune. 

• The estimation undertaken here of how much happiness flows from wealth compares very similar people: they are all lottery winners, but the amounts they won differ. 

• Happiness and Life Satisfaction are reported on an 11-point scale. They are highly positively correlated, though are influenced differently by wealth. Other variables collected are Mental Health, and Financial Life Satisfaction.

• Life Satisfaction is raised by an extra $100,000, and the effect is lasting. 

• The source of the increased Life Satisfaction is improved Financial Life Satisfaction. (Yes, a financial windfall improves one's financial satisfaction!)

• Happiness and Mental Health are not improved (in the long run) by a lottery win. 

• This research was all pre-registered: opportunities to p-hack are minimal; N ≈ 3350 

•  Lottery winners in this sample tend to behave prudently – they don't squander their winnings in a short period of time. 

Blanchflower and Oswald (2017) Review Graham’s _Happiness for All?_

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, “Unhappiness and Pain in Modern America: A Review Essay, and Further Evidence, on Carol Graham’s Happiness for All?” NBER Working Paper No. 24087, November 2017.

• The authors summarize and respond to a 2017 book by Carol Graham, Happiness for All? 

• Graham’s work centers on subjective well-being (SWB) measures, especially the Cantril ladder question, which, according to the World Happiness Report, "asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale." 

• Some of Graham’s claims about happiness in the US: (1) SWB is getting more unequal, and income inequality lowers SWB; (2) people are increasingly unhopeful, especially white Americans and poorer Americans; and, (3) Americans, particularly poorer ones, suffer from high levels of pain and stress. 

• The age-adjusted suicide rate for black American men is one-third the rate for white American men.

• Blanchflower and Oswald point out that almost surely, SWB is not nearly as unequally distributed as is income. 

• It does appear that Americans are becoming less happy, and that reported pain is very high (34% in past 4 weeks) in the US; the international average is 20%. 

• Middle-age Americans are particularly troubled. SWB tends to fall almost monotonically from the late teens until somewhere around age 40-50, and then tends to increase (slowly) for some 40 years.

• Education is associated with higher SWB. 

• There has been significant convergence in SWB among racial groups in the US in the past 45 years.

• Though there is some evidence that women in the US have become less happy in the last 30 years relative to men, reported SWB is quite similar across genders.

Adler, Dolan, and Kavetsos (2018) on Choosing to be Happy

Matthew D. Adler, Paul Dolan, and Georgios Kavetsos, “Would You Choose to be Happy? Tradeoffs between Happiness and the Other Dimensions of Life in a Large Population Survey.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 139: 60-73, July 2017 [pdf].

• Measures of subjective well-being (SWB) come in three different varieties: (1) life satisfaction; (2) happiness (positive/negative affect); and (3) meaningfulness. These varieties are termed, respectively, (1) evaluative; (2) affective; and (3) eudaimonic components of SWB. 

• Decision utility (perceived when making a choice) and experience utility (the quality of lived experience) may differ; SWB seems to be a measure of experience utility. People might purposely choose an option that they know will not maximize their SWB. People might choose options in which their health is good, for instance, even if their SWB is lower than what they could achieve with alternative options.

• Adler, Dolan, and Kavetsos present pairs of options that trade-off SWB with some other characteristic, such as health. These options are presented in “choice” (which of two possible lives would you choose) and “judgement” (which of two possible lives is better) mode. The options are presented as either brief scenarios or (less brief) vignettes; the vignettes are intended to increase the salience of the trade-off presented between SWB and some other life dimension. The three different varieties of SWB are tested separately, and each arrayed against five life characteristics: income, health, family, career, and education. n≈13,000

• The US sample indicates a slightly higher average SWB than the UK sample, though the Americans are more anxious. (And higher anxiety lowers the likelihood of choosing the high SWB option.)

• About 60% of respondents choose the high SWB option. They also seem to be drawn somewhat more to the affective component of SWB. 

• Judgement questions lead to a slightly larger pro-SWB vote than do choice questions, as does presenting the options as vignettes. 

• People possessing higher SWB are more likely to choose the high SWB option. 

• People with children and more education and people who are male are less likely to be seduced by SWB. 

• People often choose good health over high SWB; they rarely choose career success over high SWB.

[John Stuart Mill comes to mind: "Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so." -- from Chapter 4 of Utilitarianism; and the happiness that utilitarianism invokes is the happiness of all interested parties (Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism).] 

[For a related article, see here.]

Gilovich and Kumar (2015) on Experiences versus Material Goods

Thomas Gilovich and Amit Kumar, “We’ll Always Have Paris: The Hedonic Payoff from Experiential and Material Investments.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 51: 147-187, 2015. [The version outlined below has different page numbers (and perhaps other discrepancies) from the version available here.]

• Experiences provide long-lasting memories, at least relative to material goods; experiences are gifts that keep on giving. Perhaps subjective well-being (SWB) and income would be more closely related if people shifted their spending from material goods to experiential goods. 

• Vacations, concerts, dining out: these are examples of experiential goods. Electronic gadgetry and clothing fall into the material goods category. People consistently report higher happiness from experiential goods relative to material goods. 

• Experiences are better for SWB for a variety of reasons. First, they are less subject to the adaptation which, over times, erodes the pleasure boost given by a material acquisition. Experiences are more pleasurable (and interesting) to talk about, and can become embedded in our identity, our story. 

• Adaptation is helpful in allowing people to come to terms with negative events, so if bad experiences are not subject to adaptation, we could suffer long-term from unpleasant moments. But experiences tend to be malleable, so that bad experiences – the vacation where it rained the whole time – tend to be looked at more favorably, through rose-tinted glasses, over time. Indeed, the negative features of experiences can become, in retrospect, their chief virtues. 

• Even in anticipation of consumption, experiences bring more pleasure than material goods. Waiting in line is less unpleasant when it is to see a play than to buy a gadget. And after the fact, people tend to think of money spent on experiences as having been better spent than that expended on material objects. 

• The social element that is attached to many experiences is one of the sources of their SWB advantages. And talking about experiences after the fact is one of their social elements. Talking about material possessions is a bit of a snooze fest. 

• The endowment effect is connected to an unwillingness to part with something that we “own”; people tend to show larger endowment effects, greater attachments, to potential experiences than to material goods. 

• Material possessions like cars are relatively easy to compare along quality dimensions – your neighbor’s Ferrari is probably better than your Ford. But who had a better vacation, or a better time at the concert? These are harder to compare, and hence, experiences to some extent protect us against unfavorable social comparisons. And if we enjoy our concert, we are not much concerned about opportunity costs, those potentially better concerts we sacrificed to go to “ours”. 

• If you buy a bad car, you regret it, you have buyer’s remorse. But the more frequent regret in the experiential realm concerns foregone opportunities, not buyer’s remorse. And it is easy to find the good in a bad experience, but not so easy to find the upside of a malfunctioning computer. “Surprises” tend to be positive when they arise during experiences, but negative when they are connected to material goods! 

• Some material goods are purchased with the intention of using them to enhance experiences, such as watching movies with your friends and family in a home video center. But perhaps the actual consumption of these goods is less social and less experiential and even less common than anticipated. If people have the experiences in mind when they make the purchases, they may be systematically fooled, as it were, into overspending on what turn out to be merely material goods. 

• Perhaps connoisseurs are able to convert material goods (collectibles, say) into experiential goods, by harnessing the same social, identity, and even narrative advantages that other types of experiences present. 

• Can we design cities, and our lives, to maximize experience?

Easterlin (2016) Relocates the Seemingly Lost Paradox

Richard A. Easterlin, “Paradox Lost?” USC Dornsife Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper No. 16-02, 2016.

• Easterlin’s version of the Paradox: At a given point in time, within a country, happiness is positively correlated with income, and furthermore, at a given point in time, richer countries are happier than poorer countries. That is, cross-section evidence suggests a positive association between income and happiness. Over time, however, happiness is not positively correlated with income. Paradox! But the time period in which the relationship between income and happiness collapses needs to be substantial: it is long trends in happiness and income that seem to be uncorrelated. 

• Over nearly 70 years, happiness trends in the US have been zero or slightly negative, despite per-capita income tripling. 

• Easterlin looks at countries with at least 1 million people, and that possess data from at least three Subjective Well-Being surveys, conducted over a period of at least ten years and one GDP cycle: 43 countries make the cut. He finds no significant relationship between growth and happiness in this panel data. 

• Some other researchers generate different answers because they look over shorter timespans. Transition countries, for example, tend to be included with only one phase of their transition cycle in the data, biasing results towards a positive connection between GDP and happiness.

Links to outlines of a few closely-related papers:

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, pages 1-87, Spring 2008. 

Daniel W. Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being.” Emotion 12(6): 1181- 1187, 2012.

Richard A. Easterlin, “Happiness, Growth, and Public Policy.” Economic Inquiry 51(1): 1–15, January 2013. 

Richard A. Easterlin, “Happiness and Economic Growth: The Evidence.” USC Dornsife Institute for New Economic Thinking, Working Paper No. 14-03, November 6, 2014.

Shakespeare on Happiness and the Easterlin Paradox

And happy always was it for that son

Whose father for his hoarding went to hell?

I'll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind;

And would my father had left me no more!

For all the rest is held at such a rate

As brings a thousand-fold more care to keep

Than in possession any jot of pleasure. 

         

(Henry VI, Part III, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 889-895)

* * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt,

Since riches point to misery and contempt?...

My dearest lord, bless'd, to be most accursed,

Rich, only to be wretched, thy great fortunes

Are made thy chief afflictions.

(Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 2, Lines 1641-1642 and 1652-1654)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Lord, who would live turmoiled in the court,

And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?

This small inheritance my father left me

Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy.

I seek not to wax great by others' waning,

Or gather wealth, I care not, with what envy:

Sufficeth that I have maintains my state

And sends the poor well pleased from my gate.

(Henry VI, Part II, Act 4, Scene 10, Lines 2904-2911)

Helliwell, et al. (2014) on Good Government and Well-being

John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shawn Grover, and Shun Wang, “Empirical Linkages between Good Government and National Well-being.” NBER Working Paper No. 20686, November 2014.

• The World Bank provides Worldwide Governance Indicators, with six components: “government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and the control of corruption;” “voice and accountability;” and “political stability and absence of violence.” The first four are about delivery of services, the last two about the state of democracy. 

• Does good governance boost subjective well-being (SWB)? If so, through what channels? Beware of misleading correlations: more educated people are happier, but when controlling for health, etc., the effect of education goes away or reverses. It seems that education leads to things that improve happiness, but is not happiness boosting per se. 

• Nonetheless, low corruption and high trust seem to directly boost happiness, as well as making government more efficient. 

• Approximately one quarter of changes in SWB are income-related, while the rest are due to other factors. The determinants of SWB around the world seem to be quite similar. 

• Will a lost wallet be returned? International variation in answering this question is much higher when asked if police will return the wallet than when asked if a stranger will return it. 

• Trust reduces traffic deaths and suicides! 

• The quality of delivery of government services tends to have a greater association with SWB than does the extent of democracy: improvements in government service quality add considerably to SWB, even controlling for the higher GDP that they bring about. For countries that have a high quality of service delivery, however, a stronger democracy improves SWB.