Hypertension and Happiness

Hypertension and Happiness across Nations

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald

Journal of Health Economics 27(2): 218-233.

Abstract
In surveys of well-being, countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands emerge as particularly happy while nations like Germany and Italy report lower levels of happiness. But are these kinds of findings credible? This paper provides some evidence that the answer is yes. Using data on 16 countries, it shows that happier nations report systematically lower levels of hypertension. As well as potentially validating the differences in measured happiness across nations, this suggests that blood-pressure readings might be valuable as part of a national well-being index. A new ranking of European nations’ GHQ N6 mental-health scores is also given.

Ungated version:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/publications/twerp_828.pdf

The OECD and Well-being

The OECD is organising a conference in Paris on 12 October 2011 on "Two Years after the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report":

http://www.oecd.org/site/0,3407,en_21571361_48428993_1_1_1_1_1,00.html

Some interesting OECD related links:
Better Life Initiative: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/
Measuring Progress: www.oecd.org/measuringprogress
wikiprogress: http://www.wikiprogress.org/

The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report is very much a must-read on the topic: http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf

From the "correlation is not causation" department

This article discusses a recent paper which summarizes a ton of papers that find a positive correlation between happiness and longevity. It also concluded that anxiety, depression, and pessimism were linked to higher rates of disease and a shorter lifespan. Interesting correlations except that the lead author of the paper makes a causal connection (happiness etc causes greater longevity) which doesn't follow for reasons that are all too familiar.
Of course its plausible that being a happy dude makes you live longer but it's also plausible that not expecting to live long is a bit of a downer. I, for one, am delirious that I am going to outlive you all. Alternatively, you could have "the right stuff" which makes you both happy and healthy.

The pursuit of happiness

A good Radio 4 program on happiness.

The happiness of Irish voters

Happiness may seem to be in short supply in Ireland at the moment. But in general when Irish people are asked to ranked their happiness on a scale of 0-10 we average close to 8. Many predictors have been studied. Given the forthcoming election it is interesting to know if happiness differs according to how people vote. The European Social Survey asked people how they voted. Only one party is recorded so it is presumably their first choice.
Graphing happiness by party shows that Fianna Fail voters are the happiest of the lot followed by Fine Gael. Sinn Fein voters are the most miserable of the lot. These differences are statistically significant & are robust to controlling for age, sex and education. Of course this data was not collected recently and a contemporary survey might show a different pattern.

January 5th Links

1. For those interested in maximum likelihood estimation techniques, Vincent Granville discusses the method of steepest ascent in relation to Google's search algorithm.

2. The Economist: "Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs."

3. U.S. Council of Graduate Schools: The Ph.D. Completion Project

4. Yesterday it was announced that Irish property prices fell back to 2002 levels in 2010, according to reports from MyHome.ie and Sherry Fitzgerald; so it is interesting to read this SSISI paper (2007) by P.J. Drudy which "argues that Ireland’s housing problems stem in part from a particular philosophical orientation which supports the 'commodification' of housing".

5. The (U.K.) Royal Statistical Society "Get Stats" Campaign: 'giving everyone the skills and confidence to use numbers well'.

6. Researchers at Harvard have found a way of using the iPhone to measure people’s moods and have found a correlation between daydreaming and unhappiness.

7. The new Happiness Index to gauge Britain's national mood.

8. The regional impacts of Northern Irish HEIs.

9. Tom McKenzie and Dirk Sliwka: Universities as Stakeholders in their Students' Careers: On the Benefits of Graduate Taxes to Finance Higher Education.

10. CNN Money: Should companies offer sabbaticals?

11. Damien Mulley: "Failure" and Enterprise Culture in Ireland.

Affective Forecasting and Optimal Environmental Behaviour

A recent paper in the Journal of Economic Psychology finds positive associations between pro-environmental behaviour and well-being, suggesting that pro-environmental consumption may be less than individually optimal due to decision-making biases. In other words, we would feel better if we helped preserve the environment more but due to a failure to appreciate the benefits of doing so engendered by affective misforecasting, we do less than would be even individually optimal, never mind societally optimal. There are now quite a few papers demonstrating potentially superior intra-person allocations in terms of quality of life, including work by Alois Stutzer and colleagues showing decreased quality of life induced by channel surfing , and happier lives among people who volunteer. David Comerford, who is currently a visiting scholar at Duke, worked on this issue here and has presented results showing that at least part of the decision utility from car-use is due to affective misforecasting. In general, this is an interesting and challenging literature that has obvious policy and philosophical relevance.

Genes, economics and happiness

We all know some people are born stupid but what I didn't know was that some people are born to be happy dudes while others are inherently miserable. To be precise, heritability of happiness is approximately 33%, and much higher for men then women.
This is documented in a study by De Neve, Christakis, Fowler and Frey which is even able to pinpoint specific genes associated with happiness. This suggests that if you want your kids to be happy campers that you should be very careful who you mate with, especially if you are a woman. Unless its too late. There's a cheery thought.

Income and Life Satisfaction

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Sep 21;107(38):16489-16493.

High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being

Kahneman D, Deaton A.

Center for Health and Well-being, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.

Abstract

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience-the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.

The happiness of being busy

"Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we'd spent the same waiting time walking to the carousel we'd be far happier. That's according to Christopher Hsee and colleagues, who say we're happier when busy but that unfortunately our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing - an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.
Given that being busy makes us happier but that our instinct is for idleness, Hsee's team say there is a case for encouraging what they call 'futile busyness,' that is: 'busyness serving no purpose other than to prevent idleness. Such activity is more realistic than constructive busyness and less evil than destructive busyness.'
...
The researchers proceed to argue that, unfortunately, most people will not be tempted by futile busyness, so there's a paternalistic case for governments and organisations tricking us into more activity: 'houseowners may increase the happiness of their idle housekeepers by letting in some mice and prompting the housekeepers to clean up. Governments may increase the happiness of idle citizens by having them build bridges that are actually useless.' In fact, according to Hsee's team, such interventions already exist, with some airports having deliberately increased the walk to the luggage carousel so as to reduce the time passengers spend waiting idly for luggage to arrive."
From: British Psychological Society Digest

Comment: I am not sure about the government doing us a favour by wasting our time. It depends on the opportunity cost. When you get off an aircraft there is not much else to do airside so I can see the merits of a good stretch of the legs. Pretty much anything beats spending time in the ghastly baggage hall in Dublin Airport. But when there are alternatives, I would rather decide for myself how to spend my time. And what will the housekeeper or even the parlour maid think when they discover that you have deliberately let vermin in just to keep them busy? The butler will never hear the end of it.

Hsee CK, Yang AX, & Wang L (2010). Idleness aversion and the need for justifiable busyness. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21 (7), 926-30

Bernanke on Well-Being

Philip Lane on Irisheconomy links to a recent address by Ben Bernanke making the case that economic factors do a better job that we might expect in determining happiness. The recent work of Stephenson and Wolfers with the Gallup world data has bolstered the view that getting economic fundamentals correct is the best way of promoting happiness though Easterlin, in particular, has been fighting back against this idea (see previous post ).

Can you be happier than your wife?

Externalities abound in the real world and those within the household are some of the most salient. Perhaps the most salient occurs with regard to happiness, its hard to be happy if a loved one is not. So "you can't be happier than your wife". Unless you're a thoughtless git, that is. And if a big gap exists between the happiness of a couple, perhaps this leads to stress and ultimately a split. It can't help. The paper below looks at this and finds that, indeed, bigger gaps in happiness are predictive of divorce.
An important issue here is the granularity of measurement. If you measure happiness or life satisfaction on, say, a 20 point scale then you are less likely a couple on the same levels of measured happiness than if its a 10 point scale.
Intruiged by all this, I looked at life satisfaction in the SHARE data. It has a 4 point scale of life satisfaction (very satisfied,somewhat satisfied,somewhat dissatisfied,very dissatisfied). About 60% of individuals report the same level as their partner.
I didn't find any obvious predictors of this gap. Women are less likely to be more satisfied than their partners but largely because they report lower satisfaction in general.

You can't be happer than your wife:happiness gaps and divorce
C. Guven, C.Senik, H.Stichnoth
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4599.pdf

Smile or Die?

I'm looking forward to having a read through Barbara Ehrenreich's commentary on the "tyranny of positive thinking" entitled "smile or die". Until then here's a study testing the "smile or die" hypothesis (or at least the smile and die later hypothesis!): Smile intensity in photographs predicts longevity.

Daniel Kahneman on Happiness

Daniel Kahneman's TED Talk on Happiness (via Bayesian Heresy)

link here 

A Few More Links

1. Do happy people have fewer heart attacks?

2. Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee on the importance of "the first job after graduation": NYT 2006

3. This week's U.S. jobs measure: payroll tax exemption, and tax breaks for capital expenditure

4. CIRGE: the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education

5. Panel Conditioning and Attrition in the AP-Yahoo! News Election Panel Study

6. Tomorrow's edition of The Economist runs with the following lead-story: "The Data Deluge - and How To Handle It"

7. Job Opportunities at Yahoo!: the tech giant recently advertised for Ph.D. graduates in Microeconomics

Back into the kitchen, girls?

There is an interesting discussion by Posner on the limits of GDP & its relationship with happiness on the Becker/Posner blog
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/01/why-arent-americans-happierposner.html
In discussing a paper by Stevenson and Wolfers, “The Decline of Female Happiness” he notes that "..[t]hey speculate (plausibly, in my opinion) that because women are on average more risk-averse than men, they find the range of career and relationship choices open to women nowadays a source of unhappiness".
So if we restricted women's career choices they would be better off. Presumably removing the vote would also reduce stress?

For a humourous take on this see the Harry Enfield sketch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w&feature=player_embedded

Washington Post on the Economics of Happiness

Carol Graham of the Brookings Institute writes on the Economics of Happiness in the Washington Post.

link here

Weather,wellbeing & risk

The lousy weather in Ireland is a source of perennial gloom. A connection between well-being and weather seems unsurprising. What I didn't know was that lack of sunshine also seems to predict risk taking behaviour.

http://www.deakin.edu.au/news/2009/150909happiness.php

Further to Liam's post below. This is a graph of happiness (on a 1 - 10 scale) from one wave of ESS for Ireland by household income category. Looks pretty flat.

The Costs of Economic Growth

In a similar vein to some recent posts about the interaction of economic factors with social well-being, Stanford's Chad Jones has a working paper that takes a more theoretical approach:

The benefits of economic growth are widely touted in the literature. But what about the costs? Pollution, nuclear accidents, global warming, the rapid global transmission of disease, and bioengineered viruses are just some of the dangers created by technological change. How should these be weighed against the benefits, and in particular, how does the recognition of these costs affect the theory of economic growth? This paper shows that taking these costs into account has first order consequences. Under standard preferences, the value of life may rise faster than consumption, leading society to value safety over economic growth. As a result, the optimal rate of growth may be substantially lower than what is feasible, in some cases falling all the way to zero.

This approach to optimal growth seems more consistent with the thrust of the behavioural literature on smoothing.