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

Mental Health Across Europe

Liam has been posting recently about mental health. One source of data on this is international surveys which allow cross country comparisons. Share is especially useful in this regard. The following graph demonstrates that there is a considerable amount of variation in Europe with respect to depressive symptoms. This index is derived from 12 binary variables measuring the presence or absence of the following: depression, pessimism, wishing death, guilt, sleeplessness, disinterest, irritability, loss of appetite, fatigue, lack of concentration, lack of enjoyment, and tearfulness. The EURO-D scale has been previously validated (Prince et al., 1999), and seems like it should be less susceptible to the usual problems associated with self assessments as it directly measures the presence of these symptoms. I have just pooled the data from the first two waves and some countries are in here only once, and I have ordered the countries in the sample according to the mean of this scale. Nevertheless, the spread is pretty striking. At the individual level anything above 3 is potentially indicative of clinical levels of depression, which is very worrying for Italy, Israel, Spain and Poland. One explanation for these differences relates to the prevalence of different types of social networks, a topic I will post about again at some stage.

Of course this is before the recession. Angus Deaton’s paper on wellbeing and the financial crisis has already been mentioned here.

Do People Seek to Maximise Happiness?: NBER Paper

Complex and multi-layered survey experimental paper on whether people try to maximise happiness.

Do People Seek to Maximize Happiness? Evidence from New Surveys

Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles S. Kimball, Alex Rees-Jones NBER Working Paper No. 16489 Issued in October 2010 NBER Program(s): AG PE Are subjective well-being (SWB) measures a good empirical proxy for utility? We evaluate one necessary assumption: that people’s preferences coincide with what they predict will maximize their SWB. Our method is to present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and predicted SWB rankings of two alternatives. While choice and predicted SWB rankings usually coincide, we find systematic reversals. Furthermore, we identify factors—such as predicted sense of purpose, control over one‘s life, family happiness, and social status—that help explain choice controlling for predicted SWB. We explore how our findings vary with the SWB measure and the choice situation.