If you believed everything you read online, or in the media, you might get the impression that that state of the world is not only bad, but getting worse over time. It's gotten so bad, that everything seems to be in crisis. If it was the case that life is getting worse over time, we would expect to be able to see this reflected in people's subjective evaluations of their wellbeing - that is, their reported happiness. If life is worse now, surely people are reporting being less happy?
That is the research question at the heart of this new working paper by Ruut Veenhoven (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Silke Kegel (University of Konstanz). Veenhoven and Kegel look at the happiness data from the World Database of Happiness, Report on Average Happiness in Nations, tracking changes in happiness measures over time for countries where the data:
...cover at least 20 years and involve at least 10 data-points... This left us with 80 timeseries in 50 nations over ranges of 71 to 20 years in the period 1945-2021.
They then apply some fairly simple comparisons (average happiness at the end of the time-series compared with average happiness at the start of the time-series), and simple linear regressions, to identify time trends in average happiness. If life is getting worse over time, the time trend should be negative. Instead, they find that:
...average happiness changed significantly only in 37 nations, of which 26 changed to greater happiness and 11 to less, the average size of the chances being similar. So again, more rise than decline.
In their linear time trends analysis, there was very little evidence of decreasing happiness. As they note, 11 nations (and 19 time trends) were statistically significant and negative, compared with 26 countries (and 62 times trends) that were statistically significant and positive, while 35 countries (and 119 time trends) were not statistically significant at all.
And when you look at which countries and time trends are positive or negative, they results seem to make some intuitive sense. For example, Japan since the 1960s shows a significant positive increase in happiness, but Japan since the 1990s shows no significant change, consistent with improvements in wellbeing that occurred mainly from the 1960s to the 1980s. Venezuela since the 1990s shows a large negative change, consistent with the basket case that country has become over that time. Ireland since the 1980s shows a positive change. And so on.
What we can take away from this (provided we suspend disbelief of all happiness data, which should be a real concern - see here, and here, but for a counterargument see here), is that life may not be getting worse after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment