In the social sciences, data on individuals’ happiness are obtained from nationally representative surveys in which a question such as the following is asked: 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? There are many variants of this question. Instead of happiness, the question may be about your overall satisfaction with life, you might be asked to place yourself on a “ladder of life”, running from the best possible to the worst. The common objective is to deliver an evaluation of a person’s life at the time of the survey. We can use the term “happiness” as a convenient proxy for this set of measures.
What Does Happiness Mean to you?
In measuring happiness each person is free to conceive happiness as he or she sees it. You might think, then, that combining responses to obtain an average value would be pointless. In fact, there is now a substantial consensus that such averages are meaningful. A major reason for this is that most people respond quite similarly when asked about things important for their happiness. In countries worldwide – rich or poor, democratic or autocratic – happiness for most is success in doing the things of everyday life. That might be making a living, raising a family, maintaining good health, and working in an interesting and secure job. These are the things that dominate daily lives everywhere; the things that people care about and which they think they have some ability to control. It means that comparisons among groups of people are possible. Psychologists have investigated the reliability and validity of the measures and economists have studied the nature and robustness of the results. We can say that the data have withstood a thorough vetting. More support comes from the fact that many countries now officially collect happiness data. The same relationships are found between happiness and a variety of life circumstances in country after country. Those who are significantly less happy are typically the unemployed, those not living with a partner, people in poor health, members of a minority, and the less-educated.
Does Income Play a Role in Happiness?
I have to hold my hands up for one empirical relationship that, for some, has raised doubts about the data’s meaningfulness. My work on happiness and income, published in an article more than 40 years ago, looked at the links between happiness and income. It found that surveys conducted at a point in time (so-called cross-section studies) discover the expected positive relation – happiness increasing with income. However, studies of happiness and income over time (the time series relationship) yield a nil relationship. This might seem contradictory, but the difference in the cross-section and time-series results turn out to be explicable once we recognize that there are psychological mechanisms which significantly affect feelings of wellbeing. This might be social comparison or the tendency for people to adapt, at least partially, to major positive or negative events. Some recent critics of this so-called Easterlin Paradox report a longer-term relationship between happiness and income that is positive. These results, however are based on data spanning a relatively small number of years, usually a decade or less, and pick up the short-term relationship – the ups and downs of happiness (and indeed GDP) that accompany economic booms and busts.
4 Reasons Happiness is a Measure of Societal Wellbeing
So we can see that happiness and GDP can give quite different pictures of the trend in societal wellbeing. But why prefer happiness to GDP? There are several reasons. Happiness tells us how well a society satisfies the major concerns of people’s everyday life. GDP is a measure limited to one aspect of economic life, the production of material goods. The aphorism that money isn’t everything in life, applies here. If happiness were to supplant GDP as a leading measure of societal wellbeing, public policy might perhaps be moved in a direction more meaningful to people’s lives.
