andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-98 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: As part of my continuing research project with Grazia and Roberto, I’ve been reading papers on happiness and life satisfaction research. I’ll share with you my thoughts on some of the published work in this area. Alberto Alesina,, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch published a paper in 2004 called “Inequality and happiness: are Europeans and Americans different?”: We study the effect of the level of inequality in society on individual well-being using a total of 123,668 answers to a survey question about “happiness.” We find that individuals have a lower tendency to report themselves happy when inequality is high, even after controlling for individual income, a large set of personal characteristics, and year and country (or, in the case of the US, state) dummies. The effect, however, is more precisely defined statistically in Europe than in the US. In addition, we find striking differences across groups. In Europe, the poor and those on the left of the political spectru
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1 As part of my continuing research project with Grazia and Roberto, I’ve been reading papers on happiness and life satisfaction research. [sent-1, score-0.692]
2 ”: We study the effect of the level of inequality in society on individual well-being using a total of 123,668 answers to a survey question about “happiness. [sent-4, score-0.387]
3 ” We find that individuals have a lower tendency to report themselves happy when inequality is high, even after controlling for individual income, a large set of personal characteristics, and year and country (or, in the case of the US, state) dummies. [sent-5, score-0.524]
4 In Europe, the poor and those on the left of the political spectrum are unhappy about inequality; whereas in the US the happiness of the poor and of those on the left is uncorrelated with inequality. [sent-8, score-0.473]
5 Comparing across continents, we find that left-wingers in Europe are more hurt by inequality than left-wingers in the US. [sent-10, score-0.557]
6 And the poor in Europe are more concerned with inequality than the poor in America, an effect that is large in terms of size but is only significant at the 10% level. [sent-11, score-0.496]
7 They find correlations between the inequality levels of states (within in the U. [sent-14, score-0.466]
8 ) and average happiness levels of people living in these places. [sent-18, score-0.299]
9 I just don’t see any justification for them to jump from aggregate statistics to claims of individuals as being “hurt” by inequality rather than any other state- or country-level variables that happen to be correlated with inequality. [sent-21, score-0.43]
10 ” They continue: We [Stevenson and Wolfers] show that the estimated relationship is consistent across many datasets and is similar to that between subjective well-being and income observed within countries. [sent-25, score-0.367]
11 Finally, examining the relationship between changes in subjective well-being and income over time within countries, we find economic growth associated with rising happiness. [sent-26, score-0.505]
12 What interested me about Becker and Rayo’s article was their defensiveness; in their words, “although reported happiness and life satisfaction may be related to utility, they are no more measures of utility than are other dimensions of well-being, such as health or consumption of material goods. [sent-34, score-1.093]
13 Check this out: People do not think about their life satisfaction or level of happiness in the same way they think about their mailing address or years of schooling. [sent-48, score-0.692]
14 In an ingenious experiment to demonstrate the importance of transitory mood on reported life satisfaction, Norbert Schwarz invited subjects to fill out a satisfaction questionnaire. [sent-52, score-0.653]
15 Reported life satisfaction was a point higher for those who encountered a dime! [sent-55, score-0.461]
16 For example, if you are surveyed at dinnertime and that annoys you, will this lower your reported life satisfaction? [sent-60, score-0.289]
17 Krueger continues: When people are asked about their own life satisfaction or happiness, they may reflect on their economic conditions and partly use that as a handle on providing an answer. [sent-62, score-0.71]
18 When respondents are asked to place themselves on a ladder of the best possible life in a survey that is represented as a world poll, they may be more prone to a focusing illusion that goes something like, “I live in a rich country with many amenities. [sent-72, score-0.615]
19 I should place myself high on the ladder of life, regardless of how I feel in my own life moment to moment. [sent-73, score-0.32]
20 ” A reasonable concern is that the focusing illusion causes the ladder of life to exaggerate the effects of national economic development on people’s self-reported step on the ladder. [sent-74, score-0.54]
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Introduction: Grazia Pittau, Roberto Zelli, and I came out with a paper investigating the role of economic variables in predicting regional disparities in reported life satisfaction of European Union citizens. We use multilevel modeling to explicitly account for the hierarchical nature of our data, respondents within regions and countries, and for understanding patterns of variation within and between regions. Here’s what we found: - Personal income matters more in poor regions than in rich regions, a pattern that still holds for regions within the same country. - Being unemployed is negatively associated with life satisfaction even after controlled for income variation. Living in high unemployment regions does not alleviate the unhappiness of being out of work. - After controlling for individual characteristics and modeling interactions, regional differences in life satisfaction still remain. Here’s a quick graph; there’s more in the article:
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Introduction: I had a couple of email exchanges with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and James Fowler, two of the authors of the article on the gene that is associated with life satisfaction which we blogged the other day. (Bruno Frey, the third author of the article in question, is out of town according to his email.) Fowler also commented directly on the blog. I won’t go through all the details, but now I have a better sense of what’s going on. (Thanks, Jan and James!) Here’s my current understanding: 1. The original manuscript was divided into two parts: an article by De Neve alone published in the Journal of Human Genetics, and an article by De Neve, Fowler, Frey, and Nicholas Christakis submitted to Econometrica. The latter paper repeats the analysis from the Adolescent Health survey and also replicates with data from the Framingham heart study (hence Christakis’s involvement). The Framingham study measures a slightly different gene and uses a slightly life-satisfaction question com
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Introduction: Joseph Delaney quotes Frances Woolley: In other words, the reason we care about inequality is that it reduces the happiness achievable from a given amount of income. How much depends upon the happiness/income relationship. Does the marginal utility of income fall rapidly? Or is the happiness from the 100,000th dollar almost as great as the happiness from the 100th? Delaney goes on to discuss the marginal utility of income, but I have a different point to make. Woolley is a professor of economics. Economists seem to rely heavily on a sort of folk psychology, a relic of the 1920s-1950s in which people calculate utilities (or act as if they are doing so) in order to make decisions. A central tenet of economics is that inference or policy recommendation be derived from first principles from this folk-psychology model. This just seems silly to me, as if astronomers justified all their calculations with an underlying appeal to Aristotle’s mechanics. Or maybe the better analogy
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