WHAT MAKES US HAPPY (AND DOESN’T)
The strange illogic of life satisfaction
Carol Graham has straight, glossy brown hair and a slender build that belies her age of more than fifty years. On most days she runs ten miles, and her go-ahead attitude toward life is reflected in her direct, plain-spoken style of conversation. Even on first meeting, you would not be surprised to learn she is an economist, though you might be surprised to learn what kind.
Graham and I are about the same age and first met in our early forties. We both work at the same think tank, and at some point we began hanging out. I was in the closet then about my midlife dissatisfaction, and was not about to reveal my vulnerability to a colleague. Still, over periodic lunches, our conversations grew more personal. I learned that her forties were not a smooth time. She had three children, a husband who traveled most of the time, and new administrative responsibilities in two places, both of them challenging. Then her mother came down with Alzheimer’s, and her father with emphysema, and her marriage began to fail. After eighteen years together, she and her husband separated. “It was absolutely traumatic,” she said. Something like low-level warfare broke out with her ex; making peace with him took seven years. I remember the frustration she expressed during that time, and she reports still having a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder from it. “I’m still programmed to wake up and think something awful could happen any minute.” Through it all, however, she managed to do some of her best work, including a successful book: Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (published in 2010).
When I met her, I assumed that human happiness, including my own, reflects how well things are going, or at least should reflect how well things are going. Subjective wellbeing and objective wellbeing, perception and reality, ought to go hand in hand. That was why I felt so unentitled to my dissatisfaction and didn’t tell Graham or anyone else about it. As she began to explain her work, however, it gradually dawned on me that my assumption was wrong. Thomas Cole’s Voyager is at the mercy of a winding, capricious river, one whose course doubles back on itself and makes no apparent sense.
To understand the happiness curve, it’s helpful to know that happiness isn’t rational, predictable, or reliably tethered to our objective circumstances. That finding, which economics for many years did its best to ignore, has recently received important support from some peculiar discoveries by a new breed of economist, whose number includes Carol Graham.
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Lima, Peru, was a place of extremes when Graham was born there in 1962. Her father was a prominent American doctor, her mother “as Peruvian as could be.” The youngest of six children, she did not speak English until her family moved to the United States, when she was almost four. “I’m as Peruvian as I am American, in many ways,” she told me on a spring day in her office in Washington. As a child, she saw extreme poverty and extreme wealth: “The contrasts were incredibly sharp.” Her early interest in social inequality and economic development never waned.
Her twenties, like so many people’s, were a time of adventure, discovery. She became a research assistant at the Brookings Institution after college, and loved it; earned a doctorate in development economics and political economy; wrote a dissertation on how Peru’s poor coped with hyperinflation. Eschewing the usual path toward a tenure-tracked academic job, she lived from fellowship to fellowship, collaborating with famous economists and traveling to places like China, Vietnam, and Mongolia to learn how to help the poor in countries undergoing rapid social and economic change. She tramped around slums and grappled firsthand with infant malnourishment. “I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Sometimes it was scary. I remember getting on a plane to Africa thinking, What the hell are you doing? The only thing you know about Africa is French.” By her early thirties she was married, had had her first child, and was about to publish a book, Safety Nets, Politics, and the Poor: Transitions to Market Economies.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international trade negotiations, a backlash against globalization arose. Activists demanded that economists pay more attention to inequality, which economic development had often seemed to exacerbate. As it happened, Graham had a trove of data on the social and economic mobility of poor Peruvians. She found a surprisingly large amount of movement in and out of poverty—more in Peru than in the United States. That finding led her to a question, highly unorthodox in the economics of the time. “I thought: You know, I wonder how these people think they’ve done? Everyone is saying globalization is bad for the poor, so why don’t we ask the poor?”
She did, using questions such as: “How do you compare your economic situation today with ten years ago?” Because she had data on how people had actually fared economically, she could compare objective outcomes with subjective satisfaction. The result was, to say the least, unexpected. “It turns out that, of the ones that had done the best, so they had the most movement up the income ladder, roughly half said their economic situation was worse than it was before.” Equally strange, though at least consistent, was a reciprocal finding. “The people who didn’t move up at all, who were primarily rural poor, who had had no income change—they said their situation was better, or the same.”
Graham’s first instinct was to doubt the findings. Maybe Peruvians were strange. Maybe Peru’s circumstances were strange. So Graham got data for Russia. There, in the tumultuous 1990s, 70 percent of the people who had experienced the most upward mobility said their situation was worse than before, not better. More data, more countries—same pattern. In 2015, Graham looked at China between 1990 and 2005, a period of explosive economic growth. Life expectancy had reached more than seventy-five years, a leap from only sixty-seven years as recently as 1980. “Yet,” she writes with two colleagues, Shaojie Zhou and Junyi Zhang, in a 2015 paper titled “Happiness and Health in China: The Paradox of Progress,” “during the same period, life satisfaction levels in China demonstrated very different trends—in particular dropping precipitously in the initial stages of rapid growth and then recovering somewhat thereafter. The drops in life satisfaction were accompanied by increases in the suicide rate and in incidence of mental illness.” In China, as in Russia and Peru, becoming better off economically seemed to make people less satisfied.
The same curious phenomenon also holds in industrial democracies. “All the evidence says that on average people are no happier today than people were fifty years ago,” writes Richard Layard, a prominent British economist, in his 2005 book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. “Yet at the same time average incomes have more than doubled. This paradox is equally true for the United States and Britain and Japan.” In the United States, he notes, large increases in material wellbeing have neither increased the number of self-described “very happy” people nor substantially decreased the number who are “not very happy.”
So, at both the individual level and the national level, how you feel about your life does not necessarily reflect how one might suppose you should feel, at least by the materialistic standards of homo economicus. More often, the relationship works backward (even after adjusting for the effects of noneconomic variables like demography and health). “People who are in very fast-growing economies are less happy than people in slower growing economies,” Graham told me. “Rapid change makes people very unhappy.” The result is what she calls the paradox of frustrated achievers and happy peasants.
In the 1990s, when Graham unearthed that paradox, her findings seemed bizarre. Conventional economics assumed, of course, that income gains will tend to make people happier, more satisfied, less socially restive. “I didn’t know how to explain it,” Graham said. “But I started poking around and found what was then this very, very minute literature on the economics of happiness.” That was how she found her way to Richard Easterlin.
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I called Easterlin one late-spring day and reached him in California, where he was a professor in the University of Southern California’s economics department. Like a number of Nobel Prize–winning economists I have encountered, he was approachable and humble—though, unlike them, he had not won a Nobel Prize, which seemed unfair, considering that he had founded a new branch of economics.
For many years, if the modern discipline of economics had had a motto, it might well have been: look at what people do, not at what they say; at how they behave, not how they feel. Economics likes to think of itself as rigorously scientific, which means concerning itself with the hard facts of the real world. In any given month, you know how many cars people buy and how many new jobs are created. To a conventionally trained economist, knowing how people feel hardly seems of comparable importance, except inasmuch as consumer sentiment might drive demand up or down. Anyway, how can you be sure how people feel? You could ask them—but change the wording of a survey question, and you might get a different answer. Besides, people don’t always understand their own true desires and feelings, and, even if they do, they might not give a straight answer. The better way to understand preferences and desires, and even to infer subjective states of mind, is by looking at revealed preferences. Americans might tell you they like hot dogs better than hamburgers, but the sales statistics don’t lie, and those might show that Americans really prefer hamburgers. Every day, people reveal their priorities by trading goods and services to get more of whatever it is they value. In a properly functioning market, then, satisfaction should increase by definition.
In his mid-forties, Richard Easterlin found himself doing work on demography. He noticed that demographers paid a lot of attention to subjective testimony, as psychologists also do. To Easterlin, mainstream economics’ rejection of what people said about their states of mind and wellbeing seemed “pretty ridiculous.” One day around 1970, over lunch at an advanced-research center at Stanford University, a sociologist mentioned surveys of happiness. Easterlin thought it might be interesting to leaf through them.
The upshot was a paper he published in 1974, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” It posed some fundamental questions. “Are the wealthy members of society usually happier than the poor? What of rich versus poor countries—are the more developed nations typically happier? As a country’s income grows during the course of economic development, does human happiness advance—does economic growth improve the human lot?” One might have thought that economics would have long since come to grips with such basic questions, but no. “The term ‘happiness’ is used intermittently, albeit loosely, in the literature of economics,” Easterlin wrote. “To my knowledge, however, this is the first attempt to look at the actual evidence.”
Easterlin gathered surveys from nineteen countries in which people were asked a couple of happiness questions. One question simply asked: “In general, how happy would you say that you are—very happy, fairly happy, or not very happy?” The other was called the Cantril Ladder question, named after Hadley Cantril, an American public-opinion researcher who was prominent in the middle of the last century. Cantril asked people to place their lives on an eleven-rung ladder, where, the poll said, “the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom represents the worst possible life for you.” Although asking people about their happiness was simple, or perhaps because it was simple, “the approach has a certain amount of appeal,” wrote Easterlin. “If one is interested in how happy people are—in their subjective satisfaction—why not let each person set his own standard and decide how closely he approaches it?”
Sifting the results, Easterlin came across an odd phenomenon. Within particular countries, “income and happiness are positively associated.” Thus, for example, in the United States, people in the highest-income group were almost two times more likely than people in the lowest group to describe themselves as very happy. The correlation between economic status and happiness didn’t seem surprising, and to one degree or another it held in every survey Easterlin looked at.
Obviously, if richer people were happier than poorer people, then richer countries should have been happier than poorer countries. It stood to reason. But it wasn’t so! “The happiness differences between rich and poor countries that one might expect on the basis of within-country differences by economic status are not borne out by the international data,” Easterlin wrote. Knowing how wealthy a country was, relative to other countries, did not tell you how relatively satisfied people were in that country.
Something else was puzzling. In the United States, which had the best data in those days, incomes had grown dramatically over time since the mid-1940s. To this day, the quarter decade or so after World War II is looked upon by economists as a golden age of shared prosperity. But “higher income was not systematically accompanied by greater happiness.” So richer people were happier than poorer people, but getting richer didn’t make a country happier.
What could explain such seemingly inconsistent results? Perhaps they only appeared inconsistent. Suppose, Easterlin hypothesized, happiness comes from judging our own standing relative to those around us. Then, wrote Easterlin, “An increase in the income of any one individual would increase his happiness, but increasing the income of everyone would leave happiness unchanged. Similarly, among countries, a richer country would not necessarily be a happier country.” People, after all, for the most part do not spend a lot of energy comparing themselves with others in far-off lands. They compare themselves with their friends, colleagues, and compatriots. Easterlin used height as an analogy. Whether you feel tall depends on how tall the people around you are. If you grow but everyone in your comparison group grows by the same amount, you won’t feel taller. And if others grow and you don’t, you’ll feel shorter, even though you haven’t shrunk a millimeter. In fact, if everyone was frantically busy working to get richer, the result might be to put everyone in competition with everyone else, resulting in a society stuck on what happiness economists call a hedonic treadmill.
The Easterlin Paradox (as it came to be known) had the potential to revolutionize economics. It challenged the hegemony of revealed preferences and material metrics. If economists cared about making people better off, not just materially but in a deeper, life-savoring sense, then revealed preferences might be painting an incomplete or even misleading picture. To fill in the gaps, economists might need to resort to subjective measures. They might need to learn how people feel, and why. They might even need to rethink what economics is about.
Back in the real world, however, Easterlin’s revolutionary paper did not revolutionize anything. Economists remained suspicious of survey data. What exactly (they demanded to know) does happiness mean, anyway? Leaving people to define it for themselves, as questions like the Cantril Ladder do, allows different people to interpret the question differently. In any case, the profession’s collective mind was not ready to take on board any idea with such challenging ramifications. Easterlin’s findings hinted that happiness, far from smoothly tracking material wellbeing, is complicated and nonlinear. But even assuming that’s true, exactly what was anyone supposed to do with the information? It was not as if people would stop trying to increase their paychecks, or companies would give up on making profits. If people are irrational or neurotic, that’s a problem for psychologists, not economists.
Perhaps, then, it was not surprising that by and large, as Easterlin told me, his 1974 paper was ignored at the time, except insofar as it made for interesting cocktail conversation. From today’s perspective, his now venerable work holds up remarkably well. But back then there were too many questions he couldn’t answer. For a couple of decades the Easterlin Paradox remained a curiosity, until a successor generation got hold of it.
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The most fundamental question posed by Easterlin proved the least troublesome. What is it people mean by happiness, and how do we know if different people mean the same thing? In the abstract, that question has challenged philosophers since biblical days, and it continues to provoke lively debates. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, surveys came pouring in from countries all over the world, in quantities far greater than were available to Richard Easterlin, and they showed remarkable consistency in the way people reported their happiness. The data demonstrated that ordinary people, unlike philosophers, knew what they were talking about when they talked about happiness. Researchers have since determined that people’s assessments of their subjective wellbeing closely track the assessments made by friends and independent observers, and even correspond with electrical activity in the brain. “What’s remarkable,” Carol Graham told me, “is how consistent the standard patterns are in terms of the basic determinants of happiness. All the factors we know just keep showing up as very stable.”
Something else also turned up consistently, a distinction upon which much else hinges. Happiness can mean a couple of things. It can mean my mood just at the moment: how cheerful, annoyed, or worried I feel. That very likely depends on whether I am drinking with friends on Friday after work, breathing bus fumes in a traffic jam, or missing a deadline. This kind of short-term state of mind is called affective happiness; it relates to affect, our momentary emotions. Researchers measure it by asking people questions like: “How often did you smile yesterday? How much stress are you feeling right now?”
The second meaning of happiness asks for a quite different kind of assessment: How satisfied are you with your life? How does your life compare with the best possible life you could imagine for yourself? Though there are many variations, a typical question is: “If you were to consider your life in general, how happy or unhappy would you say you are, on the whole?” Such questions ask you not to report your mood but to evaluate your life in its entirety, and they bear on what’s appropriately called evaluative happiness—or, an equivalent term, subjective wellbeing.
Affective happiness and evaluative happiness bear some relation to each other (a consistently depressed mood is not good for life satisfaction), but less than you might suppose. It turned out, as the data came in, that people grasp intuitively the difference between the two concepts and have no trouble distinguishing between them. Ask people about their happiness yesterday—their mood, in other words—and they say they are happier on weekends. Ask them about their happiness with their lives, and such “weekend effects” disappear. In my own forties, my life satisfaction was low, and much lower than I thought it should be, but my mood was usually not a problem. That was part of the reason I did not believe I was a candidate for medical care. I did not have a mood disorder. I had a contentment disorder.
In his conversation with me, Easterlin went out of his way to emphasize the distinction between affective and evaluative happiness, and, beginning with his 1974 article, it was the latter that primarily concerned happiness economists like Graham. They wanted to know: if money does not necessarily increase life satisfaction, what does?
There, too, the results proved quite consistent—consistent enough so that, today, many researchers consider the basic tenets to be established as fact. In her 2011 book The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Wellbeing, Graham, having by then spent her career sifting through data from countries all over the world, wrote: “Everywhere that I have studied happiness some very simple patterns hold: a stable marriage, good health, and enough (but not too much) income are good for happiness. Unemployment, divorce, and economic instability are terrible for happiness—everywhere that happiness is studied.”
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We can unpack Graham’s list. Start with money. It matters. What my father used to say—“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better”—is true. Not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or how to put a roof over your head, is immiserating. The relationship between money and life satisfaction, however, is not linear. “Income matters to individual wellbeing, but after a certain point other things such as the incomes of others also start to matter,” Graham wrote, in her 2015 article with Zhou and Zhang.
How do the “incomes of others” matter? The answer is not flattering to human generosity. Once people’s income reaches a fairly comfortable level, they start comparing themselves with their neighbors and friends and setting their expectations accordingly. This is not good. “These studies,” Layard writes, assessing the literature, “provide clear evidence that a rise in other people’s income hurts your happiness.”
A striking, if slightly depressing, example comes from an experiment in Kenya, discussed in a 2015 paper whose title tells the story: “Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers.” A nonprofit organization called GiveDirectly randomly chose households in sixty poor Kenyan villages to receive a no-strings-attached, one-time grant of either about $400 or $1,500. Either sum was a large windfall; these were places where the typical household’s wealth was under $400. Analyzing the results, Johannes Haushofer and James Reisinger of Princeton University, along with Jeremy Shapiro of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Nairobi, found that the life satisfaction of grantees increased, as one would certainly hope. The rub was that the increased life satisfaction of those who did receive windfalls was more than offset by a large decrease in life satisfaction on the part of those who did not receive windfalls. “The magnitude of this [negative spillover] effect,” write the scholars, “is noteworthy, as this is more than four times the magnitude of the effect of a change in own wealth by the same amount.” In other words, my dollar gain causes you four times as much dissatisfaction as it brings me in satisfaction, at least if we are poor Kenyan villagers. (Fortunately or not, depending on your point of view, most of the positive effects of the windfalls and all of the negative effects wore off after about a year, as villagers adjusted to the new status quo.)
We can add another wrinkle: because happiness is subjective, perception can matter as much as reality. Suppose some mischievous demon, not in a poor African village but in an advanced economy, decided to exacerbate the happiness gap between rich and poor by publishing everyone’s tax returns online in an easily searchable format. Norway did just that in 2001. In 2016, a Microsoft researcher named Ricardo Perez-Truglia looked at Norwegians’ happiness before and after 2001, using some clever statistical controls to isolate the likely effects of transparency. Again, the results, if unsurprising, are unflattering. First, he found that huge numbers of people went online to find out what their friends and acquaintances were earning. So energetically did people snoop that they performed a fifth as many income searches as YouTube searches. Second, once people learned their place in the pecking order, happiness inequality soared after years of stability. The happiness gap between rich and poor increased by 29 percent; the life-satisfaction gap increased by 21 percent. “These findings suggest that the change in disclosure had a large effect on the wellbeing of Norwegians,” Perez-Truglia writes dryly.
Note that what changed in Norway was not the actual degree of inequality in society; what changed was what people knew (or thought they knew) about inequality. Our subjective wellbeing depends not on our absolute material wellbeing, nor even on where we stand relative to others, but on where we think we stand. (What others think of us also matters. Exploiting that fact, in 2014 the authorities stopped allowing Norwegians to search the tax records anonymously. As soon as people realized their curiosity might be noticed by friends and neighbors, they reduced their tax snooping by almost 90 percent and redirected their energies to finding out who was snooping on them.)
So Easterlin’s original conjecture appears to have been borne out: beyond a certain point, increases in the gross national product will not reliably increase gross national happiness, especially if inequality—real or perceived—also rises. It is not enough for a society as a whole to grow wealthier. In fact, if gains in social wealth are unequally spread, economic growth could increase frustration and anger—even if the wealth of the middle class is growing in absolute terms. As income dispersion grows, the rungs on the income ladder get further apart, and the person on the rung above me pulls further ahead, which I resent; the person above me, looking at the next rung above her, likewise sees herself falling behind. An increase in the visibility of inequality would compound the effect, as the Norwegians discovered.
In the United States, both phenomena are on display. Inequality has grown, and the visibility of inequality may have grown even more: as sociologists have noted, the economic elite has increasingly pulled away into its own world, with separate schools and neighborhoods and distinctive lifestyles and tastes. If you’re, say, a middle-class teacher or a working-class taxi driver in San Francisco, and if every morning you watch as millionaires who look like teenagers queue on Van Ness Avenue for the Google bus, the status gap probably feels even bigger than the income gap. Rising inequality, both real and perceived, thus poisons economic growth, even for many who are doing okay but watching others do much better. That seems to be happening in America right now.
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Here’s the most fundamental finding of happiness economics: the factors that most determine our happiness are social, not material. Humans are ultra-social creatures, after all. It would not be so surprising, then, if (beyond a certain point) we care about money not so much because of what it buys as because of where it ranks us among our peers. As another of my father’s sayings had it, “Money is applause.”
So what else is in the mix? Mostly things you might expect. Richard Layard, in his book, identifies seven big factors: “our family relationships, our financial situation, our work, our community and friends, our health, our personal freedom, and our personal values. Except for health and income, they are all concerned with the quality of our relationships.”
John F. Helliwell, another prominent figure in happiness economics, has reached a similar conclusion. Helliwell calls himself “Aristotle’s research assistant,” because Aristotle was an early and great student of what happiness means and how to achieve it. In his teachings, Aristotle emphasized the difference between moment-to-moment pleasure or pain and the deeper satisfaction of a life well lived, which is more important to wellbeing. Deeper satisfaction comes not from feeling good, he taught, but from doing good: from cultivating and maintaining virtuous habits that balance one’s own life and create and deepen ties with others.
Aristotle’s insights have held up remarkably well. Helliwell and colleagues regularly mine a vast data set called the World Values Survey, which asks people in more than 150 countries about their satisfaction with life and provides much other information about them and their social and economic environments. When Helliwell and other researchers crunch the data, they find that six factors account for three-fourths of reported wellbeing:
• social support: having someone to count on in times of trouble
• generosity: people are happier when they do generous things and live among generous people
• trust: corruption and dishonesty are bad for life satisfaction
• freedom: feeling that you have sufficient freedom to make important life decisions
• income per capita
• healthy life expectancy
If you look at that list, you will notice, again, that of the six factors, four have to do with social interaction. Of the bunch, social support is the most important, and together the social four—“relational goods,” as the term of art would have it—comprise the bulk of what makes us happy. As the 2015 World Happiness Report notes, the strong link between life satisfaction and being connected to others “appears in almost all empirical analyses of life satisfaction data irrespective of geographical and time differences.” Psychological experiments reach the same conclusion. If required to choose, the experiments show, you would be better off with less health but more social ties than the other way around. Income also matters—but, as we have seen, not in a terribly reliable way, especially if other people are doing as well or better than you materially. In fact, when Stefano Bartolini and Francesco Sarracino, two Italian economists, looked at data from twenty-seven (mostly developed) countries, they found that growth in national income correlates with life satisfaction only over a very short time span, about a couple of years; after that, people adjust to their gains. Over longer spans, any effect of economic growth on happiness vanishes altogether. By contrast, increases in group membership and in other measures of social connectedness are associated with only mild increases in satisfaction over the short term, but large increases over longer spans. So the effects of connectedness are cumulative and durable. Instead of making you earn more just to stay satisfied, as building income seems to do, building trust and relationships and other forms of social support puts wellbeing in the bank.
On the other side of the coin, social connectedness can go a long way toward alleviating the misery caused by a financial crisis. Countries with high levels of trust and mutual support fared far better through the Great Recession, where life satisfaction was concerned, than did countries with weak social ties. A sense of pulling together in times of need can buffer even severe social or economic setbacks, as many Americans and Britons who lived through World War II can remember. The truest form of wealth is social, not material.
The most intimate and, for many of us, most important form of social connectedness is marriage. Your husband or wife is your doctor and nurse and counselor and therapist of first resort; your spouse is your partner in raising children and meeting the challenges of life; marrying roughly doubles the size of your networks of kin and acquaintance, and establishes around you the most important of all forms of connectedness, the family. (All of which is why gay people fought so hard for the right to marry.) No wonder, then, that marriage is on average very good for happiness, especially at first, and divorce is dreadful. According to one estimate, the amount of money needed to “compensate,” statistically speaking, for a lost marriage is on the order of an extra $100,000 a year.
In 2010, at the age of fifty, as soon as it became legal near where we live, I married Michael. By that time we had been together for more than a decade, and we needed no “piece of paper from the government” (as some skeptics have called marriage) to prove the value of our relationship. Nonetheless, and although our marriage at that point was recognized in only a few states, I can tell you that it was worth at least $100,000, not only because it brought us closer together but because it wove us, as a couple, more tightly into our community.
In the last few years, I have also learned firsthand that what the data say about social capital and life satisfaction is true. I live in a town house community in a northern Virginia suburb. Our street mixes middle-class and working-class residents—natives and immigrants of many ethnicities. Our cul-de-sac is nondescript physically and adjoined by ugly strip developments. Home values are modest. Yet Ardley Court is the wealthiest place I have ever lived. On a summer evening, you’ll see young and old gathering impromptu on lawns and decks, sharing drinks and food as adults chat and children circulate like free electrons. People watch each other’s kids and houses, which may explain why crime has been close to nonexistent. Property prices do not remotely reflect the value of coming home on a Friday and getting hugs from the neighborhood kids and licks from the neighborhood dogs and catching up on how everyone is doing.
Unemployment, of course, is a financial problem for most people who get hit by it, and so it counts as an economic factor in happiness. But—again—the bigger story is about social connectedness and status. Jobs pay the bills, yes, but they also enrich our social networks, provide us with a sense of vocation, and enhance our standing as breadwinners and community members. No wonder that, statistically speaking, the happiness cost of unemployment has been calculated at the equivalent of about $60,000 a year, more than the median wage in the United States: not as large as marital breakup, but large.
What about parenthood and happiness? That gets complicated. Parenting is a core human endeavor. Although I made my peace with not having kids, I still recall how, many years ago, when I asked my father why he had had children, he simply said, “Because it’s the only game in town.” Well, it isn’t the only game, but it is a big one. You don’t know how much of both love and anger you are capable of feeling until you’re a parent, an ancient truism which modern scholarship bears out. But the economist Angus Deaton and the psychologist Arthur Stone, after looking at data on 1.7 million Americans, have found that the higher emotional amplitude of parents “does not carry through to their life evaluations, which are on average lower than those without children.” Having parented successfully in the past may rank as a satisfying accomplishment retrospectively; but the bulk of research finds that being a parent, while it is happening, does not increase life satisfaction and may reduce it. New parents, especially, confront very high stress. One study in Germany found more than two-thirds of parents reporting drops in life satisfaction—often sharp drops—during the two years after their kids were born. “One of the dark stories that people don’t talk about is the toll that young children take on a marriage,” one of my friends told me, explaining why the birth of her two children was a particularly difficult period. Her marriage survived, and now, with both kids grown, she said, “I’ve got two great kids. I enjoy spending time with them. I feel like I won child-raising.” Those who look to parenthood as a solution to their discontent will typically find that the rewards, though real, are some years in the future.
One other factor turns out not to matter as much as you might expect: gender. The 2015 World Happiness Report finds that women’s life evaluations are on average slightly higher than men’s, but that the differences are very small. My own interviews and surveys for this book led me to the same conclusion.
Had I known at forty about the paradoxes of happiness, I would have been less puzzled by my failure to appreciate my résumé. I was not comparing my forty-year-old self to my twenty-year-old self, as the twenty-year-old version of me had assumed I would. I was comparing myself to other fortysomethings in my peer group, many of whom also had sustained relationships (often longer), accumulated wealth (often more), and achieved professional status (often higher). True, I was better off than most of humanity, but most of humanity was not my comparison group. Unfortunately, the self-critical voices that pestered me about wasting my life insisted on comparing upward, which is the worst thing you can do. As Richard Layard writes, “One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards.”
Unfortunately, that advice, while sound, is difficult to follow; how difficult depends on not just our attitude, but also our age.
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After her own difficult, sometimes traumatic, yet still productive forties, Carol Graham turned a corner. The wilderness years of happiness economics ended; her discipline began to catch on in the academic mainstream, and the news media loved it. “I can’t disentangle being in my fifties from having my research take off,” she told me. “I get incredible satisfaction from thinking this approach has gotten some traction. It’s changing the way people think. Young scholars are picking it up and doing much cooler things than I would have thought of.” She also enjoys having teenage kids: playing guitar with them, running races together.
“And,” I asked, “have you changed as a person?” She reflected for a moment. Her teenaged son, she said, falls head over heels when he’s in a relationship, then is devastated when it breaks up. “As you get older, your ability to benchmark a bad experience against other things you’ve navigated just puts it all in a very different perspective. You do get wiser. There are things that would have bothered me before.” Negative comments about her work, for instance. “If that had happened to me in my forties, I would have thought, Oh, this is terrible. Now I couldn’t care less. I just feel like I can write what I want to write, but don’t feel I have anything to prove anymore. I think it’s very much internal. I don’t care about how others judge me.”
She has rounded the bend in the happiness curve—the curve she helped discover. In 2001, she and another development economist, Stefano Pettinato, published a book titled Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies. They included a chart showing that in Latin America life satisfaction declines from the twenties to about age forty-eight, then increases. “Studies in advanced industrial economies find a similar relationship,” they wrote, “although the low point on the happiness curve usually occurs either slightly earlier or slightly later, depending on the country.” After another few sentences, they moved on to the next point. The pattern seemed like a curiosity, a digression from more important subjects. It mostly seemed like a curiosity to others who had noticed it, too. But not to everyone.