So you sit down in the driver's seat of a brand-new high-tech car. It has a steering wheel, but no brake pedal, clutch or gearshift. Instead there's a central display with four unmarked buttons. Your problem is how to make it go. Your solution: you press each button in turn and, sure enough, find one that makes the car speed up and a different one that makes it slow down.
That's essentially what a pair of US- and Europe-based economists did to find out what determines the happiness of nations. As reported in a recent article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) they studied changes in happiness in 10 European countries measured over 4 decades. They found that the "go-faster button," the single factor that consistently increased people's satisfaction with their lives turned out to be the adequacy of the welfare benefits governments provided to their citizens. Expanding welfare programs led to increasing life satisfaction. Cutting welfare programs led to decreasing life satisfaction.
The welfare programs that made the difference were pretty basic. The researchers assessed three programs: unemployment insurance, medical insurance and pensions. Residents of countries such as Spain, Italy and France that bolstered these programs during the course of the study indicated increased happiness, while countries such as Denmark and Sweden that reduced these benefits showed the opposite.
The authors summarize, "...differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs; increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity."
Happiness, or overall satisfaction with life, has been measured in the 10 European countries in this study since 1981, as part of the European Values Study. Although that study covers a lot of issues, including family, work, environment, religion, morality, politics and society, the happiness-related question is remarkably simple: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?" Participants respond on a scale from 1 to 10.
The other "buttons" that the researchers tried but found to be duds included economic growth, quality of the environment and social capital (the amount of trust and shared values within a society). These variables have been extensively studied and promulgated by economists, sociologists and political scientists, but did not turn out to be related to changes in happiness over time. The authors conclude, "In the present study, . . . in the long term time-series data, these variables have no relation to happiness."
That finding is something of a puzzle, since earlier research has linked several of those factors, most notably social capital, economic equity and focus on the environment with national happiness ratings. The authors of the current study explain that most earlier studies have compared a number of countries at a single moment in time. They argue that comparing such "snapshots" is less meaningful than tracing increasing or decreasing happiness within a given country over time. Returning to our car metaphor, knowing that some cars are ahead of others at a given moment provides much less information than knowing which ones are speeding up and which are slowing down.
One thing this study tells us is that the austerity programs that are being implemented in 160 countries, including in the UK under its new conservative prime minister, may or may not achieve their stated economic goals such as reducing inflation or national debt, but they will almost certainly reduce the happiness of their citizens.
(Article changed on Sep 30, 2022 at 3:24 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Sep 30, 2022 at 3:26 PM EDT)
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