How's life? Combining individual and national variables to explain subjective well-being
Introduction
This paper attempts to explain international trends and differences in subjective well-being over the final fifth of the twentieth century. This will be done in several stages. First there will be a brief review of some reasons for giving a central role to subjective measures of well-being. This will be followed by sections containing a survey of earlier empirical studies, a description of the main variables used in this study, a report of results and tests, discussion of the links among social capital, education, and well-being, re-estimation of the final model, and concluding comments.
Section snippets
Why study happiness?
The idea of using self-assessments of well-being, or of life satisfaction, as a way of evaluating the quality of a society and its citizens goes back to Aristotle and beyond. It has been argued that ancient ethics ‘gets its grip on the individual at this point of reflection: am I satisfied with my life as a whole, and the way it has developed and promises to develop?’ (Annas 1993, 28).
The Aristotelian view has central importance among ancient and modern views, in part because of its attempt to
Previous research
The study of well-being has over the past century taken a distant second place to the study of psychological illness. One count places the number of psychological abstracts since 1887 mentioning anxiety as 100 times greater than those mentioning life satisfaction (Myers, 2000, 56). Nevertheless there have been many studies of well-being accumulating over the years, and there is evidence of a flowering of new interest, as shown by the more than 300 articles surveyed by Diener et al. (1999). The
Data and key variables
This paper analyses measures of subjective well-being drawn from three successive waves of the World Values Survey (WVS, Inglehart et al., 2000). The first wave was in 1980–1982, the second in 1990–1991, and the third in 1995–1997. Although each wave covers a different set of countries, there is sufficient overlap to enable some first assessments of the sources and sizes of international differences and changes in subjective well-being. There are too many changing factors to permit definitive
Results
We start, in Table 2, with an explanation of subjective well-being based on each individual's own characteristics, leaving until Table 3 the introduction of variables relating to the society in which the individual lives. In both cases the equations are estimated by least squares, allowing for a slightly modified form of two-way fixed effects, including variables for each survey wave and for each of the country groups. Alternative functional forms and estimation procedures are considered later
Social capital, education and well-being
It has already been shown that the national values of the trust variable have systematic positive effects on well-being, reflecting some of the benefits flowing to individuals living in societies where trust replaces suspicion and fear. These direct benefits on well-being are in addition to those that may flow through greater efficiency in economic affairs and government, since these channels are already directly modelled. Higher values of trust are often thought of as one of the main channels
Robust estimation of a revised equation
In some respects, the results in Table 3 seem too good to be true, showing independently significant effects of a wide range of individual and national effects. With respect to the national effects, such scepticism is justified. The least squares estimation adopted for Table 3 assumes that each observation is drawn from the same distribution, thus providing a very large number of degrees of freedom. However, there are no doubt systematic differences among countries in the error terms as well as
Conclusions and prospects
This paper has attempted to illustrate rather than exhaust the possibilities for using international well-being data to measure and explain differences in well-being within and among nations. International well-being data permit the combined use of individual and societal variables. This in turn makes it possible to identify the consequences of societal or ecological variables, whether they be the consequences of history, government policy, or community choices. The well-being data themselves
Acknowledgements
The first draft of this paper was prepared when I was enjoying the hospitality of St Catherine's College, Oxford, where I was Christensen Visiting Fellow in the first half of 2001. I am grateful variously for advice, assistance, corrections, and suggestions from Robert Amano, Sudhir Anand, Michael Argyle, Aileen Battye, Andrew Clark, Kerstin Enflo, John Flemming, Bruno Frey, David Halpern, Tom Healy, Brian Henry, Jane Jenson, Thomas Lemieux, Paul Kind, Avner Offer, Andrew Oswald, Robert Putnam,
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