The press is calling it the Dow Jones Industrial Average of American well-being. Every day, since January of this year, pollsters have called 1,000 Americans to quiz them on their health and happiness.
The first set of results from this unprecedented survey were released on Wednesday, as the inaugural report of The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and they find that 47 percent of Americans are struggling to stay afloat, and 4 percent are suffering as a result of money woes and illness. The remaining 49 percent say they are thriving, based on their quality of life and outlook on their future.
The index will continue to be updated daily, and will eventually be able to give a breakdown of well-being by profession, commute times, even ZIP codes.
All that data should be welcomed by researchers — like Freakonomics guest-bloggers Justin Wolfers and Arthur Brooks– who study happiness.
Now we’re curious: where would you put yourself on the index’s well-being ladder. Thriving, struggling, or suffering? And why?
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I’m thriving. I have certainty of eternal life through Jesus Christ, so what could be wrong? Also, while on this earth, I’m enjoying my work, getting paid fairly, and have a loving wife and two wonderful children.
I’m thriving. My reason: many economists claim happiness is based on your income relative to others around you, and years ago I decided to live a car-free live style, and thus, with increased gas prices, my real income, relative to those around me, has jumped big time in recent months.
I’m going to propose a bit of self-selection bias in our comments and hypothesize that those who consistently read and comment on the Freakonomics blog at nytimes.com are not an accurate cross-section of the public.
That being said, I’m not really suffering either.
I wold count myself high on the happiness meter for several reasons:
1) I have a wonderful, supportive wife
2) I have a beautiful 17 month old baby girl
3) I have started a free market think tank, The Emerson Institute for Freedom and Culture, which is at the organizational level, but which already has submissions to the website/journal from some pretty interesting people.
4) I love to read scholarly work, and get to daily.
5) I love to read literature, and get to daily.
6) I love to write, and get to daily.
Certainly life’s not perfect. With my Ph.D. in the Humanities, I have had a hard time getting a job. It seems the anti-science postmodernist Left-wing nihilists who run our humanities departments don’t want a free market scholar who uses evolution to explain the value of the arts and humanities. Which is why I’m striking out on my own with EIFC. The goal: to educate the people through the culture about how the world works in all its beautiful complexity.
I recently discovered that I’m in the bottom 20% as far as yearly earnings go. (-1 to happiness.) Concurrently, I am also at the most financially stable place I’ve ever been all my life (+1 to happiness) and aware that there’s really no such thing as job stability anymore.
Cautiously optimistic? Hoping for the best but expecting the worst? I don’t know what emotions those are supposed to elicit in the average human, but it makes me nervous and thankful.
I want to say suffering, because my family is in a hopeless financial situation that doesn’t look like it’ll end in the foreseeable future, but for some reason we’re still happy. I’ll say thriving.
What a wonderful opportunity for researchers to compare happiness to humidity, temperature, sunlight, rain, and other aspects of weather. Also to the length daylight.
intellectually thriving, existentially struggling, and romantically suffering- why?- in a word- women