There is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970′s or 1980′s. And this has occurred despite large increases in income and consumption inequality. Betsey Stevenson and I spell out these facts in a lot more detail in a new paper, “Happiness Inequality in the United States,” forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Studies.
The full paper is here, but if you just want the Cliff Notes version, Eduardo Porter did a terrific job in writing up our findings in this Sunday’s New York Times, here).
We make three main points which I’ll cover in three posts:
1. Today’s post: Happiness inequality has fallen.
2. Tomorrow’s post: Differences in happiness by education have risen; differences by race and gender have fallen.
3. Finally: How to put it all together.
The General Social Survey asks: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are: very happy; pretty happy; or not too happy?”
The graph below shows the pattern of responses through time. (One of our contributions is simply to put together these data in a way that takes account of the various series breaks; these corrections are also shown.)
While the trends don’t look too dramatic to the naked eye, the proportion of the population choosing the middle category of “pretty happy” rose from 52 percent in the 1970′s to 55 percent in the 1980′s, then 57 percent in the 1990′s, before declining a bit to 56 percent in the most recent decade.
And when more of us choose the middle category, inequality falls. As the next graph shows, this decline in happiness inequality is actually pretty important.
Two trends are pretty clear. First, average happiness is roughly unchanged since the 1970′s. And second, happiness inequality — measured here as the variance of happiness — fell pretty dramatically from 1972 until the late 1980′s; this compression has since stalled, and about one third of the total decline has subsequently been reversed.
There are lots of different ways of turning these surveys into a single index, and the figure above shows that our main findings are not sensitive to the approach used. (You will need to read the paper and plow through some math for the details.)
These changes yield some pretty striking changes in the distribution of happiness:
The good news is that the unhappy end of the distribution has become somewhat happier; the bad news is that the happy end has become less happy. On average, we get the well-documented puzzle that U.S. happiness hasn’t risen.
Tomorrow I’ll say more about the evolution of happiness inequality between groups.
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I figure many people may find a decrease in “inequality” to be a positive sign, but to me this trend looks like a long dull road toward apathy. Do we really want a society where everyone identifies themselves as “pretty happy”?
You should want everyone to be happy, happiness increases productivity and quality of work and can be a boon to the economy. I’m not sure where you received the concept that happiness equals apathy without exemption.
Also, a society where people are happy means a society where people are more agreeable, theoretically. If you are to take this supposition as truth, then it’s a possibility the average worker may be able to work harder, in the hopes that it may give them a larger financial return and the hope of an increase in “happiness”.
The downside of this could occur as well, people who are happy are often unwilling to sacrifice time, money or energy if that doesn’t immediately guarantee a return of “happiness”. So if we are happy, we may be less willing to invest in something that could benefit society (money donated to charity’s, time donated to assist in charitable efforts, etc.).
The reason a person is more likely to sacrifice time for work but not time for charity is because charity ends up being a financial cost, and a cost of time as well, and since most people pursue finances as a way to gain “happiness”, they are unwilling to sacrifice it unless necessary, that is, when it threatens their happiness, or social status.
Now that I consider it, a “happy” society may actually be more apathetic towards anything that would be a threat, even a minor one, to their stability and thus their safety. This is why taxation exists, because as a general rule, people will not give their money willingly even if it means a guarantee of safety, security, and yes, their “happiness”
Different Mike here, I tried submitting this before but may have misclicked.
That last graph doesn’t tell me anything; to me, it’s simply a nice example of regression to the mean.
OK I’ll bite.
I wonder how this correlates with the dramatic expansion of credit in the US over the same time period.
I also wonder how it correlates with all the new happy drugs that weren’t around 10-20 years ago.
Scott, the data doesn’t show a trend toward being happier, it shown a trend to be more AVERAGE in the happiness scale. I loosely define this as apathetic.
I agree we should try to be happier, and relish the idea that our neighbors are happy too – but not that we are all average (neither happy nor unhappy).
Do you have paired income stats? That would be interesting…
I am not sure what “happiness” means, but I suspect it has to do with our wishes and expectations, and how close we come to achieving them. Therefore, I imagine that happiness might also differ by age groups. Not having read the full paper yet, it would be interesting to see how happiness changes as we age, and how this age-related trend has changed over time.
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Maybe this shows the readiness of people to trade happiness for other goods and conversely. Maybe those people who had the greatest potential for income growth decided to trade it off for a bit of happiness, while those people who didn’t have enough income sacrificed a bit of happiness for earnings growth.