Yesterday I showed that happiness inequality has fallen since the 1970′s. The natural question is: Why?
To answer this, we ran an analysis that simultaneously estimated the evolution of happiness through time, by education, race, gender, age, marital status, and region. Here are a few graphs summarizing these findings.
(To think about the units on these graphs, we basically convert each person’s happiness level into a “z-score”; for instance, my happiness z-score is about 1.2, indicating that I’m 1.2 standard deviations happier than the average person.)
First, we find that the rising wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates (and high school dropouts) has been paralleled by a rising happiness gap by education:
(The year-to-year bumps largely reflect statistical noise, as we are asking a smallish dataset to speak to a range of issues.)
Second, just as racial wage gaps have declined, so too has the racial happiness gap. In fact, the declining significance of race is quite striking:
Turning to gender, Betsey and I have previously written about the “Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” and our finding that women are becoming less happy shows up again:
Thus, happiness trends by race and gender point to declining happiness inequality, while the trends by education point to rising inequality. We have also analyzed trends by region, age group, and marital status, although I’ll leave you to read the full paper to see them. (Hint: Turn to Figure 6.)
How important are these trends in the overall scheme of things? That’s the topic I’ll return to in tomorrow’s post.
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. You can also watch it on 
I want to reapply your test in my country could you send me which are the step you take for the analysis and the characteristics of your data.
best regards
Perhaps men are starting to get over our ha-piness envy.
Thanks for this, it’s quite an interesting topic and I can’t wait for tomorrow!
I’m interested in the 1988-1990 period, when everybody had about the same happiness, in all three measures.
Its not surprising that women are becoming less happy. Yes, women now have more opportunities than they did 30 years ago. However, they are still expected to take care of the kids, the house, etc., so now if they decide to work, they have double the responsibilities and stress than they did 30 years ago.
would love to see these plots as residuals with income factored out (as well as “education level, gender, race, age, marital status and region” according to the paper). i have a suspicion that would pretty completely account for closing of race and gender gaps, no?
what also wasn’t clear to me from the paper was how you accounted for the different sampling distributions from year to year (proportion of each demographic in sample, i mean). if certain happiness levels are more common, then you’d expect some regression to the mean in a group when you survey more of them.
I am looking at the male/female graph. The females may have benefitted from policies in the 70′s to get them into the workforce. The sexual revolution, the pill, and the ability to have an abortion would be major events in the 70′s for women. Now this is all taken for granted, but STDs, HIV and the rat race have diminished the fun of being a woman. But, from the graph I see that they are still happier than men. White men commit suicide more than other racial groups and more than women. Where’s that graph?
Re: Dennis
It was all the cocaine.
Bobby
Also interesting that male and female happiness started to correlate strongly around ’94 or so. Perhaps the coming together reflects more commonality (similar level and similar trends for the last 10+ years)