I recently read this blog post by Justin Wolfers defending the use of United States gross domestic product rather than measures of subjective well being (e.g. gross national happiness) to measure how well our country is doing.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this debate, you can see this below video or this link to the Sarkozy Commission Report which prompted the French president to similarly question whether the French are using the right indicators to measure societal progress in their country.

Personally, I think this ends up being a subjective rather than an objective question and I think it's likely that people who are productivity oriented will never be convinced to use happiness measures primarily and that those who are care oriented will never be convinced to use GDP.  I'm currently working on a paper detailing why I think that this question of the 'right indicators' is a subjective rather than an objective question that depends on one's goals, warmth or competence.

Using more objective criteria, Wolfer's argument is that perhaps gross domestic product and measures of subjective well being are so highly correlated that there is no need to use new measures of psychological well being.  If they are so highly correlated, maybe there is no need to measure both.  I disagree for 2 reasons:

1.  The correlations he uses are with log transformed values of income and most people care about actual dollar values rather than log transformed values.  Consider this excerpt from the paper referenced:

Most early studies considered the relationship between the level of absolute income and the level of happiness, and thus often found a curvilinear relationship.In some cases the lack of evidence of a clear linear relationship between GDP per capita and happiness led to theories of a satiation point, beyond which more income would not increase happiness. A more natural starting point might be to represent well-being as a function of the logarithm of income rather than absolute income. And indeed, recent research has shown that within countries "the supposed attenuation at higher income levels of the happiness-income relation does not occur when happiness is regressed on log income, rather than absolute income." However, if happiness is linearly related to log income in the within-country cross section,then cross-country studies should also examine the relationship between average levels of subjective well-being and average levels of log income.

This is a very good academic point about satiation points, and it may be true that doubling the income of someone who makes a million dollars a year produces the same increase in happiness that doubling the income of someone who makes $20,000 a year.  But for the same million dollars that it takes to double a rich person's salary, we can create the same amount of subjective well being in 50 people who make $20,000 per year (50*20,000=1 million).  That fact is lost in a log transformed graph.  Real world allocation decisions are made with actual dollars, not log transformed dollars, which removes the skew that represents the United States' actual distribution of wealth.  (ps. feel free to correct me if anyone reading this knows more about log transformation than I and I'll edit this)

2.  Life Satisfaction, Happiness, and Smiling/Laughing are different things and the fault may be in the measurement of subjective well being failing to tap what Kennedy was talking about in his speech.  If I ask you how satisfied you are with your life, a large part of your answer may have to do with your current economic circumstances.  Wolfers and Stevenson do a good job in their paper of examining questions about life satisfaction and happiness separately and conclude reasonably that the measures are similar if we throw out outliers.  However, when we look at a question like "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the correlation goes down to .27 from .82 (which was the correlation between log GDP/capita and life satisfaction).  

Try answering this question-> "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?"  What did you base your answer on?  Was it somewhat about your economic circumstances or work goals?  

Now ask yourself if you smiled or laughed a lot lately.  What was your answer based on? 

If you are like me, these questions tap very different parts of my life.  My thoughts naturally go to my progress with goals in question 1, whereas when asked about smiling/laughing, I tend to think of my day-to-day experiences.  There is a big difference between remembered happiness and experienced happiness.  General global assessments may indeed be related to economic well being, but perhaps the fault lies in the blunt ways we measure happiness where we don't really know whether the person is talking about being satisfied, joyous, lacking anxiety, feeling engaged, etc...  When asked about things which tap these more discrete constructs, GDP doesn't seem to capture them very well at all.   According to the Gallup World Poll data reported by Wolfers, having learned something interesting was uncorrelated with log GDP.  Feeling love is correlated .14.  Smiling/laughing, with a correlation of .27 with log GDP/capita, leaves a lot of unexplained variance that ought to be considered in policy making. 

To be fair, Wolfers himself acknowledges that "we can do a lot better" in measuring well being in previous posts and his defense of GDP is more to play devil's advocate as he states that he agrees with criticisms of the over-use of United States Gross Domestic Product to measure our country's progress.  I learned a lot in writing this post and will be following his well written blog and research closely in the hopes that it spurs more thought elaboration.

People who study happiness can be annoying in their pollyannish prescriptions to just look on the bright side of life.  Just ask Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.  So it's always refreshing to see someone put basic research findings (being grateful is important) into more common sense language as in the below video.

Louis CK “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy” - Watch more Sports Videos at Vodpod.

Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country's mood. I'm sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included. However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data. The possibilities are endless.

Some interesting trends from their limited graph....

Thanksgiving (2 years running) is the most positive day of the year...social pressure to be thankful?  Does it mean people are happier or not?

Why is the day after Father's day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?

Why is the 4th of July the least negative day?

Click here to view the index

Facebook just launched a gross national happiness index which uses analysis of words used in Facebook posts to measure the country’s mood.  I’m sure those who study the taxonomy of emotion would love to see more complex measures included.  However, this is a potentially wonderful tool and the fact that Facebook is willing to publish this data means that someday they could end up allowing the research community to examine their data.  The possibilities are endless.

 Some interesting trends from their limited graph….

Thanksgiving is the happiest day of the year (or the day we all feel we have to say something positive…:)).

 Why is the day after Father’s day the least positive day (they have separate indexes for positivity and negativity)?

Why is the 4th of July the  least negative day?

 Click here to view the index 

Following on this study and this article which show that women are less happy than men, I thought I would examine some of the data from our website, YourMorals.org.  Clearly our data is not representative of the population, so we cannot make any claims as to the validity of the trend which the authors describe.  The trend they established, whereby women, who were once happier than men, have become less happy than men over time, is very well researched.  What we can potentially do is examine whether one distinctive group of women, women who visit our website, happen to report more or less life satisfaction than men who visit our website.

As you can see, women actually report more life satisfaction (which is different than happiness, but the authors of the study use both life satisfaction and happiness questions to make their point) than men in our sample and the trend is robust across questions, meaning that women score as ‘more satisfied’ on all five of the questions on Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale, the measure we use on YourMorals.org.  Further, the graphs below, broken down by the source of visitors to our site, show that the effect is somewhat robust, meaning that it’s likely not just an oddity of traffic from one particular source.  Women who come from search engines (eg. by looking for ‘morality quiz’) or who read the NY times or who read BeliefNet’s conservative blog site all seem to be more satisfied than their male counterparts.

So what does this tell us?  Obviously since our data is non-representative and non-longitudinal, we can’t say much about the original hypothesis.  However, if we believe the original hypothesis that women are generally less satisfied with life than men, we can perhaps learn something from this group where women seem to do relatively well on scores of life satisfaction.  The authors didn’t really come up with a mechanism for the decline of happiness measures among women and so perhaps inspecting a group that does relatively well can give us clues to the mechanism in the same way that observing that people who have darker skin have less risk for skin cancer can tell us about the mechanism of skin cancer.

What do the women who visit yourmorals.org have in common?   Measurably, our sample is liberal (2.5 on a 7 point scale with 1 being very liberal and 7 being very conservative), younger (mean age = 37.6), very well educated (mean education is somewhere between college educated and having completed some graduate school), and politically attentive (the great majority either pay some attention or a lot of attention to politics).  Less measurably (we do have measures, but not for all visitors), our visitors likely have curiosity (see Todd Kashdan’s book), intellectual desire, and the time to explore those interests.  Perhaps the clue to increasing the subjective well being of women lies somewhere in there.

Most of the data from this article is taken from the General Social Survey, a representative sample of 1,500 Americans done each year.  The pattern is replicated in several other datasets with a general trend that Women used to be more happy than men and have since (1972) become less happy.  Why?

Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice gives me the most plausible answer.  I would be interested in looking at the data further to prove it, but it seems plausible that women are encountering more choice, while men don’t feel the pressure to choose among as many things (eg. taking care of children).

Here is the original article.

It looks like the government of France is following in the footsteps of Bhutan and the United Kingdom and is taking the idea of using happiness as a national indicator more seriously.

The article from the Telegraph is consistent with a growing drumbeat among academics and politicians to consider national indicators of well being.  The challenge is to convince those in policy positions of two things:

-  It's important to remove concerns that productivity goals will be sacrificed. There is research (Deutsch 1975; Hofstede 1980) that indicates that well being and social goals form a distinct cluster from agentic goals like productivity.  How can advocates of well being measures avoid this traditional tension and the inevitable backlash from those who are more productivity focused?  This is especially difficult in times of crisis as research suggests that feelings of threat increase the desire to focus on productivity.

- It’s important to show the scientific validity of measures of happiness.  I am not sure what the right balance is, but on it’s face, “happiness” is not something that can be measured well.  It is too multi-dimensional.  Would it be better to measure more discrete emotions such as societal anxiety, depression, joy, and satisfaction (based on Feldman-Barrett and Russell’s taxonomy of emotions)?  Would it be a more convincing argument if we tried to support the basic psychological needs (from Self Determination theory) of relatedness, autonomy, and competence?  Perhaps adding meaning/curiosity?  My gut tells me that some amount of nuance needs to be added to the word “happiness” to make it more face valid to the general public and that there is room for improvement from calling it “subjective well being”.

It looks like the government of France is following in the footsteps of Bhutan and the United Kingdom and is taking the idea of using happiness as a national indicator more seriously.

The article from the Telegraph is consistent with a growing drumbeat among academics and politicians to consider national indicators of well being.  The challenge is to convince those in policy positions of two things:

-  It’s important to remove concerns that productivity goals will be sacrificed. There is research (Deutsch 1975; Hofstede 1980) that indicates that well being and social goals form a distinct cluster from agentic goals like productivity.  How can advocates of well being measures avoid this traditional tension and the inevitable backlash from those who are more productivity focused?  This is especially difficult in times of crisis as research suggests that feelings of threat increase the desire to focus on productivity.

- It’s important to show the scientific validity of measures of happiness.  I am not sure what the right balance is, but on it’s face, “happiness” is not something that can be measured well.  It is too multi-dimensional.  Would it be better to measure more discrete emotions such as societal anxiety, depression, joy, and satisfaction (based on Feldman-Barrett and Russell’s taxonomy of emotions)?  Would it be a more convincing argument if we tried to support the basic psychological needs (from Self Determination theory) of relatedness, autonomy, and competence?  Perhaps adding meaning/curiosity?  My gut tells me that some amount of nuance needs to be added to the word “happiness” to make it more face valid to the general public and that there is room for improvement from calling it “subjective well being”.

Some of the group that run yourmorals.org are considering writing a paper focusing on Libertarians and so I've been looking at the data for triends.  One consistent pattern we have found is that Libertarians (unsuprisingly) are more self rather than other oriented.  They aren't just extreme conservatives, but are qualitatively different.  They seem to moralize less and are more self vs. other oriented on scales like the Schwartz Values Scale.One hypothesis about this would be that Libertarians are less positively affected by other people.  Happiness research consistently shows that relationships are very important for people's happiness....This is true for both liberals and conservatives.  But is this the case for Libertarians?Consider the following 2 graphs.  The first one shows the relationship between a measure of depression symptoms (BSI - eg. "feeling blue" in the past 7 days) and a measure of abstract feelings toward others (Feeling Towards Others Scale by Belinda Campos at UC-Irvine, eg.  "For me, happiness comes from performing acts of kindness for others.").

....and here is a graph with a similar pattern replacing depression symptoms with Ed Diener's Satisfaction with Life Scale.

The interesting pattern is that feeling close to abstract other people (not explicitly friends or family, for whom the pattern is different) is positively related to life satisfaction and negatively related to depressive symptoms for everyone, liberal or conservative, except libertarians.There are of course caveats to this result (as there are in any research).  Our sample is limited to people who visit our website, who tend to be well educated internet users, so this may only be true for those kinds of people.  Still, this result seems to converge with other evidence, both in our data and in society, that libertarians are more self than other oriented (eg. Ayn Rand's book, the Virtue of Selfishness).  If positive affect motivates many people to be other oriented, then the fact that libertarians lack the other-orientation->positive emotion relationship would help explain their lack of other orientation.

Below are some highlights from Ed Diener’s talk, “New Findings on Happiness” at the world congress of positive psychology which took place from June 17-20 in Philadelphia.

Diener’s main focus appears to be on promoting the integration of measures of well-being into public policy, also a theme of his new book.  Towards that end, he sought to dispel one of the most widely believed findings dealing with happiness…the idea that people adapt to situations.  People do adapt, but situation matters and adaptation is not complete.  For example, in the Gallup World Poll Ladder of Life, 94% of danes score higher than 97% of togolese.

He emphasized that Happiness is not a single thing.  For example, the US scores well on positive affect, but has relatively high levels of negative affect.  There is a difference between Life satisfaction (related to income, conveniences, basic needs) and feelings/affect  (related to social suppoet, learning and flow, public trust).  He cited research by Berridge on wanting vs. liking showing how drug addicts want drugs, but eventually get less and less enjoyment out of them, even as they want them more.   Wanting and liking are separate things, which is why traditional materialist economics misses some part of the whole perspective on society. Materialists emphasize having what you want.  Positive psychology says happiness is liking what we have.

He also reiterated meta-analysis findings about how functional it is to be happy, to counter those who dismiss happiness as unimportant.  For example, increased happiness would significantly reduce health expenditures.
He has sent his new book, Well Being for Public Policy, to Obama’s staff.  He also gave talk to the CDC and they are measuring well being as part of health promotion.  The OECD is also planning to start collecting data on well being.  They publish a lot and as such are very influential.   He sees a big change in public policy since 1990.  The Uk and Canada collect well-being data and more progress is being made.