International Differences in Well-Being

International Differences in Well-Being

Series in Positive Psychology Christopher Peterson, Series Editor Well-Being for Public Policy Ed Diener, Richard E. Lucas, Ulrich Schimmack, and John Helliwell Oxford Handbook of Methods in Positive Psychology Anthony D. Ong A Primer in Positive Psychology Christopher Peterson A Life Worth Living: Contributions to Positive Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Handbook of Positive Psychology, 2nd Edition Shane J. Lopez and C. R. Snyder

International Differences in Well-Being

Edited by Ed Diener John F. Helliwell Daniel Kahneman

1

2010

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright
2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diener, Ed. International differences in well-being / Ed Diener, John F. Helliwell, Daniel Kahneman. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-973273-9 1. Well-being—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Quality of life—Cross-cultural studies. 3. Social indicators—Cross-cultural studies. I. Helliwell, John F. II. Kahneman, Daniel, 1934– III. Title. HN25.D54 2010 306.090 0511—dc22 2009026402

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (grant 2007–1180), Richard Suzman and the National Institute of Aging of the National Institute of Health (grant P30 AG024928), and the Roybal Centers for Translational Research on Aging for their generous support of the conference on which this book was built. We also thank Katherine Ryan for her diligent and thoughtful work putting together the volume, and Debbie Nexon for her invaluable assistance in organizing the Princeton Conference.

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Contents

Introduction

ix

Section I. Measuring Well-Being in an International Context 1

2

3

Income’s Association with Judgments of Life Versus Feelings Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman, William Tov, and Raksha Arora

3

The Structure of Well-Being in Two Cities: Life Satisfaction and Experienced Happiness in Columbus, Ohio; and Rennes, France Daniel Kahneman, David A. Schkade, Claude Fischler, Alan B. Krueger, and Amy Krilla

16

Culture and Well-Being: Conceptual and Methodological Issues Shigehiro Oishi

34

4

Life Satisfaction Arie Kapteyn, James P. Smith, and Arthur van Soest

70

5

Life (Evaluation), HIV/AIDS, and Death in Africa Angus Deaton, Jane Fortson, and Robert Tortora

105

Section II. International Comparisons of Income and Well-Being Through Time 6

Does Relative Income Matter? Are the Critics Right? R. Layard, G. Mayraz, and S. Nickell vii

139

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Contents

7

Happiness and Economic Growth: Does the Cross Section Predict Time Trends? Evidence from Developing Countries Richard A. Easterlin and Onnicha Sawangfa

8

Happiness Adaptation to Income Beyond ‘‘Basic Needs’’ Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch

9

The Easterlin and Other Paradoxes: Why Both Sides of the Debate May Be Correct Carol Graham, Soumya Chattopadhyay, and Mario Picon

166

217

247

Section III. International Differences in the Social Context of Well-Being 10

International Evidence on the Social Context of Well-Being John F. Helliwell, Chris Barrington-Leigh, Anthony Harris, and Haifang Huang

291

11

How Universal Is Happiness? Ruut Veenhoven

12

Faith and Freedom: Traditional and Modern Ways to Happiness Ronald F. Inglehart

351

The Impact of Time Spent Working and Job Fit on Well-Being Around the World James K. Harter and Raksha Arora

398

13

14

Index

Work, Jobs, and Well-Being Across the Millennium Andrew E. Clark

328

436

469

Introduction

A decade ago Kahneman, Diener, & Schwartz (1999) assembled thirty contributions from around the world to make a case for the scientific study of well-being. They argued in their introduction that the new field would require changing the balance of research efforts in psychology to pay more attention to the sources and consequences of positive states of mind, and relatively less to the study of depressed states of mind. To emphasize this difference, they suggested describing the new field as ‘‘hedonic psychology.’’ A central feature of hedonic psychology, and of the broader science of well-being of which it would be a part, would be to take subjective assessments of emotions and of life as a whole more seriously than they had been during the long reigns of behaviorism in psychology and of revealed preference in economics. There has been in the intervening years a strong growth of interest in the multi-disciplinary science of well-being. This growth, of breadth and scale, makes it impractical for a single conference and volume to do full justice to the current state of the field. Our chosen focus for this volume, and the Princeton conference at which the initial draft chapters were presented and discussed, is the measurement and explanation of international differences in well-being. There were a number of central questions: 1. What are the best ways of measuring well-being to facilitate international comparisons? 2. How much do various types of well-being measures differ among individuals, across countries, and over time, and why? 3. Do various measures of well-being, and the circumstances that appear to contribute to their explanation, differ in the extent to which their variation is within rather than among nations? ix

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Introduction

In the light of the answers to these general questions, two more specific questions were the focus of most of the research presented in this volume: 1. How much does income matter in explaining differences in well-being within countries, across countries, and over time? 2. Are measured international differences in well-being explained by common reactions to differences in local circumstances—for example, social conditions—or by culturally different assessments of the same circumstances of life? If both factors play a part, where does the balance lie?

In attempting to answer these questions, the chapter authors have been aided by the growing availability of internationally comparable measures of well-being and their likely correlates. Earlier work was made possible principally by the successive waves of the European and World Values Surveys (WVS). More recently the Gallup Organization sponsored a continuing evaluation of well-being through annual samples of 1,000 randomly selected respondents in each of more than 140 countries. Both the WVS and Gallup World Poll have used different measures of well-being, thus making it easier to answer some of the key questions outlined above. Without the wide availability of internationally comparable data, the questions posed above would have had to be answered by guesswork and conjecture. Although the answers we suggest here were made possible by access to these data, it is fair to say that all the chapters in this volume can be regarded as reports of work in progress. There are many unsettled issues that will require more data and more analysis, with the structure of surveys and studies adjusted to build on and test ideas suggested by the results now available. Some at the conference suggested that we should determine if there was enough consensus apparent in the data and discussions to support a ‘‘Princeton Manifesto’’ of suggestions for future conduct of international well-being surveys and analysis. Following are several of the candidates for inclusion in such a document. First, there was a strong consensus that it was important that several measures of subjective well-being need to be comparably collected to better understand the nature and consequences of international differences in subjective well-being. Three types of difference were considered of primary importance. One is between life evaluations and measures of mood or emotion. The second relates to the frequency of assessments, and the third embraces current versus retrospective evaluations. Many combinations are possible, and further research with comparable data should guide decisions about which particular measures and collection

Introduction

xi

methods can be combined to produce the most useful assessments at a reasonable cost. Accepting, collecting, and using multiple measures of well-being will be of greatest value if surveyors always try to adopt standard terminology, while continuing to test its validity. Research will be much aided by the use, where possible, of multiple measures within the same survey or set of studies, in order to better understand their similarities and differences and to examine how to best combine the insights from each. At this still-early stage of an empirical science of well-being, it would be unwise to try to reduce subjective well-being to a single measure. On those occasions where more general surveys might be able to include only a single measure, however, this is much better than nothing. Adding well-being questions or modules to existing mainline surveys would provide more frequent, geographically fine-grained, and contextually rich assessments of subjective well-being than would otherwise be available. Second, there were discussions and some general consensus about terminology. The core idea was to use well-being as the generic name for all well-being measures. The science of well-being has for many researchers, authors, and reporters been the science of ‘‘happiness.’’ However, this term is imprecise in referring to a variety of specific different states, as well as to the entire area of well-being. While there are good reasons for using the term happiness, from marketing through intuitive appeal to a desire to have a title that carries an important message, there remains a corresponding need for scientific precision to keep the research both understandable and in accord with the phenomena that we now understand are to some degree separable. Using our preferred terminology, measures of ‘‘happiness’’ would include only those derived from questions that explicitly ask about happiness. Happiness measures are always measures of well-being, but not vice versa. Other forms of well-being include evaluations of life (e.g., life satisfaction) and specific domains of life such as job satisfaction, positive feelings, and absence of negative feelings. We are concerned in this volume with two main sorts of international differences: the first relating to international differences in average well-being (and their explanations), and the second relating to differences among nations in the ways in which people frame their experiences, and in the ways in which life circumstances influence their reported well-being. To help answer the question about the extent to which measures of wellbeing and their determinants vary within and among nations, Figure 1 shows the international (between-nation) shares of total variance of the individual responses from the first three waves (2006–2008) of the Gallup World Poll. These ratios are all within the range from zero to one, with the

Introduction

Proportion of variance Due to Nations

xii

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1

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nv en Sa eho ien ce tis ld s Im fa in po cti co rta on me nc wi ) th e Pe of life rc ep Ca relig tio nt io n n ril of lad N c At ot or de en ten rup r ou d t gh ed ion m chu o D ne rch on y Li (fo a fe t ch ed od) m o Fr on i ie ce nd fre ey s ed t H el o c om pe ou d nt a o Af stra n fe ct nge D ba r Ti ona lan m te ce e us d ti m e fre e ed om

0

Figure 1 Between-Nation Shares of Variance.

former applying to variables having identical distributions in all countries (freedom to spend one’s time as one wishes, at .04, is the closest among the variables we have chosen), and 1.0 for the variables measured only at the national level, and hence having the same value for each individual within the same country. Because the circumstances of life differ much more between countries than do patterns of emotion, we would expect to find the between-country share of variance to be higher for life evaluations than it is for measures of emotion. That difference is apparent in Figure 1. Comparing the three different measures of subjective well-being, life evaluations (life satisfaction and the Cantril Ladder) have between-country shares of variance exceeding .25, whereas affect balance has a between-country share just below .06. The emotions that are averaged in the affect balance—enjoyment, laughter, worry, sadness, depression, and anger during the preceding day—are largely universal in their incidence, with relatively little difference from country to country. By contrast, there is much more international variation in average life assessments. When respondents from more than 140 countries covered in the first three waves of the Gallup World Poll were asked to evaluate their lives as a whole (using the Cantril Ladder, on a scale of 0 to 10), national averages range from an average of 3.3 for the bottom group of Togo, Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, to an average of almost 7.7 for the top four: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands.

Introduction

xiii

Is it really possible that people living in the countries with the lowest life evaluations could have had on average as much enjoyment and as little sadness as those living in the highest-ranking countries? The Gallup data say no. Across all countries, the correlation between national averages of affect balance and life evaluations is +.58. For the bottom four life-evaluation countries, the average affect balance is .32, compared to .65 for the four top countries. Thus emotions and life evaluations are telling a broadly consistent story about the level of well-being. Figure 1 shows that some life circumstances, such as the possession of household conveniences, and (the log of) household income, are even more international in their structure than are the two life-evaluation measures. Household consumption levels, as represented by the presence of a variety of household conveniences (see Chapter 1 for the details), differ more among nations than does household real income, and both have more between-country shares of variance than do the life-evaluation measures. One measure of basic needs—having sufficient money for food—has a larger degree of within-country variation. Measures of the social context, while also correlated with life evaluations, have more of their variation within than among countries. Importance of religion and religious observance both differ more among countries than does having friends or family to count on in times of need. The three measures of individual benevolence, all positively correlated with life evaluations (see Chapter 10), have declining international shares as they move from donating money through helping a stranger to donating time. Self-assessed freedoms are importantly correlated with life evaluations (see Chapters 1 and 10), with freedom to make life choices being more international than freedom to choose how one spends one’s time. Thus Figure 1 shows that various measures of well-being, and the circumstances that appear to contribute to their explanation, differ very greatly—by more than ten times in some cases—in the extent to which their variation is between nations. A natural question at this stage is whether the countries at the bottom of the life-evaluation ladder are there because of their obviously low average incomes, or because their material disadvantages are accompanied by social ones. The Gallup data show clearly that the latter is the case. Even though the social variables have relatively more within-country variance, their international differences are nonetheless large enough to contribute significantly to the explanation of average life evaluations across countries. For example, in the four lowest-ranking countries, only 55% of the respondents have

xiv

Introduction

relatives or friends that they can count on to help in times of trouble, compared to over 95% in the four top countries. Turning to the more specific empirical questions we have posed above, it is perhaps too soon to be offering conclusions in ‘‘manifesto’’ terms, or even in terms of consensus, because some of the chapter authors present different and diverging lines of evidence. It may nonetheless be useful to summarize some of the emerging outlines of research results reported in the chapters to follow. Below we present a brief outline of the chapters of the book. Although the book is divided into sections, readers will note that most chapters have implicit and explicit links to research reported in other sections. The first section primarily contains chapters assessing the nature and cross-cultural validity of different measures of well-being. The chapters in the second section (and some of those in other sections) attempt to assess the links between income and well-being, both across countries, and over time within countries. In Section III are grouped chapters in which non-economic determinants of well-being are assessed, both in the workplace and in life as a whole. In Section I of this book, the chapters address issues related to assessing well-being across cultures. The chapter authors ask about the different forms of well-being, and whether they show different patterns in various cultures. The chapters also raise the question of how to correct for biases in responding that might occur in different cultures, making comparisons of well-being results problematical. Thus, the first section of the book is ‘‘basic’’ in the sense of addressing definitional and measurement issues. In the first chapter in Section I, Diener, Kahneman, Tov, and Arora show that one should separately analyze judgments of life versus ongoing positive and negative feelings. The authors report that both income levels and changes in income are more strongly associated with people’s judgments of life than with their daily feelings of well-being. The Kahneman, Schkade, Fischler, Krueger, and Krilla chapter contrasts on-line feelings linked to time use and activities with global judgments of life. For example, they found that the rich and married are somewhat more satisfied with their lives, but not much happier from moment to moment. They also discovered that feelings of well-being in a city in France are similar to those in a city in the United States, and that time-use patterns, with several notable exceptions, were also remarkably similar across the two cultures. Kahneman et al. offer the theoretical suggestion that time-use patterns are very important to well-being, and that attention is also important. Thus, over time, people may attend less to situations that recur frequently in their lives, although habitual preoccupations as well as major life events can move people’s attention away from their immediate

Introduction

xv

situations, and therefore make the immediate situation less important to their feelings of well-being than is normally the case. Finally, the authors suggest that one reason we have overestimated the positive effects of states such as marriage or being rich is that we have, like our research subjects, focused primarily on the benefits of these states and have ignored the costs involved. Oishi looks more deeply at cultural differences in what is considered ‘‘well-being,’’ and the measurement and methodological issues arising from this variety in definitions. Oishi recommends that various forms of well-being be measured comparably in many nations so we may better understand differences in levels and correlates across societies. Next, Kapteyn, Smith, and Soest present a promising approach for calibrating well-being scores across cultures so that they are more likely to have the same meaning. Using this approach, they find that social relations are more important and income less important to global life satisfaction in both the United States and the Netherlands. They also find that income is more highly associated with life satisfaction in the United States than in the Netherlands. Finally, Deaton, Fortson, and Tortora use Gallup World Poll data to assess the well-being consequences of family deaths from various diseases, both within and among African countries. In most cases they fail to find the expected large negative effects on life evaluations of recent diseaserelated deaths in the family, although there are large effects on sadness and depression. Africans appear to care about poverty much more than they care about health, a result that poses serious problems for health policy in Africa. The authors consider the use of their results to derive monetary estimates of the value of life, and conclude, for a variety of reasons, that this would not be appropriate. In Section II of the book, the chapters are focused even more strongly on the correlations between income and well-being within and across societies, although chapters addressing this topic can be found in the first and last sections as well. The chapter authors address the degree to which income correlates with well-being in different cultures, and importantly, the degree to which income change correlates with changes in well-being. In 1974, Easterlin framed what has become known as the ‘‘Easterlin Paradox,’’ the seemingly contradictory findings that changes in income are not associated with changes in well-being, although cross-sectional analyses show that higher-income individuals do report greater well-being. This classic paper has framed the debate about income and ‘‘happiness’’ for the last several decades. The first chapter in this section, by Layard, Mayraz, and Nickell, uses time-series data from the richer industrial countries of Europe and North America to compare the importance of absolute and relative incomes

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as determinants of subjective well-being. They conclude that incomecomparison effects, rather than adaptation, provide the primary reason why, in the United States and many countries of Western Europe, life evaluations have not improved despite substantial increases in average per capita real incomes. In the Easterlin and Sawangfa chapter, time trends of income and wellbeing are compared for 13 developing countries. They find no significant relationship between changes in subjective well-being and those that would be predicted from cross-sectional relationships. Nor do they find evidence, across their sample countries, that the countries with higher growth rates have had greater increases in subjective well-being. Making use of the basic-needs hypothesis, Di Tella and MacCulloch conclude that the subjective well-being effects of income changes in wealthy nations are small, owing to adaptation, although such adaptation takes a number of years. Graham, Chattopadyay, and Picon review evidence showing that the effects of income growth depend on a number of factors, from the time frame selected, to the specification of the income variable, to the rates of economic growth. In addition, Graham et al. suggest the importance of aspiration levels, leading to the paradoxes of happy peasants and frustrated achievers. Thus, whether income growth is accompanied by increases in well-being seems to depend on a number of other variables, such as the type of well-being, the rate of changes in people’s aspirations, and previous levels of economic development. Chapters in other sections also focus on the empirical linkages between income and life satisfaction. In particular, Diener et al. in Section I and Inglehart in Section III find positive linkages over time between changes in life evaluations and changes in per capita incomes. In addition, the Gallup World Poll cross-section data analyzed by Helliwell et al., as well as in recent papers by Stevenson & Wolfers (2008) and Deaton (2008), show insignificant differences between within-country and between-countries estimates of the effects of income on life evaluations. Because the analyses are based on a different sampling of nations, different measures, and different time frames and types of analysis, we leave it to the reader to evaluate the current state of play in the continuing debate about the relative size and significance of the linkages between income changes and changes in well-being. In our view, the linkages are complicated and contextdependent, with the debate best regarded as unsettled. Unscrambling these complexities will be greatly aided by systematic periodic collection of a variety of measures of subjective well-being. In Section III of this volume are chapters that are primarily concerned with how social factors influence well-being across nations. The Helliwell,

Introduction

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Barrington-Leigh, Harris, and Huang chapter demonstrates the importance of institutional and social variables for well-being, and calculates the large income-equivalent values (or ‘‘compensating differentials’’) of several aspects of the social context. They also find that Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (generally described here as a ladder) and a measure of life satisfaction provide consistent explanations of the determinants of wellbeing, and can be combined to provide an even more robust explanation of well-being. The authors also conclude that the meaning and causes of a good life are largely the same across cultures, with the large cross-country differences in life evaluations being driven by correspondingly large differences in life circumstances. In the following chapter, Veenhoven echoes this sentiment, concluding that well-being depends on similar conditions across the globe, reflecting the degree to which human needs are met. Inglehart focuses on personal and political freedom as important causes of well-being. He concludes that income increases can raise well-being, but that rising social tolerance and political freedom have been more important causes of increasing well-being. He also discusses the impact of belief systems and ideologies; for example, religiosity, on well-being. Harter and Arora describe analyses of the Gallup World Poll that show that good job fit—being in work that allows one to use one’s best skills—predicts both life evaluations and daily affect. Furthermore, working more hours is more detrimental to feelings of well-being for those with poor job fit. Clark pursues the nature of satisfying work, and trends over time. He concludes that there was a dip in job satisfaction during the 1990s, but that positive attitudes bounced back by 2005. However, Clark also finds that people now give more importance to the social aspects of jobs. Most people say they would prefer to be self-employed, although the rates of self-employment have dropped over time, suggesting to Clark that the barriers to selfemployment have grown. Based on the results in all chapters, and especially in the three chapters to which they have themselves directly contributed, the editors conclude that international differences in reported well-being are not just larger for life evaluations than for reports of affective experience, but are more readily explained by differing economic and social circumstances. Furthermore, we find that international differences in life evaluations are quite readily explicable in terms of shared evaluations of life circumstances across societies. Hence, the large international differences in average life-evaluation scores (whether measured by satisfaction with life or the Cantril Ladder of life) are to be explained primarily by the different economic and social circumstances in which people live, and much less by differences in their ways of viewing life.

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References Deaton, A. (2008). Income, health and well-being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22, 53–72. Easterlin, R.A. (1974). Does economic growth improve the human lot? In Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (Eds.), Nations and households in economic growth: Essays in honor of Moses Abramovitz. New York: Academic Press, Inc. Kahneman, D., Diener, E., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.). (1999). Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2008). Economic growth and subjective well-being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox. Brookings papers on economic activity, Spring 2008, 1–87.

Section I

Measuring Well-Being in an International Context

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Chapter 1 Income’s Association with Judgments of Life Versus Feelings Ed Dienera, Daniel Kahnemanb, William Tovc, and Raksha Arorad a

University of Illinois Princeton University c Singapore Management University d The Gallup Organization b

Attention has recently been drawn to the fact that ‘‘happiness’’ is actually not a single entity, and can be divided into distinct elements. Kahneman (1999) suggested that global judgments such as an evaluation of ‘‘life satisfaction’’ computed and reported at a single moment in time are fundamentally different than the pleasantness of people’s emotional lives. In support of this distinction, Lucas, Diener, & Suh (1996) found that various forms of subjective well-being are empirically separate. Thus, it is no longer sufficient to simply discuss and study well-being; the various forms of well-being must be assessed and analyzed. The major distinction that Kahneman described was between global evaluative judgments and people’s feelings of pleasure and displeasure summated over time. We suggest that the various self-report measures of subjective well-being are saturated to varying degrees with judgment and affect. Although perhaps no well-being measure is totally free of either of these components, it is plausible that a global measure of ‘‘life satisfaction’’ taken at one point in time might be more heavily weighted with judgment, whereas reports of ‘‘happiness’’ might be more saturated with affect. In the present study discussed in this chapter, we were fortunate to have two measures that appeared a priori to be toward the two ends of the judgment–affect dimension, Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (1965), which for brevity we refer to as the ‘‘Ladder’’ throughout this chapter, as well as a report of yesterday’s affect. We analyzed two additional measures, life satisfaction and happiness, that we predicted would fall between the Ladder and affect scales on the judgment–affect dimension, but each closer to the opposite poles. 3

4

Section I: Measuring Well-Being in an International Context

One goal of our study was to determine whether judgment and affect measures perform differently and to identify the mix of the two processes reflected in certain scales. We examined the intercorrelations among the measures at both the individual and national levels, as well as their correlations with external variables such as income. We also examined how the measures changed over time in response to movements in income. In this way we aimed to explore the correlates of affect versus judgment measures of well-being. In a classic 1974 article, Richard Easterlin asked whether economic growth improves ‘‘the human lot,’’ and he focused on ‘‘happiness’’ to answer the question. The ‘‘Easterlin paradox’’ is the paradoxical fact that differences between people in income are usually correlated with reports of well-being, but as national incomes grew, there was seldom substantial growth in wellbeing. Much debate has ensued about whether nations have in fact risen in average well-being over time in response to increasing income. Hagerty & Veenhoven (2003), Stevenson & Wolfers (2008), and Inglehart, Foa, Peterson, & Welzel (2008) all claimed that, on the whole, the evidence suggests that there was increasing subjective well-being in many nations, and that this was associated with rising incomes. An examination of the data reported in these articles, however, indicates variability in the findings. For example, in a response to Hagerty and Veenhoven, Easterlin (2005) pointed out that many nations in fact grew in income over time and did not increase in well-being. Easterlin presented reports of happiness over the decades in the United States, which were essentially flat, and contrasted that pattern with the substantial economic growth the country experienced during the same period of time. He concluded that across nations there are ‘‘disparate trends in happiness, suggesting that factors other than growth in income are responsible for the differential trends in happiness’’ (p. 429). In response, Veenhoven & Hagerty (2006) suggest that, on average, happiness increases occurred in nations where income rose the most. Stevenson and Wolfers argue that increasing income has led to increases in happiness, but they also point to the substantial statistical uncertainty in a few of their conclusions. Inglehart (2008) suggested that life satisfaction might be more influenced by economic conditions than is happiness, and this suggestion forms the starting point for our income analyses. We examine the possibility that various forms of well-being vary in their responsiveness to income change. Specifically, it could be that judgments and affective well-being vary in how much they are associated with economic growth. We analyze the correlation of four well-being variables that we hypothesize lie along the judgment versus affect dimension, with several economic variables— income, income change, and the ownership of modern conveniences such as televisions. Thus, we explore whether some of the past differences in

Income’s Association with Judgments of Life Versus Feelings

5

conclusions about the money–happiness relation are due to the differential association of various types of well-being with income. To examine income change and well-being change, we examined income changes over the interval from an early survey to a later survey for each type of well-being. The minimum for inclusion in our analysis was a period greater than or equal to five years, and the average for each of the measures was an interval of several decades. We selected the surveys for each type of well-being measure that were the most distant from each other in time, and used the incomes for the corresponding years for each nation. We were fortunate in this study to have a representative sample of virtually the entire adult population of the world. Unlike many previous studies, the Gallup World Poll (GWP) includes many less economically developed nations, and a representative sample of rural residents outside the major metropolitan areas of these nations. We were also fortunate that the survey included both a global judgment of life measure and an assessment of emotions experienced ‘‘yesterday.’’ One issue with past research is that the wording of questions was different in various surveys conducted over the decades. Thus, we focused on surveys that used very similar or identical wording and the same response formats. In our analyses we relied most heavily on the analyses of national data, not individual data, for several reasons. First, we have longitudinal data over time only for nations, and this is a keystone of our analyses. Second, the Easterlin claim about income change is that, in the aggregate, at the societal level income increases do not raise well-being, because as the income of everyone rises, the standard for adequate income also rises. Thus, our analyses focus on the national level, but we also examined individual data in the Gallup World Poll to determine whether the same dimensionality can be found in the well-being measures, and whether the predictors are the same as at the national level. In sum, there were two goals in our study. First, we analyzed measures of well-being to determine whether they are separable, but associated in a way reflecting an underlying dimension related to global evaluative judgments versus the ongoing experience of affect. Second, we examined income and other predictors to determine whether they are most related cross-sectionally to the judgment versus affective ends of the well-being dimension, and whether income changes relate more to judgment or to affect.

Methods

The Gallup Organization initiated its World Poll in 2005, and the first wave, conducted from late 2005 to 2006, includes representative surveys of

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Section I: Measuring Well-Being in an International Context

132 societies accounting for about 96 percent of the world’s population. The poll features a consistent set of standard questions in all surveys and uses nationwide samples (with the exception of Angola, Myanmar, and Cuba, where only urban populations were surveyed; and Afghanistan, where there were representative provinces). Two sampling procedures were used in the World Poll: random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone surveys and face-to-face interviews. The RDD design was used in countries where the vast majority of the population has access to land line telephones. In all other countries, face-to-face surveys were conducted with clusters of households (obtained from census tract listings) serving as the basis for random sampling. The typical World Poll survey in a country consisted of approximately 1,000 respondents. The total sample size for the wave 1 World Poll was 140,658. Wave 2 of the survey (2007) presented an additional well-being question on life satisfaction that was not included in the first wave. Thus, we analyzed the association of the well-being measures at the individual level using wave 2, which included 113,872 respondents from 105 nations. Approximately 55,497 respondents were presented with the life satisfaction question. We used two measures of well-being from wave 1 of the Gallup World Poll. The Ladder measure asks respondents to evaluate their life on a scale from 0 (worst possible) to 10 (best possible). The item queries respondents as to which step on the Ladder they feel that they personally stand at the present time. Another measure assesses the recent experience of emotions; namely, positive feelings (enjoyment and smiling/laughter) and negative feelings (sadness, anger, worry, and depression). To reduce the extent of bias in recalling past experiences, respondents reported (yes or no) whether they experienced lots of these feelings during the previous day. We averaged enjoyment and smiling and subtracted the average of the four negative emotions to create an Affect Balance score. We averaged the individual scores to create nation-level scores after weighting the individual scores by sample demographic weights to bring the national scores as close as possible to representativeness. The additional measure of well-being in wave 2 on Life Satisfaction asked respondents how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale ranging from 0 (Dissatisfied) to 10 (Satisfied). The Gallup World Poll also queried respondents about their ownership of modern household conveniences, and we averaged four of these to create a composite Conveniences score—electricity, telephone, television, and computer. In addition, we analyzed a question that asked how free subjects were in deciding how to spend their time. The question, answered on a binary Yes–No response scale, asked: ‘‘Were you able to choose how you spent your time all day yesterday?’’

Income’s Association with Judgments of Life Versus Feelings

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In addition to the Gallup World Poll, we also obtained well-being measures for nations from Veenhoven’s (2008) ‘‘World Database on Happiness.’’ We searched for those nations where the same four-point happiness question was asked at two points in time separated by more than five years. When the scale had been administered more than two times, we used the first and last administrations. The question asked: ‘‘Taking all things together, would you say you are: 4 – Very happy, 3 – Quite happy, 2 – Not very happy, or 1 – Not at all happy?’’ We used variants of this scale where the identical scale and responses had been used at both points in time. For example, in some administrations of the scale, the 3 response is labeled ‘‘Pretty happy.’’ We used scores from these variations if the identical scale was used in that nation at two points in time at least five years apart. We also obtained Time 1 scores for nations where the Ladder had been administered previously, and used the oldest date where the 0 to 10 response format was employed. There were often small changes in the Ladder scale from the earlier to the later administration. For instance, the early administration often showed steps ascending a mountain, whereas the later administration simply showed a ladder with steps. For life satisfaction Time 1, we used the oldest administration in each nation where the same 0 to 10 format was used as in the Gallup World Poll. However, in order to increase our number of nations for life satisfaction, we also used instances where the response format was 1 to 10, as long as earlier and later dates were available using the same response scale, which were separated by at least five years. One nation, the Dominican Republic, was dropped from the analyses of the Ladder scale because its score was an extreme outlier, far lower than any score ever reported. The score was so low that we suspect that it is an error, or a temporary response to some acute disaster. Although there are several sources that provide GDP per capita data, they differ in the years for which data are available. Given that our data set spanned over three decades, we sought a single source of GDP per capita estimates rather than drawing from different sources that may differ in terms of their estimation methods. Therefore, we used income data from Maddison (2007), who provided a broad coverage of estimates for GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity in 1990 international dollars.

Results

Our general plan was to first use the large GWP to examine how well-being measures are related to one another cross-sectionally at a point in time. We next analyzed how they relate to predictors such as income. These analyses were computed at both the national and individual levels. In the second set

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Section I: Measuring Well-Being in an International Context

of analyses, we examined how national changes in income over time are associated with country-level changes in the well-being measures. We also analyzed the magnitude of the changes in well-being. Cross-Sectional Analyses

Our analyses begin with cross-sectional correlations among the well-being measures themselves, to explore their relations to each other. We correlated the nation-level well-being averages for four measures of well-being at the most recent time of the surveys. We further explored at the nation-level the composition of Life Satisfaction and Happiness by predicting them simultaneously with both the Ladder and Affect Balance scores of nations. Life Satisfaction was predicted most strongly by the Ladder score (Beta = .67, p < .01), although Affect Balance also significantly added to the prediction (Beta = .27, p < .01). When the predictors are entered in a sequential manner, the Ladder accounted for 33 percent of the variance in Life Satisfaction beyond Affect Balance, whereas Affect Balance accounts for only 5 percent when the Ladder is entered first. Together these two measures account for 71 percent of the variance in the Life Satisfaction of nations. Happiness was also predicted by the Ladder (Beta .36, p < .01), with the Affect Balance also predicting positively (Beta = .48, p