Wealth, education, and occupational prestige do not predict happiness, but a good family life does: I've listed below those factors that best predict feeling that your life is a very happy one (according to GSS data):
Correlations between various factors and personal happiness
1. Being happily married .48
2. Satisfied with family life .34
3. Satisifed with friendships .31
4. Satisified with one's health .27
5. One's overall health .25
6. Satisfied with job .22
7. Feeling that things are worthwhile .22
If people have high scores on all these predictors, about 90% of them are very happy. Indicators of social status--income, education, job prestige--are only weakly related to being happy. I hate to concede that any wisdom can be found in Hollywood, but the popular message that a guy should invest in family over career seems to make sense.
Are gun owners mentally ill?
Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...
Where do you get those rankings from? When I looked at national survey data, northern European countries ranked at the top of the list. Happiness is subjective--I see no better measure of something subjective than with a subjective answer. I have been unhappy in my life and would have said precisely this on a survey, and I have been happy too and my answer would have been totally valid, albeit changing as life changes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the data and the link--very interesting. One pattern that emerges is that southern Europe ranks low. We're really talking about three things here: happiness, life satisfaction, and objective well-being. The GSS asks about overall happiness, so they seem to be measuring an emotional state that a person feels on average. I point I drew from the numbers is that this emotional state is only weakly related to the things we might expect--indicators of status. I think your numbers also show that this emotional state is weakly related at a national level to objective conditions: many Third World countries report greater happiness than developed countries. People are clearly better off in wealthier countries, but this does not necessarily translate into the emotional state we call happiness. Of course, it's good to have all the things that come with prospertity and status, but it is also good--and ultimately more important in my mind--to be happy.
ReplyDeleteAnd you are right that happiness is influenced by perception and by disposition. You make a very good point that the correlation between a satisfying family life and general happiness could be due to naturally happy people reporting both and naturally unhappy people reporting neither. So I guess the moral here is that if you cannot change your disposition, maybe you can become happier by changing your priorities.