Tag Archives: happiness

Childhood predictors of adult outcomes

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Two papers in The Economic Journal November 2014 deal with how childhood information may predict adult outcomes.

Frijters, Johnston and Shields consider the question Does Childhood Predict Adult Life Satisfaction? Using repeated surveys of people born in the UK in 1958, they are able to explain only 7 % of people’s adult life satisfaction with a very wide range of family and childhood variables. Interestingly, exploiting the panel dimension, they estimate that around 40 % of adult life satisfaction is a trait (i.e. fixed), so it is surprising that their first number is so low. It is as if type of childhood almost does not matter. Education and wages are predicted much better.

I do not know if information on time preferences would have helped, but Golsteyn, Grönqvist and Lindahl at least claim that Adolescent Time Preferences Predict Lifetime Outcomes in their article in the same issue. They find that Swedes who were future-oriented (had low discount rates) as children went on to obtain more education, better grades, higher incomes, and better health (obesity and mortality) as adults than their more impatient peers. The authors are admirably clear that they are not estimating causal effects.

Hell is unhappiness

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Religious beliefs have been associated with happiness, but psychologists Shariff and Aknin (PLOS ONE) take a more disaggregated look:

They construct life satisfaction and daily affect measures from the Gallup World Poll and put it together with country-level beliefs in Heaven and Hell from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey. Believing in Heaven is associated with greater well-being, believing in Hell with lower. This cross-national comparison shows the relationship between aggregate measures of daily well-being and “the percentage of population that believes in Heaven minus percentage that believes in Hell”:

There are also some regression results controlling for some things.

What is the causality? Shariff and Aknin also conduct an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: People primed to think of Hell by writing a short paragraph about it reported lower happiness and positive emotions and higher sadness, fear and negative emotions afterwards compared to people writing about Heaven or an unrelated topic. The Heaven group or the control group did not differ from each other.

H/t: Kevin Lewis

Children and happiness

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Contemplating whether or the number of children to have? Take a look at “A Global Perspective on Happiness and Fertility” by Margolis and Myrskylä. The authors use data from 25 years of the World Value Survey, totalling 86 countries and over 200 000 respondents. They are interested in what the relation between what people answer on the question “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, somewhat happy, or not at all happy?” and their number of children.

Margolis and Myrskylä find that a higher number of children is associated with lower happiness, but stress that looking at this in the aggregate is highly misleading. This is shown by breaking the data down by subcategories and plotting the results. In particular, they “find that the association between happiness and fertility evolves from negative to neutral to positive above age 40,” as shown e.g. here:

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FIGURE 3 Happiness and number of children by age and sex, from Margolis, R. and Myrskylä, M. (2011), A Global Perspective on Happiness and Fertility. Population and Development Review, 37: 29–56. doi: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2011.00389.x

So more children may pay off in the long run. Though it must be said that this is just descriptive, but valuable and interesting nevertheless. There are more graphs like this one, and the results can be understood simply by looking at the graphs.

With also the recent report that “economists with two or more kids tend to produce more research, not less, than their one-child or childless colleagues” in hand and just having achieved the second, I am expecting a short-term boost in productivity and long-term in happiness.