Happiness over Time

Today I’d like to cover what I believe to be one of the most, and maybe the only, important research topic- happiness research. If all other human drive-, the pursuit of influence, fortune, and deep interpersonal connections- are pursued in the service of the ultimate end of happiness, then it makes sense to investigate the relationship between the intermediate goals of wealth and love to the umbrella goal of wellbeing. In the article I have chosen today, two economists investigate changing average happiness levels for men and women over time in America. How does our life satisfaction change as we age? What changes in the lives of men and women are responsible for the trends that emerge?

The article I have chosen is entitled “Aspirations, attainments, and satisfaction: Life cycle differences between American women and men,” and was published in December 2008 in the Journal of Happiness Studies. It’s not too long, doesn’t bore with the nitty gritty of method, and is very accessible.

Here is the original article:
http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf

Here is a good summary from when the article was covered by Business Week last summer:
www.businessweek.com/careers/workingparents/blog/archives/2008/07/the_happiness_g.html

The economist Easterlin is also known for his research connecting income levels within and between countries to life satisfaction levels, in an article that is cited all the time in the continuing work on money’s exact relationship to well-being. Anke Plagnol has a background in economics and sociology and explores subjective well-being and gender equality.

Essentially, the findings of their study suggest that women in early life are happier than men, but that this pattern is reversed by the time adults reach the age of 50. The authors point to age 48 as the time at which average male life satisfaction exceeds that of females. Easterlin and Plagnol point to differences between marriage rates and financial satisfaction as the factors behind this result.
And now for the briefest of explorations into the methods of the experiment. The authors were hoping to tease out the gap between the aspirations and the attainments of their subjects, Discrepancies between what people consider part of a “good” life (aspirations), and what they consider themselves have now (attainments) should point to the missing components of one’s life that lead to imperfect happiness (unattained aspirations). The happiness and satisfaction data the authors use spans roughly from 1972-1993 and then biannually after ’94.
The authors analyzed aspirations and attainments over time across men and women. The pattern that emerges for marriage aspirations I thought was particularly interesting. In early adulthood, we see a large proportion of both genders seeking a happy marriage (approximately 9/10 individuals). What’s interesting is that the authors find that for both genders happy marriage ambitions decline over time, but that they decline at a faster rate for women. After the early 40’s, less women desire a happy marriage than men. The authors also find that in early adulthood women are more likely to have a happy marriage than men, while after middle age the opposite is true. Women want marriage less as they get older, but also have a happy marriage less often.
A somewhat similar trend emerges over time for women and men on the aspiration of possession of valuable (“big ticket”) consumer goods. In early adulthood, men report a larger gap between their aspirations and their attainments, reflecting a larger dissatisfaction with their finances overall. Women in later life are less satisfied with their finances, and indeed on averaged women own fewer valuable goods than men overall. In terms of differences in aspirations for material goods, the authors suggest that men and women do not significantly diverge on their desires, with the exception of clothing, which women desire significantly more. I wasn’t shocked by that finding, though I know a fair amount of male prepsters who are attached to a hefty wardrobe.
Unattained aspirations of lasting marriage and material satisfaction appear to produce the conclusions reported by Easterlin and Plagnol. A fulfilling family life (marriage) and financial well being are significant determinants of personal happiness. As I mentioned above, some of Easterlin’s studies seem to suggest that income does not predict happiness to as great an extent as we might have once thought. In the Easterlin and Plagnol study, however, we are looking at personal aspirations against personal attainments, essentially examining within subjects the unfulfilled goals on these fronts. In this way the two studies differ and so do not necessarily present contradictory findings.
What’s important about this study is not only what it says about the factors that prove important to the relative happiness levels of men and women, but also that legitimate differences in the patterns of well being for men and women at different stages in their lives exist at all. Of course individual happiness varies across demographic features (which were controlled for in this study), but it is, in my opinion, not intuitive that there would be a happiness gap between men and women at any age. Gender is a variable that is a significant predictor of well being. It’s important to look at how and why women and men experience different average happiness levels overtime- perhaps there are institutional solutions that can help to alleviate some of the factors that emerge later in life to decrease average happiness of women.