Median wages of all US workers:
When you take all men, not just those working fulltime, into account, the slight decline in the above graph becomes a plummet of 28% in median real wages from 1969 to 2009.
For more, see Wages Aren't Stagnating, They're Plummeting by , July 31, 2012 at Wonkblog.
For more, see The Only Advanced Country Without a National Vacation Policy? It's the U.S. by , July 2, 2012 at The Atlantic.
Americans anticipated they would feel twice as happy if their salaries more than doubled. But when researchers polled participants at two different income levels, they found that people making more than twice as much were only 9% happier than those making the original amount.
The "price of happiness" has made news before—-it's how much people need to make per year to feel happy and fulfilled. According to a recent Marist poll, that magic number falls somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000.Respondents to the poll who made more than $50,000 were more satisfied with their lives when it came to factors ranging from friends, to health, to how they spent their time. More than general lifts in salary (like getting a raise from $35,000 to $40,000, or even $60,000 to $65,000), that specific number was the happiness tipping point: "$50,000 is the mark where you start to see significant differences," researcher Susan McCulloch told LearnVest.
For more, see Does More Money Really Bring Happiness?, July 19, 2012 at Fox Business.
Using surveys from 1983, 2006 and 2009, the research from Carnegie Mellon University's Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts found a 10 to 30% increase in stress levels among all demographic categories over the past quarter-century.
For more, see Stress During Recession Hits One Group Particularly Hard by , June 14, 2012 at LiveScience.
For more, see The 10 Things Economics Can Tell Us About Happiness by , May 31, 2012 at The Atlantic.
From a good, long article ...
America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway.
Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.
When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
I'm not sure his solution will work, but for more, see The New American Divide by , January 21, 2012 at WSJ.com.
The threat of fresh economic turmoil and social upheaval threaten to put at risk the gains produced by globalisation, the World Economic Forum said.
The survey of 469 global experts identified chronic problems with government finances and severe income inequality as the most prevalent risks over the next decade."These risks in tandem threaten global growth as they are drivers of nationalism, populism and protectionism at a time when the world remains vulnerable to systemic financial shocks, as well as possible food and water crises", the report said.
The study said early hopes that closer global integration would inevitably lead to higher living standards for all were at risk of being dashed by trends that left large numbers of people fearful about the future.
For more, see World Economic Forum Warns of Economic Turmoil and Social Upheaval by , January 11, 2012 at guardian.co.uk.
Growth commonly refers to an increase in gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of a country's goods and services in a given period. Because overall GDP can correlate with higher quality of life, officials in the U.S. and around the world often target GDP growth as an overriding policy objective in itself. But the correlation is strongest when countries are poor. After a point, studies show, the size of the economy has little bearing on living standards.James Gustave Speth, a professor at Vermont Law School and author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, notes that the U.S. has the largest economy in the world, yet among wealthy nations it ranks last or near the bottom in 30 indicators of well-being, such as childhood poverty, income disparity, obesity, infant mortality, school performance, and prison population.
In 1950, ... per capita GDP in the U.S. was a fraction of what it is today (about one-fourth in adjusted dollars), yet surveys of happiness and life satisfaction — not to mention other indicators of well-being — have declined steadily.
For more, see The Growth of Degrowth Economics by , December 15, 2011 at Miller-McCune.
Taking it easy isn't the key to a long life, according to new research. Instead, it's the hard-working, prudent types who live the longest.The findings come from an unprecedented study of 1,528 gifted children followed from the early 1920s until their deaths. The health and longevity part of the project has been under way for 20 years, with the results published in a new book, "The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study" (Hudson Street Press, March 2011).
Among the findings: Conscientious, prudent people live a few years longer than carefree, happy-go-lucky sorts. Marriage lengthens life for men, but makes little difference for women, and social ties are longevity boosters for both genders. Hard workers who advanced in their careers and took on more responsibility were also more likely to live long, healthy lives.
The researchers also found that men with what they termed "feminine" personality traits — a willingness to reach out to others and share feelings — outlived those with more closed-off, "masculine" traits. In the same way, more feminine women outlived more masculine women.
For much more, see Hard-Working and Prudent? You'll Live Longer by , March 15, 2011 at LiveScience.
Researchers who study how people's sense of well-being varies from place to place decided to compare their findings with suicide rates.The surprising result: The happiest places sometimes also have the highest suicide rates.
"Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life," suggested Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England.
The new study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, looked at the 50 states and the District of Columbia.It lists the top 10 states for well-being as Utah, Louisiana, Colorado, Minnesota, Wyoming, Hawaii, Arizona, Delaware, Florida and Nevada.
Four of those states also are in the top 10 for suicide rates, with Nevada ranked 3rd, Wyoming, 5th; Colorado, 6th; and Utah, 9th.
Among the others, Arizona was 11th and Florida, 15th.
The 10 states with the lowest well-being ratings are: Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan and Rhode Island.
Just one of those states, West Virginia, is among the top 10 for suicides, ranking No. 8. The only other state in the top 20 was Kentucky at 16th.
For more, see Study: Some Happy States Have High Suicide Rates by , April 25, 2011 at Fox News.
If you look at snapshot data, richer people are happier than poorer people, and wealthier countries have more satisfied populations than less well-off nations. But when you look at data collected over time, more income doesn't bring happiness.
The paradox seems impossible on the surface, but there's good reason happiness and income could be linked in the short-term and not over many years, according to Easterlin. As people's incomes rise, he said, so do their aspirations. When incomes fall, he said, aspirations don't. No one wants to give up the standard of living they've grown accustomed to. So in the short term, an economic collapse is painful, while growth feels good.But in the long run, Easterlin said, more wealth simply creates more want.
"The higher your income goes up the more your aspiration goes up," he said. "Over time, the change in aspirations negates the effect of changing income."
The results suggest that individuals and policy makers should focus on non-monetary factors, like health and family concerns, that influence happiness, Easterlin said.
But ...
Writing for the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers argued that the new study doesn't prove the Easterlin paradox exists.
For more, see Global Study: Money Doesn't Buy Happiness by , December 14, 2010 at FoxNews.com.
Religious people are more satisfied with their lives than nonbelievers, but a new study finds it's not a relationship with God that makes the devout happy. Instead, the satisfaction boost may come from closer ties to earthly neighbors.According to a study published today (Dec. 7) in the journal American Sociological Review, religious people gain life satisfaction thanks to social networks they build by attending religious services.
"We think it has something to do with the fact that you meet a group of close friends on a regular basis, together as a group, and participate in certain activities that are meaningful to the group," Lim said. "At the same time, they share a certain social identity, a sense of belonging to a moral faith community. The sense of belonging seems to be the key to the relationship between church attendance and life satisfaction."While a higher number of secular close friendships were also associated with life satisfaction, church friendships seem to involve something that lifts satisfaction even more, Lim said.
For more, see Why Religion Makes People Happier (Hint: Not God) by , December 7, 2010 at Live Science.
Dismal scientists who look at happiness often contend that, beyond a GDP per capita of just $15,000 (measured at purchasing-power parity), money does not buy happiness. Up to that point the correlation between the two is strong, but thereafter it falls away. If this is true then some heretical conclusions follow: rich America is no happier than poorer Brazil, so what is the point in people who live in rich countries working harder to get ever richer? Politicians should concentrate on maximising the mental health of their voters, rather than the size of their pay checks. But plot the data another way, on a logarithmic scale where each increment represents a 100% increase in income per head, and the relationship between wealth and happiness looks more robust.
From Money and Happiness, November 25, 2010 at The Economist.
What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger—or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage.According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy's large eyes to be
mildly stressful.But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human.
For more, see Mother's Fatty Diet Makes Baby Monkeys Afraid of Mr. Potato Head by , November 19, 2010 at Discover Magazine blogs.
You make a lot of decisions based on how you think they will make you feel in the future. Car dealers ask you to think about how happy you'll be driving a beautiful new car. Ads for seafaring cruises ask you to think about how great you'll feel after a relaxing vacation. On the flip side, people work hard for a new promotion believing that if they don't advance in their career, they will be devastated.The evidence is pretty clear, though, that big positive and negative events don't have an enormous impact on people's happiness. In a 1998 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and their colleagues found that college faculty being evaluated for tenure believed they would be quite unhappy if they were denied tenure. Several months after their tenure decision, though, college faculty who had been denied tenure were no less happy than those who had gotten tenure.
... people have difficulty remembering their initial prediction for how they would feel after a positive or negative event. In one study, they asked voters in the 2008 election how they would feel a week after the election if Barack Obama won. Supporters of John McCain rated that they would be quite unhappy. A week after the election, these same voters were contacted again and asked how happy they were. They were also asked to recall how happy they said they would be before the election. These voters were significantly happier than they predicted they would be (that is the affective forecasting error). They also remembered their prediction as being less extreme than it was. That is, they did not remember predicting that they would be very unhappy.The researchers demonstrated that this poor memory for previous predictions makes it hard for people to learn to predict better in the future.
Do these affective forecasting errors really matter? In fact, these errors may be both a blessing and a curse.On the positive side, it can be motivating to be very concerned about a future event. College faculty approaching tenure are often quite productive in the years before their evaluation, because they believe that the outcome of this decision will hugely influence their career. Even though the actual tenure decision won't influence their future happiness much, this hard work may still lay important groundwork for their research in years to come.
On the negative side, though, these affective forecasting errors can also lead to bad decisions. If you really believe that a sports car will make you happier, you may overpay to own it. That means that you will spend a lot of money on a purchase that ultimately won't affect your happiness that much.
For more, see Your Future Happiness Depends Less on the Present than You Might Think by , November 12, 2010 at Psychology Today.
Comparing people's happiness against income, the researchers found that the more money people earned, the higher their overall life satisfaction. But people's day-to-day emotional state rose with average annual income only until about $75,000, after which additional income made no further difference (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1011492107).People's emotional state may stabilise above $75,000 because they no longer have to worry about meeting basic necessities, Deaton says. This allows them to settle into whatever innate level of moment-to-moment happiness their personality permits, he says.
Economic policy-makers need to be aware of the difference between these two forms of happiness, says Deaton. "Should public policy concern itself with emotional wellbeing, or with people's evaluation of their life?" Most likely, the answer will be some combination of the two. "The good life contains several things, and feelings are just one part of it," says Marc Fleurbaey, an economist at the University of Paris-Descartes.
For more, see Money Can Buy You Happiness — Up to a Point by Bob Holmes, September 7, 2010, at NewScientist.
The world really does look gray to depressed people, at least on a subconscious level, new research suggests.
The new study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, relies on an objective measure of the retina, suggesting depressed people may see the world in a different way from the non-depressed.
The research team had 40 patients with major depression and 40 healthy individuals view a sequence of five black-and-white checkerboards of different contrasts. Each checkerboard flickered (with a black square turning white and white turning black) 12 times per second on a computer screen.Meanwhile, the researchers used an objective measure called the pattern electroretinogram, which is similar to an electrocardiogram (ECG) of the retina of the eye. The retina ECG shows the response of neurons inside the retinal cells. "That's not conscious vision, it's much earlier than you conscioulsy (sic) perceive something, within milliseconds," said lead researcher Dr. Ludger Tebartz van Elst.
The depressed patients had dramatically lower retinal responses to the varying black-and-white contrasts than healthy individuals. The results held regardless of whether patients were taking antidepressants.
While the researchers aren't sure exactly why depressed people might sort of "see the world as gray," they have a strong hypothesis. Here's how they figure it works: Contrast vision relies on so-called amacrine cells within the retina, which horizontally connect the retina's neurons called ganglion cells with each other. These cells rely on dopamine, a substance known to be important for drive and attention — when lacking, two main symptoms of depression."We think the retina is some sort of outpost marker of the integrity of the dopaminergic system in the whole brain," van Elst said. So the dopamine is linked with both the vision and the depression.
For more, see Depressed People Really Do See a Gray World by Jeanna Bryner, July 20, 2010, at Live Science.
The notion that money can’t buy happiness has, in recent years, been backed up by a lot of psychological research. But this confirmation of time-honored wisdom begs the question: Why the hell not?
Affluent individuals, and less-wealthy people with money on their minds, are less likely to slow down and savor the Snickers....
In other words, that rich guy undoubtedly gets a kick out of driving his Porsche to the beach. But once he meets you there, you’re more likely to get a genuine thrill out of the gorgeous sunset.
Quoidbach and his colleagues reached this conclusion after conducting two studies....
The second experiment featured 40 volunteers, who ostensibly participated in a taste-testing study featuring varieties of chocolate. All began by filling out a survey; in the process of doing so, half were exposed to a photograph of money. [Emphasis added].
As they consumed pieces of chocolate, the test subjects were surreptitiously observed by two researchers who used stopwatches to measure the time they spent savoring each treat. The researchers also evaluated how much joy the participants showed on their faces as they tasted the chocolate.
After controlling for gender (to no one’s surprise, the men ate more quickly) and overall attitudes toward chocolate, the researchers found those who had been exposed to the photo of cash “spent significantly less time eating the chocolate, and displayed significantly less enjoyment.”
From Money Makes You Less Likely to Savor Small Pleasures by Tom Jacobs, May 24, 2010, at Miller-McCune.
Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall -- whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages, the survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries found.But the survey also showed that a key element of what many people consider happiness -- positive feelings -- is much more strongly affected by factors other than cold, hard cash, such as feeling respected, being in control of your life and having friends and family to rely on in a pinch.
"Yes, money makes you happy -- we see the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and universal around the world," said Ed Diener, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois who led the study. "But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day."
"What we didn't know before is the extent to which life evaluation and emotional well-being are so distinct," Kahneman said. "When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word -- it's happiness. People do not distinguish."
For more, see Money Can Buy One Form of Happiness, Massive Global Study Concludes by Rob Stein, July 1, 2010, at washingtonpost.com.
For more, see One World, Many Places the World's Most Satisfied Local Communities by Ipsos Social Research Institute, June 1, 2010.
Also see the similar post Mind: Global Wellbeing.
