From WSJ’s Wealth Report:

PNC Wealth Management recently polled about 1,500 Americans with $500,000 or more in investible assets and found that 69% of respondents made most of their fortune through work, business ownership or investments. Only 6% made their wealth by inheriting it, while 25% made it through a combination of inheritence and earnings.

What’s most interesting is that the survey found some major differences in the two groups’ attitudes about money — and their responses didn’t always break down along predictable lines:

[...]

LUCK — Fully 37% of earners agreed that “the money I have made so far has come from being at the right place at the right time.” Among heirs, the number was 25%. I guess the heirs don’t subscribe to Warren Buffett’s “lucky sperm” theory.

HAPPINESS– Fuly 76% of earners agree that “my financial success lets me feel less stress and worry,” compared to 50% of heirs. Half of all earners agree that “as I have accumulated more money in my life I have become happier,” compared to a third of heirs.

I especially like the luck result. It’s hard work getting born to the right parents.

[HT: Free Exchange]

Alex Singleton makes a nice point:

We moan about modern Britain in a way that does not seem to scientifically correlate to how good - or bad - it is, empirically. Indeed, complaining is something of a national pastime and, ironically, something that people seem to enjoy.

Far from being a major problem, there is something virtuous about being unhappy with our present circumstances. Ludwig von Mises, one of the 20th century’s leading free-market economists, said (pdf) that to be happy with one’s existing condition: “and to abstain apathetically from any attempts to improve one’s own material conditions, is not a virtue. Such an attitude is rather animal behaviour than conduct of reasonable human beings.”

It is not the level of wealth that makes us happy. Instead, it is the process of betterment - the pursuit of it - that makes us happy. Whether we are twice as rich today as in 1971 has little bearing on our happiness, because it is in the past. Whether people can see their lives improving in the future is what counts. That is why economic growth remains a key component in happiness, despite what the happiness researchers might tell us.

There really is something wonderful about a place that keeps getting better. Those are the places most likely to already have it good, as a consequence of a history of improvement. But people are not driven to make things better for themselves because they are fully satisfied, but because they aren’t. Of course, happiness researchers do tell us that the level of wealth, and the growth that caused it, matters to happiness. Shall we then conclude that dissatisfaction, when harnessed to the institutions of wealth creation, is the source of its own reduction? Yes.

David Leonhardt reports in the NYT on the Stevenson and Wolfers paper I blogged last week. This gives me hope that the conventional wisdom is starting to shift with the evidence. It’s worth noting that although the new Gallup World Poll has been very useful, the evidence isn’t really new. Here’s Ruut Veenhoven in the discussion we had on happiness almost exactly a year ago in Cato Unbound:

Time series data on happiness are much improved lately and now present a different picture.[2] Happiness appears to have risen in many nations over the last forty years. The greatest increases have been observed in non-Western nations such as Brazil, Egypt, India, and Mexico, with an average gain of about one point on a scale from 0 to 10 since the early 1960s. Happiness has also risen in the eight EU nations that have participated in the Eurobarometer survey since 1973, with a gain of about 0.3 points in 33 years. A similar trend is observed in the United States, where average happiness also rose 0.3 points since the early 1970s. However, compared to the first happiness surveys conducted in the late 1940s, American happiness seems to have hardly improved.

This is, in broad outline, the same story Stevenson and Wolfers are telling.

This past weekend I was at a conference that discussed a number of papers from the past decade or two drawing on the happiness literature. It is truly maddening how the measure least likely to be informative — the trend in average national self-reported happiness — is what gets top billing, over and over again. It has been crystal clear in the data basically forever that there is a positive correlation between average income and average national happiness. And that within countries there is a positive correlation between individual income and happiness. The evidence has always been strong that money makes a significant positive difference for happiness. Upon seeing a flat trend in average happiness over time as average income rises, you’d think the right thing to do would be to ask what is wrong with THAT measure. A ceiling effect? Scale renorming as expectations rise? But no. The measure that suggests income growth really does us no good, that must be right. So let’s hold that fixed and then try to explain away the significance of the strong within-country correlation by making up ill-supported just-so stories about zero-sum status races.

Now that it is increasingly clear that there is a cross-national connection between income and happiness, that it doesn’t exhaust itself at $15,000, that just about every country that has gotten richer has gotten happier, and that within these countries, richer people tend to be happier than less rich people,
I’m sure we can all look forward to a new set of ingenious theories that avoid the obvious interpretation of the data, which is that, other things equal, having more money makes life better.

[UPDATE: Here's Justin Wolfers' first blog post about the Easterlin paradox and his and Betsey's paper at the Freakonomics blog.]

I think Bryan Caplan’s latest post on kids and happiness suggests a better angle for his project:

I looked at this question using the GSS, regressing happiness on marital status, job satisfaction, real income, a personality measure (”You sometimes can’t help wondering whether anything is worthwhile any more.”), and number of children. Children have the standard negative effect, and it’s statistically significant, too. But the size is miniscule. Each child brings you down by .015 steps on a 3-point happiness scale.

In contrast, just being married gives you a boost of .286. If you take the linear model literally, that means that a married person would need 19 kids to have the expected happiness of a childless single! Of course, the linear model is pretty silly, but it does put the standard finding in perspective. The average effect of children on happiness is very tiny.

Now consider: In the real world, a very small average effect probably means that some people hate having kids, while others love the experience. So before you decide that you’re too selfish to accept even a small reduction in your personal happiness, you might want to find out the best ways to beat the average. …

Let me just say that, yes, the simple model is pretty silly. The famous-for-happiness-research panel study by Diener, Lucas et al. found that “on average, people adapt quickly and completely to marriage.” (But see Zimmerman and Easterlin [pdf], who are skeptics, like me, of the strong setpoint-adaptation theory.) So Bryan wouldn’t want to make his comparison in quite this way. But Diener et al also found a good deal of individual-level variance. Some people were much better off right after marriage and never completely adapted. Some people were much worse off after marriage and never completely adapted. So the question you want to know is: which kind of person are you?

No doubt people respond differently to children as well. So Bryan and his readers would be well served by exploring what kind of people are most and least likely to take a happiness hit from breeding, exploring the reasons kids cut into happiness for most people, and examining strategies for, as he says, beating the average. That is, his angle ought to be: You can do things to make having kids not as bad as it usually is. Instead of: Kids make you happier than you may recognize. Because what people don’t recognize is not that kids are a joy, but that they are more likely than not to make you less happy.

Here’s Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers’ new paper [pdf] on happiness and economic growth. The bottom line:

The accumulation of more recent data (and a re-analysis of earlier data) suggests that the case for a link between economic development and happiness is quite robust. Moreover, we establish that the relationship between happiness and income within a country is similar to the relationship between happiness and national income across countries. Finally, we show that the within country relationship between economic growth and happiness is similar across countries.

And this effect shows up despite all the reasons — scale renorming, unbounded income scale vs. bounded happiness scale — that you would expect to flatten the trend. Taking the methodological considerations about surveys into account, the most reasonable conclusion is that these findings set the lower bound on the contribution of income to happiness.

The paper has all sorts of interesting findings from the Gallup World Poll that I have not seen. For example:

We next turn to a series of well-being questions contained in the Gallup World Poll. Respondents are asked to report whether they experienced “the following feeling during a lot of the day yesterday?” including enjoyment, physical pain, worry, sadness, boredom, depression, anger, and love. The middle panel of Table 4 shows that, among the positive emotions, the enjoyment-income gradient is positive and similar for both the between- and within-country estimates. More income is clearly associated with more people having enjoyment in their day. Love is less clearly related to income, although within-countries more income is associated with being more likely to experience love. Among the negative emotions, physical pain, boredom, depression, and anger all fall with rises in income, at both the national and individual level.

Beatles fans and headline writers please note relationship between income and love.

The final regressions analyze the relationship between income and some more specific experiences in people’s lives, such as feeling respected, smiling, doing interesting activities, feeling proud, and learning. Most of these assessments are related to one’s income in the within-country estimates. Fewer show signs of a similar sized effect when examining the relationship between countries. However, there are some notable exceptions. Wealthier people are more likely to say that felt that they were treated with respect yesterday and as countries get wealthier more people feel respected. Wealthier countries have people who report smiling more. This last measure is particularly interesting as smiling has been shown to be correlated with reported levels of happiness or life satisfaction. Indeed, in the data people who report smiling more, also report higher levels of life satisfaction. Finally, as countries get wealthier more people report having been able to eat good tasting food the previous day and the magnitude of the relationship is similar to that seen within countries.

All told, these alternative measures of well-being point to a robust relationship between rising
income and improvements in societal welfare.

MONEY IS GOOD FOR PEOPLE. I will continue to wait with bated breathe for conventional wisdom to catch up.

[HT: Zubin Jelvah]

The evidence really doesn’t look great for the idea that kids are the key to contentment. I just got Arthur Brooks’ new book Gross National Happiness in the mail. Brooks quite rightly points out that happiness research doesn’t really do much to support conventional liberal policies, and he gives it a right-wing spin, as far as the data allow. But the data don’t allow much celebration of the happiness-value of children:

On the surface, it looks as though kids make people a bit happier: Adults with one or two kids are about 3 percentage points more likely to say they are happy than childless adults. But this gap is an illusion created by the fact that many happiness-causing things are also correlated with whether one has kids — marriage, age, religion, politics, and so forth. When we correct for these things, the relationship between kids and happiness actually reverses itself, and we see that children make people unhappy. If two adults in 2004 were the same in age, sex, income, marital status, education, race, religion, and politics — but one had kids and the other did not — the parent would be about 7 percentage points less likely to report being very happy.

The more children you have, on average, the unhappier you get — up to a point. The average happiness of adults — correcting for all the factors mentioned above — falls as more children are added to the family. …

[...]

None of this is to say that people with kids are unhappy people. There are many things in a parent’s life that bring great joy. For example, spending time away from kids.

Brooks points out that global self-reports can be misleading, because people often misremember how they have felt doing various activities. But experience sampling makes it look even worse:

Using these techniques, researchers have collected data on how people — particularly women — experience life with their children. And what emerges is that the enjoy almost everything more than they enjoy taking care of their kids. …

How about Bryan’s thesis?

Of course, we tell ourselves, having young children is difficult — but we will experience rewards when they are older, right? Probably so — although one British study suggests that senior citizens get more satisfaction from frequent contact with friends thans they do from spending time with their grown children. Al least once children have grown up, they seem, on average, to stop lowering the happiness of their parents.

I’m afraid the case for breeding, whatever it might be, isn’t going to be based in the pleasure of it.

One thing I’m constantly saying is that whether or not money helps make you feel better depends on what you do with it. This study says that it’s nice to spend money on other people, which is, believe it or not, a way of spending money. But would spending money on other people make us happier if we didn’t think it made them happier? Suppose we made a big circle with millions of people in it and everyone handed a $5 bill to the person on their left. Would we be happier?  Maybe that’s why we like Social Security so much! (That’s a joke. But how long before someone tries to use this study to argue that taxes make us happy?)

This morning’s commentary says, in a nutshell, that money does matter to happiness, so if we’re going to slow growth, it damn well better be worth it. But listen!

A recent study by psychologists at the University of Edinburgh tracking 973 pairs of twins shows that the heritable differences in self-reported happiness are entirely accounted for by the genes that determine the Big Five personality traits. That is to say, differences of personality account for all the heritable difference in happiness. In particular, low neuroticism and high extraversion are strongly correlated with higher levels of happiness, high conscientiousness is a bit less strongly correlated, and high agreeableness and openness to experience are positive but not so important. Non-neurotic, conscientious extraverts are the winners in the genetic happiness lottery.

This is important stuff. It tells us that individual variability matters. Individual-level strategies for improving happiness depend a great deal on the art of self-management given the constraints of personality. For example, I am very low in neuroticism and mildly extraverted, which bodes very well for my baseline level of happiness, but I am also extremely low in conscientiousness (not unlike a lot of homeless people and inmates), which ends up creating a lot of internal struggle and anxiety. For me, the key to higher levels of happiness is the conscious development of the habits of self-discipline and time management that don’t come naturally. The highly introverted or neurotic face challenges unique to their types. I look forward to future work that pushes deeper into happiness strategies for various combinations of personality traits.

And at a more general theoretical level, it is crucial to understand there are differences in the degree to which people revert to their baseline levels of happiness after good or bad changes in circumstances, and in difference in the rate of reversion. That will prevent us from making silly, sweeping generalizations about the insignificance of new cars or a lost limbs. When there is a lot of non-random variation, averages can lie. Regarding my previous post, I think it is important to recognize that not everyone compares themselves strongly to other people. Much of Robert Frank’s body of work is based, I think, on assuming a false uniformity in people’s disposition to compare themselves to others. We can avoid that kind of mistake if we attend more closely to the way individual happiness is mediated by personality.

The fussy, hedged, inconclusive complexity of Robert Frank’s latest NYT column about income and happiness shows just how hard it is for an intellectually honest guy to make a strong case against the income-happiness link, given the complexion of the evidence. In order to get as far as he does, which is not very far, Frank seems to me to nonetheless rely on a tendentious and, one would think, outdated interpretation of the happiness data:

This assumption ["that absolute income levels are the primary determinant of individual well-being"] is contradicted by consistent survey findings that when everyone’s income grows at about the same rate, average levels of happiness remain the same. Yet at any given moment, the pattern is that wealthy people are happier, on average, than poor people. Together, these findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income.

The first finding, the flat trend, is contested. Veenhoven and Hagerty argue it is not flat at all. In any case, there is plenty of reason to think that (1) the subjective criterion people use to report how happy they are changes somewhat as their expectations change, and so objective gains in real welfare are likely to be underestimated by survey methods. That is to say, the phrase “pretty happy” may not tracking the exact same feeling over five decades; “pretty happy” may refer to something a bit happier than it did 50 years ago, just like “pretty tall” refers to something a bit taller than it did 50 years ago. And there is plenty of reason to think that (2) comparing the bounded life satisfaction survey scale against the unbounded income scale likely leads objective gains in real welfare to be underestimated by survey methods. So, scale renorming plus a kind of methodological error leaves us with the conclusion that the extent of the absolute gains are likely concealed by the measurement method.

The second finding, that wealthier people tend to say they are happier than poorer people, on its face suggests that it feels better to be rich than to be poor. Part of this is surely absolute. Having a bit more money increases your sense of control and decreases your sense of anxiety. Have you ever had bill collectors calling you constantly? I have. It helps a lot to have enough money to pay your bills. And it’s not just about avoiding poverty. If you’ve ever had the good fortune to move up one quintile from the middle, the reduction in economic anxiety is palpable. That’s the effect of an absolute gain. Which is not to say that relative concerns are unimportant. It’s nice to be doing better than the people you compare yourself to. But there is no evidence that people are uniformly comparative. That is, some people have a weaker or stronger “social comparison orientation” than others. And there is no evidence that, when people do compare, the relevant comparison class is the set of U.S. residents. The claim that the very strong within-society relationship between income and happiness is due primarily to a preference for higher relative income (within the U.S. distribution) is mainly bluff. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

So how is it that these two finding taken together suggest relative income is a better predictor of well-being than absolute income? They don’t.

Maybe Frank would like to explain the Deaton result. All the evidence for strong comparative effects are very local. It matters how I’m doing relative to friends, neighbors, and co-workers. As far as I know there is no evidence that the comparison class is global. I suppose you could try to take the fact that average national income is a strong predictor of average national happiness as evidence that the relevant comparison class is global, but that would just beg the question in the worst way while showing a weird determination to avoid the obvious importance of absolute income. Why not say something along the lines of happiness guru Ruut Veenhoven:

Another reason to doubt the Easterlin Paradox is the theory behind it, which assumes that happiness is “calculated” cognitively by comparing one’s condition with local standards of the good life. According to this theory, one can be happy in Hell if one does not know any better — or if one’s companions are in an even hotter spot. The available data fit better with the theory that happiness is “inferred” from the quality of affective experience, which reflects the gratification of basic needs. This “needs theory” of happiness fits a wider functional perspective on affective guidance in higher animals, and predicts that we will live happily in conditions that suit human nature well.

Now, I don’t think this has to be an either/or thing (and I criticized Veenhoven for assuming happiness is necessarily evidence of “natural” environmental fit). But Frank here is overselling the evidence for the unimportance of absolute wealth, even though he knows too much not to hedge lot.

I was going to say something about GDP, but this blog post is long enough.

My guess: Because it is very big and very diverse. America almost certainly does better than the average of the EU. Does anyone know of a source of state-by-state happiness data? Because I figure Minnesota, were it a country, would rank right near ethnically similar but even more homogeneous Norditopian countries. (New state slogan: “Minnesota: Rich as Norway, happy as Denmark!”) Mississippi would rank, I figure, right around Italy.

Yesterday I answered a few email questions from Aaron Hotfelder of Gadling, Weblogs Inc.’s travel blog. The results are here. Here’s what I had to say about his parents’ upcoming anniversary:

1. My parents have a wedding anniversary coming up. Why should I buy them, say, a trip to Hawaii or an Alaskan cruise rather than a new flat-screen TV?

You should buy them what they want! If they don’t like traveling, bring the world to them — in HD! But if they’re indifferent, go for the equivalently-priced trip.

According to psychologists, we are prone to “adaptation” or “habituation,” the tendency for changes in our experience to become the new normal. When you jump into a swimming pool, it’s really cold at first, but then suddenly it’s not. Getting new stuff is a lot like that. After a while, the novelty of a sweet flat-screen will wear off, and Seinfeld reruns will be no funnier.

Travel, however, constantly stimulates our taste for novelty. Habituation is precisely why people feel they are “sleepwalking” through their daily routine–the familiar recedes into the deep background of consciousness and only changes register. That’s why you feel more “alive” in a new place: your mind takes very little for granted. You are awake to everything. Also, long after mom and dad have retired their once-new TV, they’ll still value the memories of their trip.

I just ran across Angus Deaton’s latest summary of his happiness findings at the Gallup website:

As the graph indicates, life satisfaction is higher in countries with higher GDP per head. The slope is steepest among the poorest countries, where income gains are associated with the largest increases in life satisfaction, but it remains positive and substantial even among the rich countries; it is not true that there is some critical level of GDP per capita above which income has no further effect on life satisfaction. Instead, each doubling of income adds about the same amount to life satisfaction, across poor and rich countries alike. [bold added]

Please share this fact with friends at your next cocktail party.

Here’s the graph:

Deaton conjectures that the consistent relationship between income and life satisfaction has to do with some kind of shared global standard for self-reporting — the Danes know how good they have it relative to the folks in Togo, and the folks in Togo know how bad they have it relative to Danes. I don’t know about that.

The Sunday edition of the Baltimore Sun has a feature on happiness by Joe Burris, which contains a number of quotes from your resident happiness wonk. I’m especially delighted to have received the last word:

Those rankings raise the age-old question: Does money buy happiness?

“All the evidence points to the fact that people who have more money are more likely to say that they’re happy on these surveys,” said Wilkinson. “People who say that money doesn’t matter are misleading you. Within just about any country, as you go up the income scale, the people higher up the income scale are happier.”

The last sentence in the quotation is a casual gloss of the first where “are happier” = “are more likely to say they are happy.” I was thinking of this chart:

Maybe one of these days, the conventional wisdom will actually reflect the data.

He focuses on the absence of negative feelings. He’s almost Eastern. And I think this is in fact the largest part of the subjective sense of well-being. The importance of the absence of anxiety and worry is why it is plausible that money has a fairly strong non-relative effect well up the income scale. There is always some worry that having a bit more helps alleviate.

By the way, Big Think has a lot of interesting stuff. I think of it as mono-vlogging. 

This week on Free Will, I chat with Eric Weiner, author of NewYork Times bestseller, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. I didn’t always agree with Eric’s interpretation of some of the happiness data, but I found this a really fun, though-provoking hybrid of travel and science writing. As it happens, I met Eric when he called to interview me for this article on why Republicans are happier than Democrats, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. Here’s my appearance:

Nowadays, politicians are hesitant to explicitly utter the H-word, choosing instead to dance around the subject. It’s only a matter of time, though, before Republicans begin to crow about their happiness. “They can say, ‘Look, I’m not being a stuffy, old-fashioned conservative,’ ” says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. “There is real science that shows that if you go to church, if you don’t get divorced, you’ll be happier. That’s tempting to any politician.”

Eric had asked whether using happiness research for political purposes was mostly just a left-wing thing, or if it might appeal to conservatives too. I said that if there are findings congenial to conservatives, and there are, then you can bet it won’t go unmentioned, especially if it gives a scientific patina to what they believed in anyway. David Cameron was first out of the blocks on this, but I bet we’ll see plenty of conservative references to happiness findings in the future.

My review essay on The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield from the December issue of Reason is available online.

This new AP-Yahoo! News poll shows that while 66 percent of Americans say they are happy, 77 percent think the country is heading in the wrong direction. This is, in a nutshell, why Sachs-Stevenson lost the Economist happiness debate. Right now, many Americans are unhappy with their position in the political and economic cycles. But Americans are a happy people, with a sense of control over their lives. This high level of personal satisfaction is the consequence of an optimistic culture and stable institutions that create wealth and opportunity. Dissatisfaction with the way things are going will change soon enough, Americans know it, and that’s why it doesn’t actually get us down.

Here are a few pics from this weekend’s Economist debate.

We won! From my vantage on the stage, I’d say the crowd swung from 30/70 against Tyler and me at the beginning to about 55/45 in our favor at the end. Sachs basically spent the entire time complaining that the United States does not have the politics of the readership The Nation, which I think must have struck a good deal of the audience — many of whom came to see him — as evasively off topic. I simply agreed that we have a bad president, are involved in a pointless war, and that we most certainly have not implemented Jeffrey Sachs’ policy preferences. And I repeatedly emphasized that the proposition was about how Americans are doing in the pursuit of happiness, about which there is a great deal of evidence, and was not a referendum on the Bush years. Stevenson I think was hampered by the fact that the happiness data simply doesn’t show that Americans are unhappy. She pushed hard on negative externalities from positional arms races, but I think that’s a bit hard for an audience to grasp when stated, but not really explained. Plus, its a theory-driven, not a data-driven argument, and plain evidence is simply more persuasive. And if you ever have to be in a debate, get Tyler as your partner. That helps a lot.

I have to say I was completely stunned by the scale of the event. I had no idea that the venue would be a grand old bank with a soaring domed ceiling, that there would be a red carpet and red velvet ropes, that there would be 400 people there with a giant screen and 30 foot red Economist banners behind us on the stage. It was probably the most exciting intellectual event I have taken part in, and I’ve never been so nervous. So I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to have (I think) nailed my closing statement, or how much of a thrill it was to see all those red fans go up in the final vote.

Pre-debate highlight: Sachs said he read my happiness paper and that it was “excellent” and that he “learned a lot”.

Oh… and the debate continues in my mind. At one point in the main event Stevenson cut me off to express incredulity that welfare benefits didn’t improve the average happiness of the unemployed. I certainly wasn’t making it up. I don’t know what explains the finding, but there are a number of reasons why this isn’t at all implausible. First, as she was arguing, the effect of income on happiness is often weak. Second, surveys show that unemployment is very depressing. It often involves a painful loss of status. And social networks are often work-related, so the unemployed often lose friends and end up feeling isolated. Welfare transfers may do little to boost happiness under those sad conditions. Third, there is a stigma to “the dole,” so the effects of income from welfare transfers may be different from market income. Fourth, generous welfare benefits reduce the incentive to quickly reenter the labor market, which may extend the average depressing period of unemployment. Anyway, I felt like she was trying to have this worse than both ways: denying the normal economist’s assumption that income translates straightforwardly into utility when it is market income, but then acting like its simply crazy that income wouldn’t translate straightforwardly into utility when it’s a government transfer.

Here’s Tyler’s account, and accounts from a number of his commenters who attended.

W00t!

As Tyler announced last week, The Economist newspaper is importing its series of debates, already a big success in London, to these United States, and in the inaugural U.S. event, Tyler and I will be debating on the negative  side of the proposition “That America is failing at the pursuit of happiness” against economist-to-the-stars Jeffrey Sachs and Penn economist and happiness researcher Betsey Stevenson. The Economist’s executive editor Daniel Franklin will moderate.

Here’s the basic details:

Saturday, November 10th
3:00 - 4:30pm
Gotham Hall
1356 Broadway (@ 36th Street)
New York, NY 10018

It’s one of those Oxford-style debates where the audience votes before and after to gauge who was most persuasive. If you’ll be in New York, or can be in New York, and are looking for some rousing live intellectual-on-intellectual action, you can buy your tickets here. I have to admit: I’m a little nervous and a bunch of friendly faces would help. It’s the same price as the Decemberists show, but with more famous economists and many fewer songs about sailing vessels.

Language Log’s Mark Liberman has an outstanding post on the NYT article on the gender gap in happiness that helps put it all in perspective.

I read Ross Douthat’s new Atlantic article on the electoral opportunity open to the Democrats as a chance to characterize the Democratic “threat” in a way that makes Douthat’s conservative “populist” alternative look like an attractive counter-strategy for ‘08 Republicans in the market for advisers.

The pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism, as even well-educated workers—in fields from financial services to health care—begin to face stiff competition from overseas. In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.

The phrase “easy to imagine” has all the virtues of theft over honest toil. It is “easy to imagine” that the Kaiser won the Great War and that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet). Likewise, it is easy to imagine Jacob Hacker’s now-largely-discredited thesis of income volatility and our current cyclical financial worries defining domestic politics in a generation, but why would we bother to imagine it? Let’s imagine instead the centrality of the coming “robot gap” in American politics.

There is good evidence that many Americans just now are worried about the economy and find it hard to pay off debt, as this Harris Poll shows. But, on the other hand, this doesn’t seem to be breeding the kind of discontent likely to push a populist to power. According to another very recent Harris Poll, the level of overall satisfaction is up since 2003, well over half of Americans say their life situation has improved over the last few years, and nearly 2/3 expect it to improve over the next five. Some of this pretty clearly has an economic component. When broken down according to generation, Gen X-ers, like me, (ages 31-42, according to Harris) were most likely to report improvement in their life situation over the past five years, and this is likely because we saw the largest wage gains in that period as many of us finished the 20s transition from entry-level to mid- and upper-level positions. By contrast the oldest cohort–either holding steady in late career, or retired–was least likely to report an gain in life satisfaction over the last half-decade. Sensibly enough, the young group Harris calls the “Echo Boomers” (aka “Gen Y” — ages 18-30), slightly edges out X-ers as most likely to expect improvement in their life situation. The level and trend of American life satisfaction looks so rosy and expectations for future improvement are so high, that it is hard for me to see how a populist politics is supposed to hit takeoff velocity, or how Democrats are supposed to capitalize on some kind of alleged trend of high anxiety that never seems to materialize in the numbers.

Economic anxiety is cyclical. Housing market aside, the current economic indicators look good. I’ll be surprised if the public isn’t pretty happy with its economic lot in a year or so–and especially when Bush is clearing brush full time. In any case, conservatives don’t need to think right-wing populism is just the thing to stave off left-wing populism, since left-wing populism built on some elusive but magically potent middle class economic anxiety is about as authentic a threat as Osama’s caliphate.

I was alerted today that my happiness paper has edged into the top ten downloads in a couple of SSRN categories. Apparently it doesn’t take much. (11 whole downloads! Woo!) Anyway, I sense that these things can be sort of self-reinforcing. People want to read what other people have read. So, if you think you’d like to read my happiness paper, but haven’t yet had a chance, feel free to download it today. You’ll help keep it in the top ranks for a while, and helping to increase the chance that some who might not otherwise will read it, too.

My colleague Dan Mitchell complains that Denmark’s new tax cuts aren’t deep enough. That’s his job. And he’s probably right. But, I wonder: Does Denmark’s tax policy imperil its citizens’ well-being? I imagine there are a good number of Danes upset about their astronomically high taxes, but they also must be pretty popular. Also, if you don’t mind boring, or blondes, Denmark appears to be one of the best place for human beings to live in the history of world. Look at these various rankings:

GDP per capita: 7th
Human Development Index: 16th
Economic freedom: 13th
Self-reported life satisfaction: 1st
Ease of doing business: 7th

Denmark also gets top grades (not a ranking) from Freedom House for political rights and civil liberties.

Now, I think Denmark should cut their taxes. Their GDP growth is lower than the OECD average, despite their being relatively aggressive free-traders. I doubt they’ll stay so high in all these rankings if they begin to fall behind their neighbors over time, GDP-wise.

But these high taxes and slowish growth surely have something to do with this:

Welfare state and social spending as % of GDP: 1st

which leads to:

Low income inequality: 1st

And the Danes seem to like it that way. From almost all indications, the Danish model of a free-market welfare state is a stunning success. They no doubt need to fiddle with their tax rates to keep it sustainable. But it’s certainly hard to blame them if they don’t think the cuts need to be as aggressive as Dan or I think they should be.

Also, to be clear, I don’t want the U.S. to look more like Denmark in terms of tax and social policy. I also don’t think Denmark should want the U.S. to look like Denmark. The continued viability of countries like Denmark depends on the success of countries like the U.S. But, unless one insists on being ax-grindingly ideological, you’ve got to admit that both Denmark and U.S. are huge successes in terms of human flourishing. They’ll never have our levels of innovation, we’ll never have their Gini coefficient, and you know what? That’s OK.

Also, did I say that Denmark is boring?