Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation's wealth and the wellbeing of its citizens.
The researchers looked at life satisfaction data from 37 countries collected over various time periods, from 12 to 34 years, up to 2005. The sample included nations that are developed and developing, rich and poor, ex-Communist and capitalist.
It was specifically designed to test the paradox that although people in richer countries tend to be happier on average, as a country gets richer its inhabitants don't necessarily become happier.
The lead author of the paper, economist Richard Easterlin of the University of South California, has been studying the concept of national happiness since the 1970s, when he formulated his "Easterlin Paradox".
"Simply stated, the happiness-income paradox is this: at a point in time both among and within countries, happiness and income are positively correlated," he said. "But, over time, happiness does not increase when a country's income increases."
Until now, the long-term statistics looking at links between wellbeing and GDP have been limited to developed countries. Easterlin's study brings in developing countries and his conclusions rebut claims by other researchers over the past decade that national happiness can indeed increase (pdf) in line with wealth.
Easterlin says that any ups and downs measured by these recent studies are simply the short-term effects of, for example, economic collapse and recovery in individual countries. He says they do not seem to hold up over the long term – typically more than 10 years.
"With incomes rising so rapidly in [certain] countries, it seems extraordinary that no surveys register the marked improvement in subjective wellbeing that mainstream economists and policy makers worldwide expect to find," he said.
In the paper, Easterlin cites surveys from Chile, China and South Korea. In these countries, per capita income has doubled in less than 20 years but overall happiness does not seem to have followed the same path. In China and Chile, there appeared to be small drops in life satisfaction, but the numbers were not statistically significant. For South Korea there was a modest, again not statistically significant, increase in life satisfaction in the early 1980s, but it declined slightly from 1990 to 2005.
The results, he said, were "strikingly consistent": over the long term, the sense of wellbeing in a country's citizens did not go up with income. His work is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Where does this leave us? If economic growth is not the main route to greater happiness, what is?" said Easterlin. "We may need to focus policy more directly on urgent personal concerns relating to things such as health and family life, rather than on the mere escalation of material goods."
David Bartram, a sociologist at the University of Leicester, said that if the UK government were serious about the public's happiness, the prime minister, David Cameron, would rethink cutting public spending, "putting people out of work and undercutting the conditions for his vaunted 'Big Society' – and all for the sake of a headline growth rate that apparently depends on avoiding tax increases affecting mainly the wealthy (including corporations)."
The results come just a few weeks after the UK government unveiled plans to measure and raise the happiness and wellbeing of Britons – rather than simply relying on GDP as an index of general satisfaction. Cameron has said that "improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."
Commenting on the new results, Alexander Gorban, a mathematician at the University of Leicester, said it was difficult to quantify happiness because of the problem of comparing material and subjective wellbeing. "Unfortunately, both are very difficult to put in numbers. It is a priori clear that subjective happiness or satisfaction is a very fragile and non-universal concept strongly influenced by cultural and even linguistic intercultural differences. Moreover, the material wellbeing is also not easy to quantify."
He said that Easterlin had taken GDP as a major index of objective prosperity, for example, but this did not necessarily reflect the average income of a typical person in a country and therefore it might be poorly related to personal satisfaction from life.
He warned against over-interpreting the results. "Life is complex and non-linear. The connection between happiness and material wellbeing is also non-linear, and it is difficult to suggest and verify some universal conclusions in an unbiased way. The authors of the article make a valuable and very professional effort in this direction by considering a representative set of countries (developed, developing, in transition). However, the conclusions are in general dependent on concrete implementation of statistical procedures and should be handled with care, especially when taken for construction of society development programmes."
