From the "correlation is not causation" department

This article discusses a recent paper which summarizes a ton of papers that find a positive correlation between happiness and longevity. It also concluded that anxiety, depression, and pessimism were linked to higher rates of disease and a shorter lifespan. Interesting correlations except that the lead author of the paper makes a causal connection (happiness etc causes greater longevity) which doesn't follow for reasons that are all too familiar.
Of course its plausible that being a happy dude makes you live longer but it's also plausible that not expecting to live long is a bit of a downer. I, for one, am delirious that I am going to outlive you all. Alternatively, you could have "the right stuff" which makes you both happy and healthy.

The pursuit of happiness

A good Radio 4 program on happiness.

The happiness of Irish voters

Happiness may seem to be in short supply in Ireland at the moment. But in general when Irish people are asked to ranked their happiness on a scale of 0-10 we average close to 8. Many predictors have been studied. Given the forthcoming election it is interesting to know if happiness differs according to how people vote. The European Social Survey asked people how they voted. Only one party is recorded so it is presumably their first choice.
Graphing happiness by party shows that Fianna Fail voters are the happiest of the lot followed by Fine Gael. Sinn Fein voters are the most miserable of the lot. These differences are statistically significant & are robust to controlling for age, sex and education. Of course this data was not collected recently and a contemporary survey might show a different pattern.

January 5th Links

1. For those interested in maximum likelihood estimation techniques, Vincent Granville discusses the method of steepest ascent in relation to Google's search algorithm.

2. The Economist: "Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs."

3. U.S. Council of Graduate Schools: The Ph.D. Completion Project

4. Yesterday it was announced that Irish property prices fell back to 2002 levels in 2010, according to reports from MyHome.ie and Sherry Fitzgerald; so it is interesting to read this SSISI paper (2007) by P.J. Drudy which "argues that Ireland’s housing problems stem in part from a particular philosophical orientation which supports the 'commodification' of housing".

5. The (U.K.) Royal Statistical Society "Get Stats" Campaign: 'giving everyone the skills and confidence to use numbers well'.

6. Researchers at Harvard have found a way of using the iPhone to measure people’s moods and have found a correlation between daydreaming and unhappiness.

7. The new Happiness Index to gauge Britain's national mood.

8. The regional impacts of Northern Irish HEIs.

9. Tom McKenzie and Dirk Sliwka: Universities as Stakeholders in their Students' Careers: On the Benefits of Graduate Taxes to Finance Higher Education.

10. CNN Money: Should companies offer sabbaticals?

11. Damien Mulley: "Failure" and Enterprise Culture in Ireland.

Affective Forecasting and Optimal Environmental Behaviour

A recent paper in the Journal of Economic Psychology finds positive associations between pro-environmental behaviour and well-being, suggesting that pro-environmental consumption may be less than individually optimal due to decision-making biases. In other words, we would feel better if we helped preserve the environment more but due to a failure to appreciate the benefits of doing so engendered by affective misforecasting, we do less than would be even individually optimal, never mind societally optimal. There are now quite a few papers demonstrating potentially superior intra-person allocations in terms of quality of life, including work by Alois Stutzer and colleagues showing decreased quality of life induced by channel surfing , and happier lives among people who volunteer. David Comerford, who is currently a visiting scholar at Duke, worked on this issue here and has presented results showing that at least part of the decision utility from car-use is due to affective misforecasting. In general, this is an interesting and challenging literature that has obvious policy and philosophical relevance.

Genes, economics and happiness

We all know some people are born stupid but what I didn't know was that some people are born to be happy dudes while others are inherently miserable. To be precise, heritability of happiness is approximately 33%, and much higher for men then women.
This is documented in a study by De Neve, Christakis, Fowler and Frey which is even able to pinpoint specific genes associated with happiness. This suggests that if you want your kids to be happy campers that you should be very careful who you mate with, especially if you are a woman. Unless its too late. There's a cheery thought.

Income and Life Satisfaction

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Sep 21;107(38):16489-16493.

High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being

Kahneman D, Deaton A.

Center for Health and Well-being, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.

Abstract

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience-the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.