What do modern studies, with actual data and statistical analysis, have to say about happiness in Europe?“DCP quoting 2006 book” wrote: For as long as I can remember, people who disagree with my fairly libertarian economic views have told me how much more they care about the poor than I do. Non-religious people have assured me that, while I’m focused on some sort of illusory “pie in the sky when I die” and on “saving” others from mythical sufferings in a fairy-tale afterlife, they are devoted to making life in this world, on this planet, tangibly better for everybody.
In my particular case, the critics may be right. They may be far better people than I am in every regard, including charity, kindness, and concern for their fellow humans. However, the publication of Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism (New York: Basic Books, 2006) made it much, much harder for left-leaning secularists to preen themselves, as a class, on their superior compassion without supplying actual evidence to demonstrate it.
Religious people, it turns out, give more to charity than do non-religious people. They donate more money—and not merely to their churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. “Religious people are more charitable in every measurable nonreligious way—including secular donations, informal giving, and even acts of kindness and honesty—than secularists.” They are more likely to give money to family and friends, and, when they give, to do so in larger amounts. They are more likely to volunteer, and to give blood. Even in the case of non-churchgoers, those who were raised in religious households are more likely to donate to charity than those who were not.
Unsurprisingly, private charity in ever-more-secular Europe has plummeted—to the point, in some areas, almost of extinction. Brooks, who also argues that charitable giving is essential to a strong economy, points to polling data suggesting that Europeans are, according to their own reports, less happy with their lives than Americans are, and suggests that their unhappiness may be connected with their low rates of charity and volunteerism. Humans feel better when they give.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210639119“ Explaining happiness trends in Europe (2022)” wrote: Over the past 5 decades, happiness has emerged as a subject of social science research and a potential goal of public policy. But how can a country’s happiness be increased? On this, there is a conflict between a number of policy alternatives—promote economic growth, increase social capital, improve the environment, and expand welfare state programs. Each of these has point-of-time (cross-section) evidence supporting its claim, but there are very few long-term, time-series studies. This article presents newly available time-series evidence that supports the importance of welfare state policies.
In Europe, differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs—increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal conclusion from a time-series study of 10 Northern, Western, and Southern European countries with the requisite data.
What principally determines long-run changes in a country’s well-being? The answer typically advanced by economists is economic growth (1). A runner-up, pioneered by sociologist Robert Putnam, is social capital (2). A third, favored by political scientists, is welfare state policies (3). A more recent entry promoted by ecologists is quality of the environment (4). The evidence offered in support of these conclusions is typically based on point-of-time (cross-section) data relating happiness to the favored variable.
Our independent variables comprise four possible determinants of happiness—(1) economic conditions, indexed here by two measures: real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the unemployment rate; (2) social capital, as commonly measured by responses to a query on “trust in others”; (3) government welfare policies, as approximated by two summary measures: the generosity of social welfare programs and government spending on such programs; and finally, (4) quality of the environment, as reflected in air pollution exposure, particulate matter 2.5 (PM 2.5), which measures fine particulate matter that poses the greatest risk to health.
The question of interest here is which of our independent variables, if any, is most associated with differences in the change of happiness—economic conditions, social capital, welfare state programs, and/or quality of the environment.
The answer, based on regression analysis, is the generosity of welfare state programs—increases in generosity going with increases in happiness and decreases with reduced happiness. If one compares the regression coefficients from bivariate regressions of the change in happiness with the change in each of the independent variables, only the coefficient in the happiness-generosity regression is significant, P < 0.05.
Typically, in Spain and other countries with a sizeable growth in happiness, the generosity of welfare programs increased substantially, while in Sweden and Denmark, where happiness decreased, there was a substantial pull back.
The present results suggest the importance of the generosity of welfare state programs in determining happiness trends. The results are based on a limited set of European countries, the only ones with sufficient long-period data, but provide informative results nonetheless. In the present analysis, cross-section regressions give almost diametrically opposite results to the time series. In the time-series results, changes in generosity better predict changes in happiness than economic conditions, social capital, and air quality. Generous welfare programs are the apparent key to happiness.
Sorry Daniel. It turns out the big evil socialist welfare state is actually they key to happiness you keep whinging about.
So much for “compassionate conservatism.”
