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ASK
people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply
in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn't so bad when you
consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading
eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world's
careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than
death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life
is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of
death. It is, rather, a U-bend.
When
people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful.
Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir
commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The
surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old
age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and
looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.
This
curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a
more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional
economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the
discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that
there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have
decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.
These
ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the
concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new
policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the
environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008
France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning
economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader
measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a
touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced
that the British government would start collecting figures on
well-being.
There are already a lot of
data on the subject collected by, for instance, America's General Social
Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of
question. One concerns people's assessment of their lives, and the other
how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines
of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is
something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious?
The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the
second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the
same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel
better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that
they felt angry or anxious yesterday.
Statisticians
trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather
as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the
perennial question: what makes people happy?
Four
main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and
age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are
also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women
experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around
a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to
experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable
than men, while most are more cheerful.
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Two
personality traits shine through the complexity of economists'
regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those
who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is
more than a tautological observation about people's mood when asked
about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following
people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable
personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic
people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have
low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing
relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.
Whereas
neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the
opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to
be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and
hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain
some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of
British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on
average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.
Then
there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people's
lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the
way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not
as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America,
being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though
the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays
associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house
are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but
that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in
other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer.
And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a
source of argument (see article).
The view from winter
Lastly,
there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds
(as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke
University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in
2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots
point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and
the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics
written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do
look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr
Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that
glowed with good humour.
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Mr
Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this
view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant
image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost
invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle
age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise
and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early
1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business
School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”
Since
then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness
is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the
elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world.
David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr
Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among
countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most
miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great
majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and
early 50s. The global average is 46.
The
U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of
hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by
Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook
University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into
positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those
emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age,
then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply;
worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines
throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls
thereafter.
Turn the question upside
down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force
Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an
arc, peaking at 46.
Happier, no matter what
There
is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes
during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A
70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he
is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was
thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data
undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have
not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both
their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend
would not show up consistently in 40 years' worth of data.
Another
possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to
establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle
age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon.
Perhaps the U-bend is merely an _expression_ of the effect of external
circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different
stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have
teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence
of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be
richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of
cash?
The answer, it turns out, is no:
control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is
still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery
must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal
changes.
People, studies show, behave
differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up
with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their
emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one
study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of
people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and
younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and
less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that
“you can't please all the people all the time.”
There
are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen,
professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely
human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time
horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues,
they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things
that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When
young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be
to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters
most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties
because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the
future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail
parties.”
Death of ambition, birth of acceptance
There
are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries
keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of
their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and
weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture
shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant
branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete.
“Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna
Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a
really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps
acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the
day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up
striving to be young—or slender.”
Whatever
the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional.
Happiness doesn't just make people happy—it also makes them healthier.
John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London,
monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted
small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as
fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He
found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed
fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to
be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help
counteract their crumbliness.
Happier
people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio
Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them
a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance
to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who
had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two
conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose
the economists' experiment rather than the psychologists' or
psychiatrists'. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help
counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive
skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with
an ageing workforce.
The ageing of the
rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to
be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter.
The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which
should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).