The Art of Manliness - The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you're

00:00:11.240 someone who's a decade or two out from your high school graduation, do you ever find yourself

00:00:14.640 thinking that you're just not as happy as you were back then? Of course, all the positive

00:00:18.220 thinking self-talk thing kicks in. You think, well, maybe I actually wasn't that happy before.

00:00:22.620 I do like my life better now. I like the independence I have. Yeah, yeah, I really

00:00:26.920 like being an adult. Yet no matter the glass half full glow you try to put on things, you can't

00:00:31.160 shake the feeling that your happiness has declined over the years. That at 30, you weren't as happy

00:00:35.200 as you were at 20 and that at 40, you weren't as happy as you were when you were 30. Well,

00:00:39.260 that feeling is more than a nostalgic hunch and it's not unique to you. It's actually been borne

00:00:43.200 out by hundreds of research papers and studies and shown to be a near universal experience.

00:00:47.720 My guest today has authored many of those papers. His name is Dr. David Branchflower. He's a labor

00:00:51.680 economist who not only studies data around money and jobs, but also around human happiness.

00:00:55.660 Today on the show, David explains how happiness follows a U-shaped curve. It starts declining

00:00:59.860 around age 18 and continues to fall into midlife before picking back up again. And David shares

00:01:04.820 the average age at which happiness hits its very lowest point. While it's not entirely

00:01:08.820 clear why the U-shape of happiness occurs, we talk about some possible reasons behind it.

00:01:12.980 And while the U-shape is consistent across the world, it can be lower or higher. And so we

00:01:17.080 discuss how factors like gender, socioeconomic, and marital status, and having children affect

00:01:21.520 happiness and whether it's possible to mitigate the dip. While the fact that it won't be until

00:01:25.020 your mid-60s that you feel as happy as you were at age 18 might seem depressing, David

00:01:29.040 argues that it's comforting to know that the feelings of declining happiness you experience

00:01:32.520 as you approach midlife are normal. It'll not only pass one day, but start moving in the

00:01:36.460 other direction. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash happiness curve.

00:01:40.720 David Blanchflower, welcome to the show.

00:01:57.360 Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

00:01:59.100 So you are a labor economist, but you've done a lot of research and writing about happiness

00:02:04.180 over the lifespan of humans. How did an economist who specializes in labor end up researching human

00:02:10.000 happiness? Well, one of the big things I've been interested in is work. And I thought a lot about

00:02:17.200 why do people work? They work because obviously it pays them money, but it actually makes people feel

00:02:24.660 good. And very early on when I started working in labor economics, I was in the UK in the 1980s,

00:02:31.860 and there was lots of unemployment as there was all around Europe. And there was a big question,

00:02:36.020 was unemployment voluntary? Did people choose to do it because it made them happy? Or did they not

00:02:42.480 choose to do it and they were forced to go and be unemployed? Was it what's called Marx's army of

00:02:47.820 the unemployed? Was it a volunteer armory or a conscript army? So I started to think of that for

00:02:52.480 a really, really long time when basically discovered a really important fact, which is that undoubtedly on

00:02:58.560 every piece of debt you ever look at, unemployment makes people unhappy. There's no disputing that it

00:03:05.040 doesn't look that people choose to be unemployed. If you chose to be unemployed, why would you do that

00:03:09.400 if it makes you unhappy? So I started to think about well-being. And then as time goes on, economists are

00:03:14.740 interested in utility. And I started to think, well, how could we measure people's well-being? And so

00:03:21.420 that's kind of how I got there. But particularly, and I ended up being a central banker,

00:03:24.920 and I was interested in inflation and unemployment, one of the big issues we see today. And the

00:03:30.580 question I started to ask myself was, well, if you want to measure inflation and unemployment and

00:03:35.280 their effects, you should look at well-being and happiness. So that's what I did and basically found

00:03:40.120 that a one percentage point rise in unemployment makes people much more unhappy than a one percentage

00:03:46.740 point rise in inflation. So the consequence, as we're seeing right now, the consequence of time to

00:03:51.960 deal with inflation may well be something much worse. I'm a labor economist. I care about work.

00:03:57.400 I care about unemployment. And that's why I ended up working on well-being, happiness, unhappiness.

00:04:03.940 Okay. So one of the things your research has shown is that over the lifespan of human happiness,

00:04:11.040 there is this U-shaped curve. Can you walk us through happiness from young adulthood through

00:04:16.040 all the years? When does happiness start to fall? Right. It starts to fall, actually. I'm a

00:04:22.460 professor. I teach at Dartmouth. I taught class yesterday, first class of the quarter. And these

00:04:28.060 young folks, 18 years old in my freshman class, they're extremely happy. They're at college and

00:04:33.260 they're young. And in any of the data that we see, that looks like a really happy time. And I teach this

00:04:41.100 class with them. I teach them about the U-shaping happiness. And I say to them, well, make best,

00:04:47.200 because it's going to get worse for quite a while. Eventually, it'll get better. But just so you

00:04:53.000 understand, it seems to happen to everybody. And so we have a lot of evidence, millions of

00:04:58.200 observations around the world from 150 countries across time periods and so on. And basically,

00:05:04.380 what it appears is that happiness declines through midlife. There's a midlife crisis and then late

00:05:11.920 40s or so on. And then things pick up through around age 65 or 70. And there's a lot of evidence

00:05:20.460 that actually being happy is particularly good. In fact, at age 70, happy people live longer. So this

00:05:27.760 is what you see, a decline and then a pickup. And the extent of that pickup varies by countries

00:05:34.200 in a place like Germany, it's more like a ski jump. But in most countries, including the United States,

00:05:39.400 it's really like a U-shape. And just to finish it off, so happiness is U-shaped in age. But if you

00:05:47.340 think of unhappiness, it's just the flip. So the unhappiness curve is just the hump-shaped copy

00:05:53.540 of the U-shape. So it's an inverted U. So it looks like in the data, there's a life satisfaction

00:06:01.040 decline, a happiness decline through midlife, which is astonishingly present in the data.

00:06:06.920 And it's quite interesting. Quite a lot of psychologists try to pretend that it's not there,

00:06:11.500 but it's blindingly obvious in the data.

00:06:14.100 So like, okay, there's a midlife dip. Is there like an average age where this is like the lowest?

00:06:18.920 Like I could be looking at my life and like, okay, when I hit this age...

00:06:22.240 It seems like a pretty good low point to use. Somewhere around there, and as I said, I've

00:06:28.340 written all sorts of papers and can show it to you in lots of different countries. The average

00:06:33.480 across developed and developing countries, about 150 countries, is about 48 or so is a good run.

00:06:40.220 And the surprise, actually, is that the same thing is true in developing as well as developed

00:06:45.960 countries. I'd expected there to be a big age difference, and the answer is there isn't.

00:06:50.660 No, so yeah, that's interesting. So this isn't just a United States phenomenon. This happens

00:06:54.760 across cultures and cross countries.

00:06:57.440 Absolutely. It happens across cultures. And one of the big things is that over the years,

00:07:02.320 we've started to see surveys being run in lots of different countries to allow us to do these

00:07:08.280 comparisons. So Gallup, the polling organization, includes questions about happiness in masses of

00:07:16.000 countries. And many governments around the world include it in many of their surveys. In the UK,

00:07:22.620 the survey called the Labour Force Service set up to calculate the unemployment rate actually includes

00:07:28.180 it. And surveys by the European Commission and the Japanese government and all sorts of places

00:07:34.080 around the world include these kinds of questions. So we can track. We can track happiness amongst groups

00:07:39.620 of people. And we can track happiness from the same person as they age.

00:07:46.060 When differences do appear, so generally, there's going to be a U-shaped curve across countries. But

00:07:49.280 are there differences? Like, does the trough happen at different times?

00:07:54.180 Well, there's a bit of variation. But the surprising thing is how little variation there actually is.

00:07:59.540 It looks like sort of deeply genetic. But actually, your listeners may well be surprised by the fact

00:08:06.900 that actually a survey, a study has been done amongst orangutans and chimpanzees. And they don't

00:08:13.360 ask the orangutan, but they ask volunteers and their keepers and so on. And it appears that actually in

00:08:18.640 the data, the same pattern is seen in great apes. So that maybe suggests there's something kind of

00:08:25.200 deeply, deeply genetic going on.

00:08:28.160 So apes have midlife crises too. 0.96

00:08:30.080 Seems that that's the way. As I say, there's a new paper, a paper by a whole series of scientists,

00:08:36.620 of biologists and scientists and economists who have got together and done this study of apes. So

00:08:41.500 that suggests to you that, you know, perhaps it's deeply there. And then that might suggest that's

00:08:45.660 the reason why it doesn't vary much by country. But you think you ought to have expected that in a

00:08:51.840 country that has very short life expectancy, much shorter than in the United States, that you would

00:08:57.800 see something different. But the surprise is that you don't. But the great thing is,

00:09:02.440 I'm an empiricist, the great thing is you go look at the data and the data tells its story.

00:09:06.860 And so that's the challenge around the world. We haven't expected this, but that's what we see.

00:09:11.680 Are there differences between the sexes when it comes to the U-shaped curve of happiness?

00:09:15.300 Not really. There's much expectation that there really, that there would be. There isn't. But

00:09:22.280 the more recent work, I've just done a new paper out in the last couple of days called the female

00:09:26.480 happiness paradox. It is true that there's a U-shape in age, but it certainly appears if you think of

00:09:32.200 where it is, it turns out that on average, females are less happy than men. So you might think that

00:09:38.400 the function is a little higher for men than it is. Just think of two U-shaped, one slightly above the

00:09:45.080 other. So it does appear that women are less happy than men, but they have a U-shape as well.

00:09:50.840 And the bottom of it is about the same place as it is for men.

00:09:54.900 And one thing your paper talked about is that while there is a U-shape in unhappiness,

00:09:59.760 it's shifted over time. I think the paper suggested that women were happier maybe a generation ago

00:10:06.040 compared to women today. Is that correct? Did I read that right? 0.53

00:10:08.260 Well, yeah. Well, the latest work we've been doing, it makes it rather less clear. I mean,

00:10:15.320 there certainly was evidence in the past. Some evidence in data, some researchers have suggested

00:10:20.900 that in the past, women were happier than men and actually were healthier than men. But I think 0.81

00:10:27.540 over time, what you've observed is women have become more equal. They've gone to work and they've 1.00

00:10:32.640 actually had taken on some of the characteristics and some of the traits, if you like, that men have

00:10:37.180 because they've gone to work. But it appears that today, the evidence is much clearer that women are

00:10:42.740 less happy than men. There was some evidence in the past that the reverse was true. What particularly 0.99

00:10:48.020 happened is that the pandemic especially hit women who were really, really hit very hard by the

00:10:54.380 pandemic and the lockdowns in March and April, particularly 2020. They somewhat recovered, but that seems to have

00:11:01.780 been a really big deal. But there is some evidence, and we don't quite understand why, that those

00:11:05.940 patterns were starting to emerge in 2018, 2019. Perhaps, you know, we don't really have a great

00:11:12.100 story for it, but the pandemic has really, if you like, put the tin hat on it. And the evidence we have

00:11:18.400 is, for now anyway, that women are less happy than men on almost every measure. And there's no

00:11:23.780 contradiction, it turns out, at all when you look at measures of unhappiness. So over time, if you look at

00:11:29.000 measures of, you know, stress and depression and pain, these are all things that women experience

00:11:36.180 more than men. The contradiction, a little bit, is when you ask them about their happiness levels. But

00:11:41.200 unhappiness is clearly something that women report. They're more anxious and worried and so on than 1.00

00:11:48.980 men. The little bit of contradiction is when you ask about happiness, but it's pretty, absolutely

00:11:54.040 clear-cut in unhappiness. Okay, so men and women will hit that midlife trough at this, about the

00:12:00.100 same age. But it's just, men will probably be, like, less unhappy than women at that period.

00:12:04.920 Yeah, I mean, I think it is. So we're thinking about the, think of two U-shapes. Just take these 0.98

00:12:10.580 two U-shapes and say, do they look similar to each other? Yup. Is the bottom at about the same age?

00:12:16.460 Yup. Is one of these curves slightly above the other? The answer is yes. The male line is a bit 0.69

00:12:22.460 above the female line, especially now, as I say, with the pressures that came from lockdown,

00:12:28.300 from remote working, from having to look after children, women particularly worried about finances 0.99

00:12:34.600 and other things. So the answer to that is yes, the patterns were clear, but they're much clearer

00:12:39.300 today, particularly with what's happened in the last couple of years. How does education influence

00:12:44.000 this happiness curve? Well, education, I mean, there's a similar story here, which is that happiness

00:12:50.600 is, as I say, U-shaped in age. But it turns out that there's a big pattern in the data,

00:12:56.700 which is groups that are particularly unhappy and have particularly high unhappiness levels

00:13:02.640 are less educated prime age. We used to think it was men, but it's men and women. So less educated 1.00

00:13:09.140 prime age in America who've seen their good jobs disappear. I have a book called Where Have All

00:13:13.800 the Good Job's Gone. And the problem there is that we've seen a big rise in what I'll call morbidity

00:13:19.700 and mortality. So that group, particularly the less educated in America, especially,

00:13:25.760 have been impacted by it. And famously, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have written about what they call

00:13:32.740 deaths of despair. And what we've seen is a big rise in deaths from drug overdoses,

00:13:38.860 suicide, and cirrhosis of the liver. I mean, we're talking of 100,000. We're not talking a million

00:13:46.220 or so, as we've seen in COVID. But so in a sense, this midlife crisis has particularly impacted

00:13:56.340 the prime age, less educated whites, in fact, more than anything else, and Native Americans. And I've

00:14:02.960 written something about that. So this is really important, because in some ways, you might connect

00:14:07.540 this unhappiness of these folks to their poor performance in the labor market. And you see

00:14:14.580 this around the world.

00:14:15.400 Okay, so low education, low employment prospects, that's going to make you even more. And I think,

00:14:21.140 yeah, the research showed, which is surprising, we typically think of deaths of despair, like

00:14:24.640 suicide as a young person's thing. 0.86

00:14:27.380 Yeah, I mean, this is really particularly surprising. And if you look at things like death from cocaine

00:14:32.400 use, death from heroin, all these overdoses, as I say, and cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide,

00:14:40.260 I mean, the patterns in the data, you might think that this is certainly, you know, these are young

00:14:44.960 persons. Turns out that's not true. We're talking of the mid-age, if you like, but the high points of

00:14:50.920 these are exactly as we've talked about. They're in midlife. So the high points of opioid deaths,

00:14:56.940 deaths, as I say, from cocaine, and from any of these opioids we've talked about, those happen

00:15:02.600 to be in midlife. So that's a consistent pattern in the data. Hard for those who want to argue,

00:15:07.760 but there is no life, if you like, midlife crisis in the happiness data, when there's clearly evidence

00:15:13.960 of objective evidence from the real world, as I say, that suicides and so on, peak in midlife.

00:15:19.640 Something else that peaks in midlife, actually, is the taking of antidepressants. So we have work

00:15:24.820 show, and there's another way of objectively looking at these patterns. Hard for people

00:15:28.960 to argue, there isn't a midlife crisis, but there's quite clearly a midlife crisis

00:15:32.780 in observed things like death.

00:15:35.840 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:15:39.460 And now back to the show. What about marital status? How does that affect the curve?

00:15:44.400 Well, marital status is a little bit difficult. It has a degree of impact. It has more impact on

00:15:51.440 the shape of this curve in the United States than elsewhere, not least for two things, which is

00:15:57.120 that in the mid-20s, young Americans marry more than most other European countries and advanced

00:16:02.520 countries. But by the age of 35, they divorce more. So there's a reality at the beginning,

00:16:08.480 which is it has an impact on happiness. But both the married and unmarried, there is still a midlife

00:16:13.600 crisis. The path of the data before that is a little strange because people think, oh, great,

00:16:18.740 I'm going to get married. This is great. But then it doesn't work out. But we find both for

00:16:23.200 married and unmarried that there is still a midlife crisis. But the pattern is a little different in

00:16:29.180 the United States, I'd say, not least because the proportion of people who marry in their 20s is

00:16:33.600 higher in the United States than elsewhere. But I've written about that.

00:16:37.020 I think one thing I read, correct me if I'm wrong, in one of your papers, it talks about marital

00:16:41.020 status. As you get older, if you're married when you're older, you'll be happier than people who are

00:16:47.260 single. Everyone's going to experience that uptick. But if you're married, you'll probably 0.54

00:16:51.920 be a little bit happier.

00:16:53.060 Yeah. One of the things that, well, there's actually a couple of interesting things. Married

00:16:56.460 people tend to be happier than unmarried people. They're happier than divorced and separated

00:17:01.560 widowed people. One of the things that actually is also relevant, new work has just been done about

00:17:08.640 people over the age of 70. And there's two things to note. Happy people live longer.

00:17:16.620 But two big things happen in later life. The first is that ill health, particularly in the last three

00:17:23.300 years of life, has a big impact on people's happiness. But one of the other things is that

00:17:29.380 in later life, so I think after the age of 70, the death of a spouse actually has very big negative

00:17:35.980 effects on the well-being of the other spouse. So marital status has an impact, but obviously when

00:17:40.940 you're tied together, this has a negative effect on your happiness, particularly, as I say, in later

00:17:46.440 life when a spouse dies. So marital status is good, but you're then tied to the spouse, and that has

00:17:51.580 implications later.

00:17:53.240 What about children? Have you looked at that? Like if you have kids?

00:17:56.700 Yeah, I've done lots of these. I've got so many papers I've worked on. So we worked on,

00:18:00.240 we have a paper with my colleague, Andrew Clark. And we were intrigued by the fact that in the data,

00:18:07.400 it looks like children made people unhappy. And we both have kids, and it never really made any sense

00:18:14.260 to me, in the sense that you might think you had one kid, and if that made you unhappy, why would

00:18:19.400 you have more? Because that wouldn't make any sense. So it turns out that we've now basically worked that

00:18:25.340 out. And the answer is as follows. Young kids make you happy. So toddlers, two-year-olds,

00:18:33.180 three-year-olds, and I have seven grandkids, and they're all under five, and they're all wonderful,

00:18:38.620 but they're slightly different with grandkids. But anyway, let me keep going. So kids under five

00:18:42.660 in the data just undoubtedly make people happy. But in the raw data, it looks like people,

00:18:48.400 kids between the age of about five and 18, in the raw data, don't make you happy. That doesn't seem

00:18:54.700 to make any sense. What we discovered is that once you control for the cost of kids,

00:19:00.360 so the big thing is you've got a 15-year-old, they're expensive. So it turns out, once you

00:19:05.760 control for the fact that it generates a cost, and it generates difficulty in paying your bills,

00:19:11.620 once you control for that, it turns out kids make you happy. Older kids might not make you quite as

00:19:17.640 happy as young kids, but kids make you happy. And that makes sense. I mean, a lot of this stuff is,

00:19:21.740 for listeners, is does this make sense to you? And as I said, I have three kids. Why would I have

00:19:26.980 had three kids if the first one made me unhappy, the second one made me unhappy? Well, it's by

00:19:31.520 accident, but it wasn't an accident. And I think the answer is that children, it's hard to kind of

00:19:36.760 work it out, but it turns out that having teenagers is expensive. Once you control for the fact that it's

00:19:42.280 expensive and it's a trouble to your finances, then kids make you happy, which makes sense.

00:19:48.540 Well, and also what happens when you have a teenager, you're typically approaching that 47, 48 age. So

00:19:55.440 have you been able to separate that? Yeah, exactly. At the same time, these processes are going on,

00:20:03.200 there's pressures on marriages and so on. I mean, having teenagers, I remember tough days,

00:20:08.900 tough, tough times. But as you say, the two things sort of interact together. And then you're getting

00:20:13.940 to this midlife period. And a lot of the time, people ask me, I assume you're going to ask me,

00:20:20.360 well, then what? What do you say to people? And I always say to people at the low point,

00:20:24.500 well, the great thing about this research is A, you're not unique. It's not unique to you.

00:20:30.160 And B, it's going to get better. That, I think, is the positive bit of this work.

00:20:35.520 Yeah. And it seems like part of the reason, once you hit that midlife trough, things start getting

00:20:40.960 better is that people, you just start accepting that your life is what it is, right? And you stop

00:20:46.060 regretting what could have been and you just move on. Well, the reality is that people are becoming

00:20:50.540 more realistic in their aspirations. They understand that maybe they wanted to be a top 10 golfer,

00:20:58.400 but that's not what they could do. And they ended up having a career doing something else and

00:21:03.100 they became realistic and their life got kind of better. And perhaps it's to do with the fact

00:21:07.960 that their income rose over time and eventually they were, they would become, but I think a lot

00:21:12.200 of it's about becoming realistic. Okay. So it sounds like if part of the reason we get happier after

00:21:18.420 that midlife dip is that we become more realistic, then the flip side of that points to why this

00:21:24.500 happens, like why the midlife dip happens in the first place. So part of it's genetic because it also

00:21:30.540 happens to primates as well, but it sounds like it also happens because, you know, this midlife dip

00:21:35.500 happens because we start running into our unmet expectations, right? Like you start feeling a

00:21:40.380 regret that your life didn't turn out the way you thought it would be when you were 20 years old.

00:21:44.600 I think it's a lot of that, but I think you then get to the point of going, well, actually it's not

00:21:49.920 that bad. I think it's, I mean, there are, there are positives coming forward. I've done, I've done,

00:21:55.440 I mean, there are unmet expectations and yes, you haven't become a Supreme Court justice, but,

00:22:01.480 but actually being realistic, you, it may, life may be actually better than you think. And in fact,

00:22:08.320 you can, the kids are going to go off to college. And one of the big things I always remember is the

00:22:12.120 kids going off to college and what are you doing in the first, in the last year or so, you're fighting

00:22:16.120 and arguing with your kids. In a sense, you're preparing them to leave, making them want to leave

00:22:20.520 and you're being prepared for them to leave. And, and then you move into other parts of your life.

00:22:25.320 But I mean, there's evidence about, you know, people becoming disabled and you ask people, you

00:22:30.300 know, what, what, what happens if you're a football player and you can no longer play football,

00:22:33.980 you have a knee injury and you say the whole of my life is football. And then you discover later that

00:22:38.560 actually there are other things that you can do. You can play pickleball, you can play golf, you can

00:22:43.020 surf, you can do all sorts of things. And people suddenly realize that, that there's,

00:22:47.420 there's other things to life. Remembering that some people don't do that. Some people do get in

00:22:52.220 that midlife crisis and, and, you know, they don't survive it. And we're talking of a hundred

00:22:56.220 thousand people a year who are, you know, in that sort of, particularly in that sort of situation.

00:23:01.200 But I think the answer is reality comes. I mean, the surprise in a sense, we haven't focused on it

00:23:06.180 is in a youth shift. We've talked about the drop from youth to midlife, but then, then really the focus

00:23:12.380 has to be then from midlife to age 70, this thing picks back up again. And so that's sort of what we

00:23:20.320 have to kind of think about. Things are going to get better. Reality is going to set in. And I think,

00:23:25.580 I think the answer is, look at my own life. I think I became realistic. The grass on the other side

00:23:30.820 was not quite as green as you thought.

00:23:33.720 I'm sure someone's listening to this and thinking, okay, 47, 48, I'm going to hit this low point.

00:23:39.040 I'm 70. But I'm sure there's like someone who's like, you know, 35 listens. Like, I want to avoid

00:23:45.480 that dip. Do you have a hunch whether it's possible to avoid the dip by doing certain things? Like I'm

00:23:50.340 going to optimize my life. I'm the wrong person really to ask that other than as an individual.

00:23:56.320 I mean, there are all sorts of things about friends. I mean, let me, well, I'll say this.

00:24:01.020 Psychologists are actually good at this stuff, but as an economist, what I, what I basically

00:24:07.960 discovered was that, I mean, economists care about money things. So a lot of the stuff I've tried to

00:24:13.020 think about is, well, how much money buys you happiness? Well, more money do things. But what

00:24:17.800 we discovered was that lots of other things having a really very high happiness value. So living in a

00:24:25.300 safe place, having friends, having a dog, going to the cinema, going to the theatre, going to see

00:24:31.600 art museum, going to an art museum. So these kinds of things where, I mean, I guess you, I guess the

00:24:38.840 story is it takes a village. The surprise in a way is that, you know, a marriage has a very big

00:24:44.520 positive in money terms. If you try and put these things in money terms, these sorts of things have

00:24:49.980 very high value. And so I think people learn to, I mean, they go to, they go to knitting groups and

00:24:57.100 sewing groups and chess groups and book clubs. Those kinds of things appear to be bonding, and they

00:25:03.040 appear to have much greater value than an economist would have thought. And money doesn't buy as much

00:25:07.960 happiness as you might have imagined. So maybe life's about that. You haven't made as much money. But

00:25:12.580 the reality is that one of the big stories is that relative things matter. Yes, you compare yourself to

00:25:18.100 others, but having a bigger car, having a big fancy BMW may look great at the beginning, but every day you

00:25:24.740 take it shopping, you have to go to the store, just like someone who drives a little car, and you become

00:25:29.520 realistic, and you look at other things. And then, so I'm, in a way, I'm a guy who looks at the data.

00:25:36.100 Psychologists, there's a huge industry and people talking about how to be happy and what to do. But, but I'm

00:25:41.700 an economist who looks at the data. I'm the fact guy. Not the fact, not the fact guy. I mean, the fact guy.

00:25:49.520 So you've given some insights, some advice on what you can do as an individual, knowing that you're going to

00:25:54.120 have this happiness dip as you approach middle age. I mean, there's things you can do to mitigate it,

00:25:58.260 have friends, go visit art museums, have interests, but also just kind of manage expectations. Like,

00:26:04.740 just, it's going to happen. Manage expectations. Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is that

00:26:08.640 I like the fact of saying to people, this is just normal. This is what happens to people. This is

00:26:16.500 something that happens, and it's going to pass. It's going to pass. Just understand it's going to pass.

00:26:22.880 There are things that you can do to help, talk to people, go to therapy, all sorts of things. But

00:26:27.820 ultimately, I think the focus, in a way, with our discussion has been about this happiness declines

00:26:33.180 from youth to middle age as you try and find your way and decide what you want to do.

00:26:38.260 But eventually, other people have been in this situation, lots of other people in this situation,

00:26:43.160 and boy, it's going to get better. That, I think, is the thing that I would say. Now,

00:26:47.440 a psychologist might explain why that is, but that's what I say to people. Hope is not loss.

00:26:53.540 Each year from now. But those who are at 47, 46, life might seem pretty bleak and grim,

00:27:00.560 but it's going to get better. Well, you're a labor economist, so I imagine you want your

00:27:04.920 research to influence public policy. And this is an issue on the public policy level, because you

00:27:10.000 said like 100,000 people are dying a year from these deaths of despair. How do you think this

00:27:15.320 information can influence public policy?

00:27:19.000 Well, I think it's really, really important to try and think about the well-being. When I talk about

00:27:24.360 the well-being, I mean, in Britain, I talk about the well-being of the man or woman on the

00:27:28.880 clapham omnibus. I mean, I'll translate. You care about the well-being of those, particularly in this

00:27:35.420 world, at the low end, with rising inequality, public policy to try to do things about poverty,

00:27:42.320 poverty, and jobs. So my book I wrote is called, as I said, basically about what happened to the

00:27:48.120 good jobs. Where did all the good jobs go to? Where have all the good jobs gone? The answer is

00:27:53.460 that the evidence appears to be that people respond to work. They like work they like. They like to do

00:28:01.140 it. So the provision of well-paid, decent jobs is particularly important. And we've seen that in

00:28:06.460 the pandemic, we've seen that people have now been choosy. They're choosing jobs that they want to go

00:28:12.140 to. The provision of a good job raises well-being. Inability to work is a big deal. And think about

00:28:19.000 the people I've talked about, the less educated blue-collar worker, compared to, let's say, their

00:28:24.700 father and their grandfather, their standard of living is not as high. So the answer is that we,

00:28:30.280 in a sense, to this issue of despair and distress, we have to do something about those who have been

00:28:37.560 left behind. We have to do something about provision of health care, programs to help people get off

00:28:43.720 these drugs. We have to try and do something about those most impacted and provide ways of helping

00:28:49.760 people in their mid-lives. But the answer, I think, increasingly, we've learned it during the

00:28:53.800 great pandemic, is that, in a sense, we've got to help people. And the provision of furlough schemes

00:29:01.520 and help through this crisis, perhaps, is indicative of that, because this has been a really big shock

00:29:07.180 to people's well-being. So helping people and adjusting them, but also giving incentives for

00:29:13.240 firms to hire people, looks like a really big deal, because Caves and Deaton and I take the same view,

00:29:19.820 that much of this distress that we've seen is driven by the labor market jobs. And we simply

00:29:25.240 haven't delivered enough jobs of equality for those at the low end. And that seems like a big

00:29:30.860 policy prescription. Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people

00:29:34.940 can go to learn more about your work? Yes, we can link to it. There's a whole host of papers

00:29:39.560 on my website. I think you're going to post a link to the website. I mean, there's all sorts of

00:29:45.160 papers there, and I can try and make sure that it's easy for people to access. But yes, some of

00:29:50.500 them are a little bit technical, but a lot of them just lay out pretty easily what's going on. I mean,

00:29:57.260 I think of this as sort of applied common sense. When you talk to people, people come write to me,

00:30:03.480 and they say to me, yeah, that makes sense to me. I felt like, personally, I had a midlife crisis.

00:30:07.200 I did. And so it seems to me that this is sort of sensible things. And the people listening to it

00:30:13.520 should say, does it make sense? And if it doesn't, that's fine. But if it does, and most people seem

00:30:18.680 to think it does, then what you'd like to know is that there's work going on trying to understand

00:30:22.920 this. And that's what I do. And that's what other people do. And increasingly, people in economics do

00:30:28.400 it. Angus Deaton, as I talked about in a minute ago, won the Nobel Prize in economics. Danny Kahneman,

00:30:32.860 who's a psychologist, he also won the Nobel Prize in economics. There's a whole slew of people,

00:30:38.940 Dick Thaler, who talks about behavioral things. So economists are interested in well-being and how

00:30:45.120 people behave and trying to understand patterns in the data. And that's what this is. It's not magic.

00:30:51.020 It's about applied common sense. So you mentioned you had a midlife crisis. How old were you when it

00:30:55.880 happened? 48. You know I'd say that. 48 in three months. That's what the research is indisputable.

00:31:07.800 That's right. I started from that, right? Well, David, thanks so much for your time. This

00:31:12.620 has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much. Great. My guest is David Branchflower. He is a labor

00:31:17.580 economist who also research and writes about human happiness. You can find more information about his

00:31:21.200 work at our show notes at awim.is slash happinesscurve. Well, that wraps up another edition

00:31:32.940 of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com where you find our

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00:32:05.980 I'm Brett McKay. Remind you to not list the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:32:18.320 you

The Art of Manliness - April 18, 2022

The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness

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