The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. David Branchflower explains how happiness begins to decline around age 18 and continues to fall into mid-life, before picking back up again. Dr. Branchflower is a labor economist who not only studies data around money and jobs, but also about human happiness.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you're
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someone who's a decade or two out from your high school graduation, do you ever find yourself
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thinking that you're just not as happy as you were back then? Of course, all the positive
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thinking self-talk thing kicks in. You think, well, maybe I actually wasn't that happy before.
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I do like my life better now. I like the independence I have. Yeah, yeah, I really
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like being an adult. Yet no matter the glass half full glow you try to put on things, you can't
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shake the feeling that your happiness has declined over the years. That at 30, you weren't as happy
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as you were at 20 and that at 40, you weren't as happy as you were when you were 30. Well,
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that feeling is more than a nostalgic hunch and it's not unique to you. It's actually been borne
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out by hundreds of research papers and studies and shown to be a near universal experience.
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My guest today has authored many of those papers. His name is Dr. David Branchflower. He's a labor
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economist who not only studies data around money and jobs, but also around human happiness.
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Today on the show, David explains how happiness follows a U-shaped curve. It starts declining
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around age 18 and continues to fall into midlife before picking back up again. And David shares
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the average age at which happiness hits its very lowest point. While it's not entirely
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clear why the U-shape of happiness occurs, we talk about some possible reasons behind it.
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And while the U-shape is consistent across the world, it can be lower or higher. And so we
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discuss how factors like gender, socioeconomic, and marital status, and having children affect
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happiness and whether it's possible to mitigate the dip. While the fact that it won't be until
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your mid-60s that you feel as happy as you were at age 18 might seem depressing, David
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argues that it's comforting to know that the feelings of declining happiness you experience
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as you approach midlife are normal. It'll not only pass one day, but start moving in the
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other direction. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash happiness curve.
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So you are a labor economist, but you've done a lot of research and writing about happiness
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over the lifespan of humans. How did an economist who specializes in labor end up researching human
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happiness? Well, one of the big things I've been interested in is work. And I thought a lot about
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why do people work? They work because obviously it pays them money, but it actually makes people feel
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good. And very early on when I started working in labor economics, I was in the UK in the 1980s,
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and there was lots of unemployment as there was all around Europe. And there was a big question,
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was unemployment voluntary? Did people choose to do it because it made them happy? Or did they not
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choose to do it and they were forced to go and be unemployed? Was it what's called Marx's army of
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the unemployed? Was it a volunteer armory or a conscript army? So I started to think of that for
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a really, really long time when basically discovered a really important fact, which is that undoubtedly on
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every piece of debt you ever look at, unemployment makes people unhappy. There's no disputing that it
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doesn't look that people choose to be unemployed. If you chose to be unemployed, why would you do that
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if it makes you unhappy? So I started to think about well-being. And then as time goes on, economists are
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interested in utility. And I started to think, well, how could we measure people's well-being? And so
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that's kind of how I got there. But particularly, and I ended up being a central banker,
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and I was interested in inflation and unemployment, one of the big issues we see today. And the
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question I started to ask myself was, well, if you want to measure inflation and unemployment and
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their effects, you should look at well-being and happiness. So that's what I did and basically found
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that a one percentage point rise in unemployment makes people much more unhappy than a one percentage
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point rise in inflation. So the consequence, as we're seeing right now, the consequence of time to
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deal with inflation may well be something much worse. I'm a labor economist. I care about work.
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I care about unemployment. And that's why I ended up working on well-being, happiness, unhappiness.
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Okay. So one of the things your research has shown is that over the lifespan of human happiness,
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there is this U-shaped curve. Can you walk us through happiness from young adulthood through
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all the years? When does happiness start to fall? Right. It starts to fall, actually. I'm a
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professor. I teach at Dartmouth. I taught class yesterday, first class of the quarter. And these
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young folks, 18 years old in my freshman class, they're extremely happy. They're at college and
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they're young. And in any of the data that we see, that looks like a really happy time. And I teach this
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class with them. I teach them about the U-shaping happiness. And I say to them, well, make best,
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because it's going to get worse for quite a while. Eventually, it'll get better. But just so you
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understand, it seems to happen to everybody. And so we have a lot of evidence, millions of
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observations around the world from 150 countries across time periods and so on. And basically,
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what it appears is that happiness declines through midlife. There's a midlife crisis and then late
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40s or so on. And then things pick up through around age 65 or 70. And there's a lot of evidence
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that actually being happy is particularly good. In fact, at age 70, happy people live longer. So this
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is what you see, a decline and then a pickup. And the extent of that pickup varies by countries
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in a place like Germany, it's more like a ski jump. But in most countries, including the United States,
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it's really like a U-shape. And just to finish it off, so happiness is U-shaped in age. But if you
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think of unhappiness, it's just the flip. So the unhappiness curve is just the hump-shaped copy
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of the U-shape. So it's an inverted U. So it looks like in the data, there's a life satisfaction
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decline, a happiness decline through midlife, which is astonishingly present in the data.
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And it's quite interesting. Quite a lot of psychologists try to pretend that it's not there,
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So like, okay, there's a midlife dip. Is there like an average age where this is like the lowest?
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Like I could be looking at my life and like, okay, when I hit this age...
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It seems like a pretty good low point to use. Somewhere around there, and as I said, I've
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written all sorts of papers and can show it to you in lots of different countries. The average
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across developed and developing countries, about 150 countries, is about 48 or so is a good run.
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And the surprise, actually, is that the same thing is true in developing as well as developed
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countries. I'd expected there to be a big age difference, and the answer is there isn't.
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No, so yeah, that's interesting. So this isn't just a United States phenomenon. This happens
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Absolutely. It happens across cultures. And one of the big things is that over the years,
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we've started to see surveys being run in lots of different countries to allow us to do these
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comparisons. So Gallup, the polling organization, includes questions about happiness in masses of
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countries. And many governments around the world include it in many of their surveys. In the UK,
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the survey called the Labour Force Service set up to calculate the unemployment rate actually includes
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it. And surveys by the European Commission and the Japanese government and all sorts of places
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around the world include these kinds of questions. So we can track. We can track happiness amongst groups
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of people. And we can track happiness from the same person as they age.
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When differences do appear, so generally, there's going to be a U-shaped curve across countries. But
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are there differences? Like, does the trough happen at different times?
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Well, there's a bit of variation. But the surprising thing is how little variation there actually is.
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It looks like sort of deeply genetic. But actually, your listeners may well be surprised by the fact
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that actually a survey, a study has been done amongst orangutans and chimpanzees. And they don't
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ask the orangutan, but they ask volunteers and their keepers and so on. And it appears that actually in
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the data, the same pattern is seen in great apes. So that maybe suggests there's something kind of
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Seems that that's the way. As I say, there's a new paper, a paper by a whole series of scientists,
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of biologists and scientists and economists who have got together and done this study of apes. So
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that suggests to you that, you know, perhaps it's deeply there. And then that might suggest that's
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the reason why it doesn't vary much by country. But you think you ought to have expected that in a
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country that has very short life expectancy, much shorter than in the United States, that you would
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see something different. But the surprise is that you don't. But the great thing is,
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I'm an empiricist, the great thing is you go look at the data and the data tells its story.
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And so that's the challenge around the world. We haven't expected this, but that's what we see.
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Are there differences between the sexes when it comes to the U-shaped curve of happiness?
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Not really. There's much expectation that there really, that there would be. There isn't. But
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the more recent work, I've just done a new paper out in the last couple of days called the female
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happiness paradox. It is true that there's a U-shape in age, but it certainly appears if you think of
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where it is, it turns out that on average, females are less happy than men. So you might think that
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the function is a little higher for men than it is. Just think of two U-shaped, one slightly above the
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other. So it does appear that women are less happy than men, but they have a U-shape as well.
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And the bottom of it is about the same place as it is for men.
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And one thing your paper talked about is that while there is a U-shape in unhappiness,
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it's shifted over time. I think the paper suggested that women were happier maybe a generation ago
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compared to women today. Is that correct? Did I read that right?
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Well, yeah. Well, the latest work we've been doing, it makes it rather less clear. I mean,
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there certainly was evidence in the past. Some evidence in data, some researchers have suggested
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that in the past, women were happier than men and actually were healthier than men. But I think
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over time, what you've observed is women have become more equal. They've gone to work and they've
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actually had taken on some of the characteristics and some of the traits, if you like, that men have
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because they've gone to work. But it appears that today, the evidence is much clearer that women are
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less happy than men. There was some evidence in the past that the reverse was true. What particularly
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happened is that the pandemic especially hit women who were really, really hit very hard by the
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pandemic and the lockdowns in March and April, particularly 2020. They somewhat recovered, but that seems to have
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been a really big deal. But there is some evidence, and we don't quite understand why, that those
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patterns were starting to emerge in 2018, 2019. Perhaps, you know, we don't really have a great
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story for it, but the pandemic has really, if you like, put the tin hat on it. And the evidence we have
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is, for now anyway, that women are less happy than men on almost every measure. And there's no
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contradiction, it turns out, at all when you look at measures of unhappiness. So over time, if you look at
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measures of, you know, stress and depression and pain, these are all things that women experience
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more than men. The contradiction, a little bit, is when you ask them about their happiness levels. But
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unhappiness is clearly something that women report. They're more anxious and worried and so on than
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men. The little bit of contradiction is when you ask about happiness, but it's pretty, absolutely
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clear-cut in unhappiness. Okay, so men and women will hit that midlife trough at this, about the
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same age. But it's just, men will probably be, like, less unhappy than women at that period.
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Yeah, I mean, I think it is. So we're thinking about the, think of two U-shapes. Just take these
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two U-shapes and say, do they look similar to each other? Yup. Is the bottom at about the same age?
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Yup. Is one of these curves slightly above the other? The answer is yes. The male line is a bit
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above the female line, especially now, as I say, with the pressures that came from lockdown,
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from remote working, from having to look after children, women particularly worried about finances
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and other things. So the answer to that is yes, the patterns were clear, but they're much clearer
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today, particularly with what's happened in the last couple of years. How does education influence
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this happiness curve? Well, education, I mean, there's a similar story here, which is that happiness
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is, as I say, U-shaped in age. But it turns out that there's a big pattern in the data,
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which is groups that are particularly unhappy and have particularly high unhappiness levels
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are less educated prime age. We used to think it was men, but it's men and women. So less educated
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prime age in America who've seen their good jobs disappear. I have a book called Where Have All
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the Good Job's Gone. And the problem there is that we've seen a big rise in what I'll call morbidity
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and mortality. So that group, particularly the less educated in America, especially,
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have been impacted by it. And famously, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have written about what they call
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deaths of despair. And what we've seen is a big rise in deaths from drug overdoses,
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suicide, and cirrhosis of the liver. I mean, we're talking of 100,000. We're not talking a million
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or so, as we've seen in COVID. But so in a sense, this midlife crisis has particularly impacted
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the prime age, less educated whites, in fact, more than anything else, and Native Americans. And I've
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written something about that. So this is really important, because in some ways, you might connect
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this unhappiness of these folks to their poor performance in the labor market. And you see
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Okay, so low education, low employment prospects, that's going to make you even more. And I think,
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yeah, the research showed, which is surprising, we typically think of deaths of despair, like
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Yeah, I mean, this is really particularly surprising. And if you look at things like death from cocaine
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use, death from heroin, all these overdoses, as I say, and cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide,
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I mean, the patterns in the data, you might think that this is certainly, you know, these are young
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persons. Turns out that's not true. We're talking of the mid-age, if you like, but the high points of
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these are exactly as we've talked about. They're in midlife. So the high points of opioid deaths,
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deaths, as I say, from cocaine, and from any of these opioids we've talked about, those happen
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to be in midlife. So that's a consistent pattern in the data. Hard for those who want to argue,
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but there is no life, if you like, midlife crisis in the happiness data, when there's clearly evidence
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of objective evidence from the real world, as I say, that suicides and so on, peak in midlife.
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Something else that peaks in midlife, actually, is the taking of antidepressants. So we have work
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show, and there's another way of objectively looking at these patterns. Hard for people
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to argue, there isn't a midlife crisis, but there's quite clearly a midlife crisis
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. What about marital status? How does that affect the curve?
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Well, marital status is a little bit difficult. It has a degree of impact. It has more impact on
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the shape of this curve in the United States than elsewhere, not least for two things, which is
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that in the mid-20s, young Americans marry more than most other European countries and advanced
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countries. But by the age of 35, they divorce more. So there's a reality at the beginning,
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which is it has an impact on happiness. But both the married and unmarried, there is still a midlife
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crisis. The path of the data before that is a little strange because people think, oh, great,
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I'm going to get married. This is great. But then it doesn't work out. But we find both for
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married and unmarried that there is still a midlife crisis. But the pattern is a little different in
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the United States, I'd say, not least because the proportion of people who marry in their 20s is
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higher in the United States than elsewhere. But I've written about that.
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I think one thing I read, correct me if I'm wrong, in one of your papers, it talks about marital
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status. As you get older, if you're married when you're older, you'll be happier than people who are
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single. Everyone's going to experience that uptick. But if you're married, you'll probably
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Yeah. One of the things that, well, there's actually a couple of interesting things. Married
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people tend to be happier than unmarried people. They're happier than divorced and separated
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widowed people. One of the things that actually is also relevant, new work has just been done about
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people over the age of 70. And there's two things to note. Happy people live longer.
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But two big things happen in later life. The first is that ill health, particularly in the last three
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years of life, has a big impact on people's happiness. But one of the other things is that
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in later life, so I think after the age of 70, the death of a spouse actually has very big negative
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effects on the well-being of the other spouse. So marital status has an impact, but obviously when
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you're tied together, this has a negative effect on your happiness, particularly, as I say, in later
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life when a spouse dies. So marital status is good, but you're then tied to the spouse, and that has
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What about children? Have you looked at that? Like if you have kids?
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Yeah, I've done lots of these. I've got so many papers I've worked on. So we worked on,
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we have a paper with my colleague, Andrew Clark. And we were intrigued by the fact that in the data,
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it looks like children made people unhappy. And we both have kids, and it never really made any sense
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to me, in the sense that you might think you had one kid, and if that made you unhappy, why would
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you have more? Because that wouldn't make any sense. So it turns out that we've now basically worked that
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out. And the answer is as follows. Young kids make you happy. So toddlers, two-year-olds,
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three-year-olds, and I have seven grandkids, and they're all under five, and they're all wonderful,
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but they're slightly different with grandkids. But anyway, let me keep going. So kids under five
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in the data just undoubtedly make people happy. But in the raw data, it looks like people,
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kids between the age of about five and 18, in the raw data, don't make you happy. That doesn't seem
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to make any sense. What we discovered is that once you control for the cost of kids,
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so the big thing is you've got a 15-year-old, they're expensive. So it turns out, once you
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control for the fact that it generates a cost, and it generates difficulty in paying your bills,
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once you control for that, it turns out kids make you happy. Older kids might not make you quite as
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happy as young kids, but kids make you happy. And that makes sense. I mean, a lot of this stuff is,
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for listeners, is does this make sense to you? And as I said, I have three kids. Why would I have
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had three kids if the first one made me unhappy, the second one made me unhappy? Well, it's by
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accident, but it wasn't an accident. And I think the answer is that children, it's hard to kind of
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work it out, but it turns out that having teenagers is expensive. Once you control for the fact that it's
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expensive and it's a trouble to your finances, then kids make you happy, which makes sense.
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Well, and also what happens when you have a teenager, you're typically approaching that 47, 48 age. So
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have you been able to separate that? Yeah, exactly. At the same time, these processes are going on,
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there's pressures on marriages and so on. I mean, having teenagers, I remember tough days,
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tough, tough times. But as you say, the two things sort of interact together. And then you're getting
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to this midlife period. And a lot of the time, people ask me, I assume you're going to ask me,
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well, then what? What do you say to people? And I always say to people at the low point,
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well, the great thing about this research is A, you're not unique. It's not unique to you.
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And B, it's going to get better. That, I think, is the positive bit of this work.
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Yeah. And it seems like part of the reason, once you hit that midlife trough, things start getting
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better is that people, you just start accepting that your life is what it is, right? And you stop
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regretting what could have been and you just move on. Well, the reality is that people are becoming
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more realistic in their aspirations. They understand that maybe they wanted to be a top 10 golfer,
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but that's not what they could do. And they ended up having a career doing something else and
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they became realistic and their life got kind of better. And perhaps it's to do with the fact
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that their income rose over time and eventually they were, they would become, but I think a lot
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of it's about becoming realistic. Okay. So it sounds like if part of the reason we get happier after
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that midlife dip is that we become more realistic, then the flip side of that points to why this
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happens, like why the midlife dip happens in the first place. So part of it's genetic because it also
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happens to primates as well, but it sounds like it also happens because, you know, this midlife dip
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happens because we start running into our unmet expectations, right? Like you start feeling a
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regret that your life didn't turn out the way you thought it would be when you were 20 years old.
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I think it's a lot of that, but I think you then get to the point of going, well, actually it's not
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that bad. I think it's, I mean, there are, there are positives coming forward. I've done, I've done,
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I mean, there are unmet expectations and yes, you haven't become a Supreme Court justice, but,
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but actually being realistic, you, it may, life may be actually better than you think. And in fact,
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you can, the kids are going to go off to college. And one of the big things I always remember is the
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kids going off to college and what are you doing in the first, in the last year or so, you're fighting
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and arguing with your kids. In a sense, you're preparing them to leave, making them want to leave
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and you're being prepared for them to leave. And, and then you move into other parts of your life.
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But I mean, there's evidence about, you know, people becoming disabled and you ask people, you
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know, what, what, what happens if you're a football player and you can no longer play football,
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you have a knee injury and you say the whole of my life is football. And then you discover later that
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actually there are other things that you can do. You can play pickleball, you can play golf, you can
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surf, you can do all sorts of things. And people suddenly realize that, that there's,
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there's other things to life. Remembering that some people don't do that. Some people do get in
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that midlife crisis and, and, you know, they don't survive it. And we're talking of a hundred
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thousand people a year who are, you know, in that sort of, particularly in that sort of situation.
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But I think the answer is reality comes. I mean, the surprise in a sense, we haven't focused on it
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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
00:23:33.720
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
00:27:19.000
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
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00:31:36.680
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