RALEIGH – I’ve written several times in the past about the field of happiness research and its relevance to political and public-policy disputes here in North Carolina as well as Washington. Now, I feel compelled to report – no, check that, I am ever so happy to report – that new research appears to have confirmed a clear and significant link between freedom and happiness.
Three University of Michigan scholars, plus a colleague at Germany’s Jacobs University, collaborated on a just-published paper utilizing decades of findings from the World Values Survey, the standard tool of measurement in the field. (You’ll find it and numerous supporting graphs and tables at the survey website.) The core finding may not strike you as surprising, but it did contradict conventional wisdom in some academic circles: average human happiness can increase.
The argument had been that while individuals within a society can become more or less happy, based on a variety of factors, the happiness of society as a whole will tend not to change much over time. The argument is invalid. Since 1981, average happiness has risen in 45 of the 52 countries for which there are sufficient data to analyze the trend. The upsurge didn’t occur just in one category of countries. It happened across the board. But, interestingly, the largest swings in the Subjective Well-Being index (which combines survey data on “happiness” and “life satisfaction”) tended to be in formerly communist countries such as Ukraine, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic as well as countries that have liberalized their economies and political systems while further integrating into the world trading system, such as Nigeria, Turkey, Mexico, and Brazil.
This led the researchers to ask the question: what explains the past few decades of rising happiness? It can’t be economic development alone, because countries such as China and India have made extraordinary progress in reducing poverty yet didn’t post gains in subjective well-being during the period. The data appear to show that economic growth does play a role, but it’s a diminishing one. Once a country’s economy develops to a certain level, other factors kick in.
Here’s the good news for liberty lovers: these factors mostly involve increases in freedom of choice. As societies become more democratic, more tolerant, and more open to both products and ideas from elsewhere, their citizens feel happier and more satisfied with their lives. A key passage from the paper:
The findings presented here are consistent with the interpretation that economic factors have a strong impact on subjective well-being in low-income countries – but that at higher levels of development, evolutionary cultural changes occur in which people place increasing emphasis on self-expression and free choice, leading them to increasingly emphasize strategies that maximize free choice and happiness. In recent years, economic growth, democratization and these changing cultural strategies actually seem to have raised happiness levels in much of the world. The evidence indicates that these factors were conducive to happiness mainly through their common tendency to increase human freedom, as human development theory argues.
Freedom is a core human impulse. It isn’t the only impulse, of course – and sometimes conflicting impulses of fear or envy lead people astray. The risk is particularly high during periods of war or economic crisis, as the Great Depression and subsequent expansions of big, centralized government in Europe and America illustrated. The problem persists today in large chunks of Africa and the Arab World, where governments continue to maintain tight control over the economic, social, and religious decisions of their citizens while engaging in rampant corruption. These are, generally speaking, the most unhappy places on Earth.
Let’s stick with optimism today. The collapse of the Soviet Empire and the spread of democracy and capitalism had not only material but also psychological benefits. As large swaths of humanity became freer, they also became happier. Doesn’t that make your day?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.