Thanks, very useful. The World Happiness Report data (from Gallup World Poll; I’d seen the figures before but couldn’t find more info) does show a rise of about 0.25/10 over the period—about one-third of the rise in the other ONS and Eurobarometer results (when Eurobarometer converted to a score out of 10).
I suspect the difference is in the wording of the question, which defines 0 as ‘the worst possible life for you’ and 10 as ‘the best possible life for you’ and asks where they are now. (It doesn’t mention the word ‘satisfaction’). Whereas the ONS question is ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’ where 0 = not at all satisfied and 10 = completely satisfied (Eurobarometer has similar wording AFAIK). They’re rather different, and personally I find the ‘life for you’ wording (which I’ve come across before) a bit confusing, as does 10 mean ‘doing as well as I could given my abilities & circumstances’ or ‘having the best life I can imagine (with no restriction)’?
[ADDED] To put it another way, the Gallup question seems to be asking people to compare with some unclear external scale of what’s possible for their life (in the real world? in a fantasy world in which they could be a rock star or Bill Gates?), rather than how satisfied they feel about their life (a more internal scale of feelings). If they’re comparing where they actually are with what might be possible in a fantasy world, it’s not so surprising it doesn’t go up much, because reality rarely approaches fantasy.
Without deciding which survey has a ‘better wording’, if any of them shows a substantial effect then it suggests something is going on in whatever that question is measuring.
There is a lot of happiness data available, including from the ONS, but there is a tendency now to prefer life satisfaction because it’s more stable (happiness varies with the weather and day of the week) and more all-encompassing. So I didn’t look into it. Though the ONS happiness data show the same trend over time as satisfaction.
(On a lesser point, I don’t know how large the Gallup poll is but I imagine, like Eurobarometer, it’s a few thousand people per country. The ONS is over 150,000 so very reliable. That said, aggregating multiple years removes the sample size problem.)
In the nationally representative UK Household Longitudinal Survey (“Understanding Society”), for example, average life satisfaction, measured on a scale from one to seven whereby higher values denote higher wellbeing, was not significantly higher in 2016 than in 1996 (5.3 vs. 5.2), despite large rises in real incomes.
Couldn’t quickly chase down source data up through 2016--best I could find was this through 2008.
Belatedly—thanks. I’m not sure what to make of this. That survey is quite large (30-50,000 people p.a.), so much larger than Eurobarometer, though smaller than ONS (around 150,000). Eurobarometer shows a large rise 1996-2016 (7.19 to 7.74/10), and the later-starting ONS shows a smallish but non-negligible rise 2012-2016 (7.45 to 7.67/10). Possibly again the question wording might have an influence.
But 5.2 to 5.3 is a rise, even if (statistically?) insignificant. It’s unfortunate that the paper cites other surveys (in other countries) which confirm its claim of no effect, but doesn’t cite these other UK surveys which suggest the opposite.
Since the ONS survey is much the largest, and also kind of confirmed by its findings on happiness (i.e. positive emotions), perhaps the reality is that there has indeed been a substantial rise since 2012, but only a small rise, or perhaps none, before that.
Hmm, I just went to OurWorldInData and looked at their info.
This is the (unsmoothed) Eurobarometer data you were looking at: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-people-who-say-they-are-happy-eurobarometer?time=1973..2016&country=GBR.
The World Value Survey seems to broadly agree: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-people-who-say-they-are-happy?time=1998..2009&country=GBR
The World Happiness Report on the other hand seems pretty flatlined: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder?tab=chart&time=2005..2018&country=GBR.
It looks like Eurobarometer also has a question about happiness (instead of life satisfaction), but I couldn’t find an easy way to get a plot of this online: https://www.gesis.org/eurobarometer-data-service/search-data-access/eb-trends-trend-files/list-of-trends/happiness
They’re each slightly different but it seems useful to look at as many data sources as possible.
Thanks, very useful. The World Happiness Report data (from Gallup World Poll; I’d seen the figures before but couldn’t find more info) does show a rise of about 0.25/10 over the period—about one-third of the rise in the other ONS and Eurobarometer results (when Eurobarometer converted to a score out of 10).
I suspect the difference is in the wording of the question, which defines 0 as ‘the worst possible life for you’ and 10 as ‘the best possible life for you’ and asks where they are now. (It doesn’t mention the word ‘satisfaction’). Whereas the ONS question is ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’ where 0 = not at all satisfied and 10 = completely satisfied (Eurobarometer has similar wording AFAIK). They’re rather different, and personally I find the ‘life for you’ wording (which I’ve come across before) a bit confusing, as does 10 mean ‘doing as well as I could given my abilities & circumstances’ or ‘having the best life I can imagine (with no restriction)’?
[ADDED] To put it another way, the Gallup question seems to be asking people to compare with some unclear external scale of what’s possible for their life (in the real world? in a fantasy world in which they could be a rock star or Bill Gates?), rather than how satisfied they feel about their life (a more internal scale of feelings). If they’re comparing where they actually are with what might be possible in a fantasy world, it’s not so surprising it doesn’t go up much, because reality rarely approaches fantasy.
Without deciding which survey has a ‘better wording’, if any of them shows a substantial effect then it suggests something is going on in whatever that question is measuring.
There is a lot of happiness data available, including from the ONS, but there is a tendency now to prefer life satisfaction because it’s more stable (happiness varies with the weather and day of the week) and more all-encompassing. So I didn’t look into it. Though the ONS happiness data show the same trend over time as satisfaction.
(On a lesser point, I don’t know how large the Gallup poll is but I imagine, like Eurobarometer, it’s a few thousand people per country. The ONS is over 150,000 so very reliable. That said, aggregating multiple years removes the sample size problem.)
I also thought the World Happiness Survey looked flat but it has gone up. 0.25/10 is not be sniffed at.
WHS has a much smaller sample size—around 1,000 per year—whereas the Office of National Statistics asks around 300,000 people a year. ONS data also shows a rise of about 0.3/10 between 2011 and 2019 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/datasets/headlineestimatesofpersonalwellbeing)
For comparison, when converted to a 0-10 scale, the Eurobarometer survey shows a rise by 0.7/10 between 1999 and 2019.
Also just came across this claim in this paper:
Couldn’t quickly chase down source data up through 2016--best I could find was this through 2008.
Belatedly—thanks. I’m not sure what to make of this. That survey is quite large (30-50,000 people p.a.), so much larger than Eurobarometer, though smaller than ONS (around 150,000). Eurobarometer shows a large rise 1996-2016 (7.19 to 7.74/10), and the later-starting ONS shows a smallish but non-negligible rise 2012-2016 (7.45 to 7.67/10). Possibly again the question wording might have an influence.
But 5.2 to 5.3 is a rise, even if (statistically?) insignificant. It’s unfortunate that the paper cites other surveys (in other countries) which confirm its claim of no effect, but doesn’t cite these other UK surveys which suggest the opposite.
Since the ONS survey is much the largest, and also kind of confirmed by its findings on happiness (i.e. positive emotions), perhaps the reality is that there has indeed been a substantial rise since 2012, but only a small rise, or perhaps none, before that.