unusual economic trajectories of a small number of countries, such as the rapid growth in Korea and Ireland, and the
decline of the former Eastern bloc countries (Figure 15). Even so, most of our approaches to these data yield suggestive
evidence falsifying the Easterlin hypothesis that the time-series well-being-GDP gradient is zero. Moreover, even in those
cases in which the data fail to falsify the null that the gradient is zero, they also fail to falsify the alternative null
hypothesis that this gradient is equal to 0.4, similar to that obtained from our between-country or within-country analyses.
How should our findings be reconciled with earlier reports suggesting no link between changes in GDP per capita
over time and life satisfaction? We suspect that the key is simply that our analysis of the satisfaction-income gradient
based on both within- and between-country comparisons gives us a specific quantitative yardstick for assessing the
importance of (even imprecisely estimated) trends in subjective well-being.
Europe
We turn next to the other major set of repeated international cross-sectional data, the Eurobarometer Survey, a
data collection intended to track public opinion across the European Union. We draw our data from the Mannheim
Eurobarometer Trendfile, which collects available microdata from 1970 to 2002, supplemented with data extracted from
print editions of the Eurobarometer Reports series from 2002 through 2007. These surveys initially asked respondents in
what were then the nine member states of European Union about their life satisfaction. A life satisfaction question has
been asked at least annually (and often semi-annually) from 1973 onward (except in 1974 and 1996). The survey has
expanded as the E.U. expanded, covering fifteen countries by 2002 (with separate surveys for East and West Germany),
and it presently includes thirty countries (including three candidate countries), yielding a broad but unbalanced panel. A
happiness question was also briefly asked (from 1975 through 1986, except in 1980 and 1981, and in a different format in
2006); given these gaps in the data, we focus on life satisfaction. For the purposes of our analysis, we keep West Germany
separate from East Germany, which permits us to analyze a continuous sample of well-being among West Germans over
thirty-five years.
We begin by analyzing the relationship between life satisfaction and GDP for the nine countries that constituted
the original 1973 sample. Easterlin analyzed these same nine countries (through to 1989), concluding that “satisfaction
drifts upward in some countries, downward in others. The overall pattern, however, is clearly one of little or no trend in a
period when real GDP per capita rises in all of these countries from 25 to 50 percent” (1995, p. 38). In a subsequent
update, Easterlin maintains that “I think the evidence continues to support my generalization in the 1995 study” (2005a, p.
434).
Figure 16 updates this analysis, adding a further eighteen years of data (shown with hollow circles). In eight of the
nine countries, rising GDP per capita has been associated with rising life satisfaction, six of which are statistically
significant (p < .10, assessed using Newey-West standard errors, accounting for first-order autocorrelation). This figure
also suggests a couple of puzzles: a significant declining trend in satisfaction is observed in Belgium, and declining life
satisfaction in Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s, although this was quickly followed by rising satisfaction during the
rapid economic growth associated with the “Irish Miracle”. (Satisfaction appeared to be anomalously high in the very first
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