economic development. The Easterlin paradox suggests that on average countries will not get happier as they get richer.
The evidence from the countries for which we have time series observations, on balance, casts doubt on the Easterlin
paradox, with Europe, Japan, countries in the World Values Survey becoming happier, on average, as income grows.
VI. Alternative Measures of Subjective Well-Being
Our discussion so far has analyzed three basic measures of subjective well-being: reports of happiness, of life
satisfaction, and of well-being expressed in terms of a “ladder” with the best and worst possible lives at top and bottom.
Yet this still leaves a lot unsaid about the subjectively experienced lives of the rich and the poor. Fortunately, recent major
advances in cross-country data collections have started to paint a broader picture of subjective well-being.
We begin by analyzing the battery of ten questions typically grouped as the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale, which
were included in the first two waves of the World Values Survey (Bradburn, 1969). This scale is intended to separately
assess both positive and negative affect, by probing direct reports of whether various pleasant and unpleasant feelings
have been experienced recently. This battery of questions asks the respondent whether, during the past few weeks, he or
she has had any of five positive experiences (“pleased about having accomplished something,” “proud because someone
had complimented you on something you had done,” “particularly excited or interested in something,” “things going your
way,” or “on top of the world/feeling that life is wonderful”) and five negative experiences (“bored,” “upset because
somebody criticized you,” “so restless you couldn’t sit long in a chair,” “very lonely or remote from other people,” or
“depressed or very unhappy”) (Bradburn, 1969, chapter 4).40
We analyze each question separately in Table 6, and because our dependent variable is binary (whether or not the
respondent reported experiencing each feeling), we use probit regressions. To separately isolate the between-country and
the within-country variation, we run one regression in which log GDP per capita is the only independent variable, and
then another substituting log household income for GDP per capita, and controlling for country fixed effects. To maintain
some consistency in the units, we report actual probit coefficients rather than the elasticity of predicted probabilities.
The first panel of Table 6 shows that in both within-country and between-country comparisons, measures of
positive affect are all positively, and measures of negative affect negatively, associated with income. While the within-
country comparisons are typically statistically significant, the limited number of country observations gives us less precise
and hence less significant estimates (we cluster the standard errors in these regressions by country). The magnitudes of the
estimated within- and between-country coefficients are roughly similar, and the within-country estimates typically lie in
the 95% confidence interval surrounding the between-country estimates. Putting these together into a measure of net
affect (the average number of positive experiences less the average number of negative experiences) yields a measure that
40 He found that among his U.S. sample, within the group of positive or negative questions, responses tended to be highly correlated,
but that responses between questions probing “positive affect” and “negative affect” were not closely related. Moreover, individual
evaluations of happiness appear to reflect positive and negative affect in roughly equal measure.
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