The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age

For awhile I’ve been curious (see also here) about the U-shaped relation between happiness and age (with people least happy, on average, in their forties, and happier before and after).

But when I tried to demonstrate it to me intro statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U.

So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton, who write:

Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it.

They write:

What is the relationship between happiness and age? Do we get more miserable as we get older, or are we perhaps more or less equally happy throughout our lives with only the occasional special event (marriage, birth, promotion, health shock) that temporarily raises or reduces our happiness, or do we actually get happier as life gets on and we learn to be content with what we have?

The answer to this question in the recent economic literature on the subject is that the age-happiness relationship is U-shaped. This finding holds for the US, Germany, Britain, Australia, Europe, and apparently even South Africa. The stylised finding is that individuals gradually get unhappier after their 18th birthday, with a dip around 50 followed by a gradual upturn in old age. The predicted effect of age can be quite large, i.e. the difference in average happiness between an 18 year old and a 50 year old can be as much as 1.5 points on a 10 point scale.

Their conclusion:

The inclusion of the usual socio-economic variables in a cross-section leads to a U-shape in age that results from indirectly-age-related reverse causality. Putting it simply: good things, like getting a job and getting married, appear to happen to middle aged individuals who were already happy. . . . The found effect of age in fixed-effect regressions is simply too large and too out of line with everything else we know to be believable. The difference between first-time respondents and stayers and between the number of years someone stays in the panel doesn’t allow for explanations based on fixed traits or observables. There has to be either a problem on the left-hand side (i.e. the measurement of happiness over the life of a panel) or on the right-hand side (selection on time-varying unobservables).

They think it’s a sample-selection bias and not a true U-shaped pattern. Another stylized fact bites the dust (perhaps).

3 thoughts on “The mystery of the U-shaped relationship between happiness and age

  1. Surely the selection effect also accounts for a large part of the story of people without children being happier than those with children which you mentioned a while ago…

  2. Based on a recollection of Daniel Gilbert's happiness book, I'd suggest that people are un-happiest when they have children at home. Children can be fun, but they can also be very stressful and disruptive to many other things that you might enjoy doing.

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