The Origins of Happiness

Chapter 6

Health and Life- Satisfaction

Does the picture change if, instead of focusing on misery, we

analyze everything in terms of its impact on the full range

of life- satisfaction, measured 0– 10? What role does health

play in determining this? Table 6.3 gives the answer. It uses

the same definitions of the right- hand variables as in Table

6.2, and the results are essentially the same as when the de-

pendent variable was binary (“miserable” or otherwise).^12 As

before, we are looking at the effect of each factor holding all

other factors constant. In all the countries differences in men-

tal health explain more of the variance of human experience

than differences in income or employment status. Mental

illness also explains more of the variation in the quality of

human life than does the variation in physical health.

Some people may instinctively feel that income and un-

employment must be more important. Don’t they, after all,

cause a lot of mental illness? To see the effects of poverty and

unemployment including their effects via mental illness, we

can simply omit mental illness from the equation. The effects

of income and unemployment barely increase, because their

correlation with mental illness is actually not that high.^13

Table 6.2. How misery is affected by adult outcomes

(cross- section) (β- coefficients)

USA Australia

Britain

BCS

Britain

BHPS

Income (log) −0.12 (.00) −0.09 (.02) −0.05 (.01) −0.07 (.01)

Unemployed 0.06 (.00) 0.06 (.01) 0.03 (.02) 0.07 (.00)

Physical illness 0.05 (.00) 0.16 (.02)* 0.05 (.01) 0.09 (.01)

Mental illness 0.19 (.00) 0.14 (.01) 0.09 (.01) 0.26 (.00)*