Chapter 16
than unemployment, and it also reduces happiness
by 0.7 points. In fact mental health problems are
not highly correlated with poverty or unemploy-
ment, so we need a much wider concept of what it
is to be deprived. This needs to include both mental
and physical pain.
- Education. An extra year of education has a small di-
rect effect on happiness of 0.03 points and larger in-
direct effects via income and mental health. These
last through life. However people largely value their
education relative to that of their peers. So the main
overall gains from educational expansion may come
from the external effects of a more civilized com-
munity of citizens and voters.^4
- Child development. All these adult factors affecting
happiness are influenced in turn by the pattern of
child development— emotional, behavioral, and in-
tellectual. Here academic qualifications are less ef-
fective predictors of a satisfying adult life than a
child’s emotional health.
- Parenting. Your development as a child is in turn de-
termined by your parents and your schooling, The
best predictor of a child’s emotional development
is the mother’s mental health. Conflict between par-
ents is also damaging to emotional development, as
is child poverty. There is no clear evidence that chil-
dren suffer emotionally when their mother goes
out to work, once the child is over one year of age.
- Schools. Differences between schools account for a
substantial part of the variation in children’s emo-
tional health. The same is true of the variation in
their behavior and in their academic performance.
