The Origins of Happinesssample was scattered over many schools with many chil-
dren in each school, we can ask “How much difference did
it make which school your child went to?” The answer is a
huge difference.
If we include a dummy variable for each school, we can
see how much that school affected the children’s outcomes.
We can then take the standard deviation of these effects,
and this is shown at the bottom of Table 16.4. Even though
the outcomes are measured at age 16, the primary school a
child went to makes as much difference as the secondary
school— when it comes to child well- being and child be-
havior. Only when it comes to academic performance at 16
is the secondary school more important than the primary
school. We can also trace the impact that individual primary
school teachers have on their children, which is even larger
on their children’s emotional health than on their learning
of math. The effects of primary school teachers can be de-
tected 10 years later.
Since only one child is studied in each family in the Avon
sample we cannot carry out the same analysis for the over-
all effect of which family you belong to. But we can look at
the effect of all the family variables that we can measure. The
total of these effects was in each case about the same as the
effects of the secondary school.
Public Goods
We have looked so far at what makes one person’s happi-
ness different from another’s in the same society. But there
are many things that affect the well- being of everybody in