The French Unhappiness Puzzle: the Cultural Dimension of Happiness

The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus psychological and cultural factors. The latter turns out to be of nonnegligible importance in explaining international heterogeneity in happiness. In some countries, such as France, they are responsible for 80% of the country’s unobserved idiosyncratic source of (un-)happiness. JEL Classification: I31, H52, O15, O52, Z10 Keywords: happiness, subjective well-being, international comparisons, France, immigration, European Social Survey Corresponding author: Claudia Senik Paris School of Economics 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris France E-mail: [email protected] * I thank Marc Gurgand, Andrew Oswald and Katia Zhuravskaya for discussions and comments on the paper, as well as participants in the OECD New Directions in Welfare Conference (Paris, July 2011), IZA Workshop: Sources of Welfare and Well-Being (Bonn, October 2011). I am grateful to Hélène Blake for precious research assistance, to CEPREMAP for financial support, and to Mariya Aleksynska for her participation in another related project, which has greatly contributed to prepare this one. All errors are mine. 2 I. Introduction Happiness studies have gained so much credit over the last decade that several governments and international organizations have endeavored to collect measures of happiness to be included in national accounts and used to inform policy (Waldron, 2010, Commission 2009, Eurostat 2010). Going “beyond GDP” in the measure of well-being has become a familiar idea, and subjective happiness is one of the main proposed alternative routes. However, targeting an aggregate happiness indicator is not straightforward. The literature is rich of information about the correlates of individual happiness but aggregate indicators of happiness are still puzzling. Whether happiness follows the evolution of aggregate income per capita over the long run remains hotly debated among specialists (see Clark and Senik, 2011). International comparisons are also quite mysterious; in particular, it is difficult to fully explain the ranking of countries in terms of subjective well-being. For example, as illustrated by Figures 1.A and 1.B, the low level of happiness in France and Germany is not consistent with a ranking of countries based on income per capita or even on Human Development Indices that include life expectancy at birth and years of schooling. All available international surveys (the European Social Survey, the Euro-Barometer Survey, the World Values Survey, the World Gallup Poll) lead to a similar conclusion: observable characteristics are not sufficient to explain international differences; in all estimates of life satisfaction or happiness, country fixed-effects always remain highly significant, even after controlling for a large number of controls (Deaton 2008, Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). The suggestive Figure 2, taken from by Inglehart et al. (2008), illustrates the existence of clusters of happiness, with Latin-America and Scandinavia being systematically above the regression line, and former communist countries, below. As a rule, France, Germany and Italy stand close to Eastern countries at the bottom of the ranking. Figures 2.A and 2.B show that international differences in happiness are quite stable over time. Several studies show that they cannot be explained by the structure of satisfaction, which is very similar across countries (di Tella et al., 2003). Because France is amongst the countries that rank lower than