New study: Politics makes people sad: Amen. From the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton:
Contact: Elisabeth Donahue, 609 258 5988
edonahue@princeton.edu
Thinking about politics and politicians makes people feel bad about themselves, even more so than losing their jobs, according to a new study by Wilson School professor Angus Deaton. Deaton set out to examine the effect of the financial crisis on Americans’ own reports of their well-being using daily data collected by the Gallup Organization (the Gallup Healthways Well-being Index). Many of his findings were expected—well-being took a big hit on the day that Lehman Brothers failed—but many others were very puzzling; there were days when nothing much happened but reported well-being changed dramatically.
He concluded that the way the survey question was asked had a lot to do with the answers. In a nutshell: when Americans are asked about politics at the start of the survey, they report much lower levels of well-being than when those questions are left off. Since January 2008, the Gallup Organization has been collecting data on 1,000 Americans each day with a range of self-reported well-being (SWB) questions. In the fall of 2008, around the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and lasting into the spring of 2009, at the bottom of the stock market, Americans reported sharp declines in their life evaluation, sharp increases in worry and stress, and declines in positive affect – not surprising given the dire economic times. However, by the end of 2010, in spite of continuing high unemployment, these measures had largely recovered – although still lower than when the survey started in January 2008. That is, people reported feeling much happier even though the economy was still in a slump. This contradiction puzzled Deaton who predicted that the low levels of life evaluation would continue to mirror the state of the economy.
It turned out that two things were happening. First, from 2008 to 2009, political questions were asked before the life evaluation ones; during that time period, reports of life evaluation were quite low. When Gallup dropped the questions, reports of well-being increased even though there was no corresponding improvement in the economy. “People appear to dislike politics and politicians so much that prompting them to think about them has a very large downward effect on their assessment of their own lives,” Deaton notes. “The effect of asking the political questions on well-being is only a little less than the effect of someone becoming unemployed, so that to get the same effect on average well-being, three-quarters of the population would have to lose their jobs.”
Second, life evaluation tracked the stock market in an unusual way: while most Americans do not invest in the market, their happiness or unhappiness was tied to how the stock market behaved over the crisis. The most plausible explanation for this is that the media is almost compulsive in its coverage of the stock market, and Americans are quite sensitive to media reports. The result is that the stock market has become the most watched indicator of the present and future economy. So even though those surveyed may have not been directly influenced by nor had assets in the market, their sense of well-being was still tied to it. Unemployment, by contrast, hardly shows up, even though being unemployed is very bad for people’s well-being. This happens because unemployment rose by “only” five percentage points, so that the effect on the national average well-being is small. Even the effect of St Valentine’s Day on national well-being is larger!
Concludes Deaton, “Surveys about “happiness” and self-reported well-being certainly have their place and are very are useful in some arenas. However, in the area of assessing economic policy, we need to tread lightly when relying on these findings.”
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