Progress Daily

Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson analyzed all the major post-war happiness studies data (.pdf file here), including new data from the Gallup World Poll, which contains detailed data on subjective well-being for 132 countries in 2006. Contrary to previous researchers using less complete date, they found that: 1) Rich people are happier than poor people. 2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries. 3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.

The following chart takes the average levels of satisfaction reported on the Gallup Poll’s 0-10 scale, and plots it against G.D.P. per capita (note the log scale):

The correlation between average levels of happiness and average incomes is very high — greater than 0.8.

The relationship between happiness and log income appears nearly linear. Thus, a 10% rise in income in a rich country like the USA appears to increase happiness by about as much as a 10% rise in income in Burundi — in fact, the slope appears to get steeper above $15K!

A 10% rise in income in Burundi requires one-sixtieth as much income as a 10% rise in income in the USA. Thus, even if the slope is three times as steep for rich countries as poor countries (as Wolfers & Stevenson estimate), this still means than an extra $100 has about a twenty-times-greater effect on happiness in Burundi.

“The Economics of Happiness, Part 1 & Part 2,” by Justin Wolfers

Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary (”Religion and Economic Growth Across Countries” & “Religion and Political Economy in an International Panel“) researched the relationship between religion and development.

Their cross-country analysis shows that per capita gdp has a significantly negative effect on religion, both in terms of beliefs and participation. This tendency is gradual as countries grow richer. A steady pattern of secularization has only applied to a few countries, such as Britain, France, and Germany.

For a given level of religious participation, increases in core religious beliefs — notably belief in hell, heaven, and an afterlife — tend to increase economic growth. In contrast, for given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. In other words, the main growth effect is a positive response to an increase in believing relative to belonging (attending).

A certain amount of participation in religious activities is positive, in that people acquire useful beliefs. But if people spend too much time in religious activities, there is a negative effect on economic growth.

Religious participation is correlated with a lower probability of substance abuse, juvenile delinquency (Michael J. Donahue and Peter L. Benson, “Religion and the Well-Being of Adolescents“),  and depression (”Immigrant Generation, Assimilation and Adolescent Psychological Well-being“), and positive attitudes toward marriage and having children (Elaine Marchena and Linda J. Waite, “Re-assessing Family Goals and Attitudes in Late Adolescence”).

Overall, urbanization has a negative effect on religiosity, particularly in terms of participation.

“Religion and Economic Development,” by Rachel M. McCleary

As human societies grow richer, people have fewer children. In most species, such an increase in available resources leads in the opposite reproductive direction. What makes the “demographic transition” even more paradoxical is that in less developed times and places, the rich do not have smaller families than the poor.

Most explanations of the demographic transition are social, and none is really satisfactory.

A study by Agnar Helgason, of deCODE Genetics, has recently provided a new explanation: that the mixing-up of people caused by the urbanisation which normally accompanies development is, itself, partly responsible — because it breaks up optimal mating patterns.

Iceland’s records since its founding by a few Vikings are so good that the antecedents of today’s inhabitants (apart from a handful of recent immigrants) are known with precision. Its medical records are also good, and most Icelanders have given genetic samples to deCode.

The study’s principal finding is that the most fecund marriages are between distant cousins. The optimum degree of outbreeding (measured in terms of the number of children and grandchildren produced) lay somewhere between cousins of the third and fourth degrees.

(”Kissing cousins, missing children,” The Economist)

Icelandic women born between 1800 and 1824 who mated with a third cousin had significantly more children and grandchildren (4.0 and 9.2, respectively) than women who hooked up with someone no closer than an eighth cousin (3.3 and 7.3). Those proportions held up among women born more than a century later when couples were, on average, having fewer children.

Despite the general pattern for reproductive success favoring close kinship, couples that were second cousins or more closely related did not have as many children.

With close inbreeding — between first cousins — there is a significant increase in the probability that both partners will share one or more detrimental recessive genes, leading to a 25 percent chance that these genes will be expressed in each pregnancy.

Mating with a relative might reduce a woman’s chance of having a miscarriage caused by immunological incompatibility between a mother and her child. Some individuals have an antigen (a protein that can launch an immune response) on the surface of their red blood cells called a rhesus factor. In some cases — typically during a second pregnancy — when a woman gets pregnant, she and her fetus may have incompatible blood cells, which could trigger the mother’s immune system to treat the fetus as a foreign intruder, causing a miscarriage. This occurrence is less probable if the parents are closely related, because their blood makeup is more likely to match.

It may be that the enhanced reproductive success at the level of third and fourth cousins (who on average would be expected to have inherited 0.8 percent to 0.2 percent of their genes from a common ancestor) represents a point of balance between the competing advantages and disadvantages of inbreeding and outbreeding.

(”When Incest Is Best,” by Nikhil Swaminathan)

Within a few months China will overtake America as the country with the world’s largest number of internet users. For the past three years China has also been the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology. It already has the same number of mobile-phone users (500m) as the whole of Europe.

According to India’s telecoms regulator, half of all urban dwellers have mobile- or fixed-telephone subscriptions and the number is growing by 8m a month. India produces more engineering graduates than America.

The World Bank’s recently released its Global Economic Prospects. Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, the index that summarises the technology adoption indicators rose by 160% in poor countries (with incomes per person of less than about $900 a year at current exchange rates) and by 100% in middle-income ones ($900-11,000). The index went up by only 77% in industrialised countries (with average incomes above $11,000). Poor and middle-income nations, the bank concludes, are catching up with the West.

The main channels through which technology is diffused are foreign trade (buying equipment and new ideas directly); foreign investment (having foreign firms bring them to you); and emigrants in the West.

In the past ten years the ratio of poor countries’ imports of high-tech products to their GDPs has risen by more than 50%. The ratio in middle-income countries has increased by over 70%. Capital goods (mainly industrial machinery) often embody new technology, and imports of these have increased faster in middle-income countries than in rich ones.

Emerging economies’ share of global trade in high-tech goods rose by 140% between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

Relative to GDP, inflows of foreign direct investment to developing economies have increased sevenfold since the 1980s. In some countries, such as Hungary and Brazil, foreign firms account for half or more of all R&D spending by companies.

Nearly half the ($40 billion-worth of) foreign direct investment in China in 2000 came from Chinese abroad. Remittances have doubled in the past ten years and now account for roughly 2% of developing countries’ GDPs — more than foreign aid.

The World Bank looked at how much time elapsed between the invention of something and its widespread adoption (defined as when 80% of countries that use a technology first report it). For 19th-century technologies the gap was long: 120 years for trains and open-hearth steel furnaces, 100 years for the telephone. For aviation and radio, invented in the early 20th century, the lag was 60 years. But for the PC and CAT scans the gap was around 20 years and for mobile phones just 16.

In the World Bank’s database, there are 28 examples of a new technology reaching 5% of the market in a rich country; of those, 23 went on to achieve over 50%. In other words, if something gets a foothold in a rich country, it usually spreads widely.

In emerging markets this is not necessarily so. The bank has 67 examples of a technology reaching 5% of the market in developing countries — but only six went on to capture half the national market.

Technology use in developing countries is highly concentrated. Almost three-quarters of China’s high-tech trade comes from just four regions on the coast. More than two-thirds of the stock of foreign investment in Russia in 2000 was in Moscow and its surroundings. Whereas half of India’s city-dwellers have telephones, little more than one-twentieth of people in the countryside do.

Rich countries spend 2.3% of GDP on R&D, East Asians 1.4%, and Latin America 0.6%. In East Asia and the West companies spend most of the money and do most of the research. In eastern Europe and Latin America the government is the largest source of finance, and in Latin America universities do the largest share of the work.

“Of internet cafés and power cuts,” The Economist

Daniel Esty analyzed the Environmental Sustainability Index, which grades the “environmental health” of 150 countries. He found that the single biggest variable in determining a country’s ranking is income per head.

Economic growth offers solutions to the sorts of environmental woes (local air pollution, for example) that directly kill humans. About a quarter of all deaths in the world have some link to environmental factors. Among these killers (especially of children) are diarrhoea, respiratory infections and malaria.

As poor countries get richer, they usually invest heavily in environmental improvements, such as cleaning up water supplies and improving sanitation, that boost human health. (Their economies may also shift gear, from making steel or chemicals to turning out computer chips.)

But the link between growth and environment is much less clear when it comes to the sort of pollution that fouls up nature (such as acid rain, which poisons lakes and forests) as opposed to directly killing human beings.

A mixture of factors related to good government -— accurate data, transparent administration, lack of corruption, checks and balances — all show a clear statistical relationship with environmental performance. Among countries of comparable income, tough regulations and, above all, enforcement are the key factors in keeping things green.

“How green is their growth,” The Economist

In China 25 years ago, over 600m people — two-thirds of the population — were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. Worldwide, 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.

In 2007 Unicef said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

The fertility rate in low- and middle-income countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years).

The biggest decline is in those countries that are most involved with globalization (especially in East Asia, though China is a special case because of its one-child policy). With the exception of Yemen, all the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are in Africa.

In closed agrarian societies, families need a lot of children as insurance against disaster. But in countries that have opened themselves up, families can rely on other sorts of protection, such as urban jobs or trade.

These demographic changes help to create a virtuous circle of growth. When fertility rises then falls, you get a bulge of people at and just after the inflection point. Between 1960 and 1990 Europe and America had relatively few old people (because mortality rates had earlier been high), relatively few children (because fertility had fallen) and a disproportionately big number of economically active adults.

Developing countries are seeing a similar confluence now.

A World Bank study of 19 poor countries concluded that every 1% increase in national income per head translates into a 1.3 point fall in extreme poverty.

Last year the global economy entered its fifth year of over 4% annual growth — the longest period of such strong expansion since the early 1970s. Unlike previous expansions, inflation remained relatively tame.

During this boom, according to the World Bank, national income in the European Union rose slightly more than in America for the first time in a decade. Growth in East Asia was 10%, in South Asia over 8%, in eastern Europe almost 7% and in Africa, thanks to the commodity boom, over 6%. Almost half of humanity, spread over more than 40 nations, lives in countries growing at 7% a year or more (a rate that doubles the size of an economy in a decade). This is twice the number of fast growers that existed in the years between 1980 and 2000.

The world’s economic balance is tilting from rich industrialized countries to emerging markets. Their share of world output in 2006 was just below half, and rising.

Since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the poorest fifth have risen everywhere except, marginally, in Latin America, where they have been affected by the after-shocks of debt crises. In Asia, the real incomes of the poorest fifth rose 4% a year; in Africa, by 2% a year, faster than the rise for other income groups.

The World Bank labels as “fragile” (as opposed to “failed”) troubled countries where the government has partial control of territory (Sudan), where it cannot deliver basic services (Zimbabwe) and places with high levels of political conflict (Nigeria).

Fragile states contain roughly half the developing world’s childhood deaths. About a third of their people are undernourished and more than that do not have access to drinking water. Most of the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are fragile. They are much more likely to be affected by wars, refugees and every sort of political crisis.

“Somewhere over the rainbow,” The Economist

Humans have spent most of their time as hunter-gatherers — from at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later.

Human height shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East.

Farmers also had more skeletal wear and tear from the hard work, their teeth rotted more, they were short of protein and vitamins and they caught diseases from domesticated animals: measles from cattle, flu from ducks, plague from rats and worms from using their own excrement as fertiliser.

From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. Usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

Richard Wrangham says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species.

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density.

Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. The urban poor were overworked and underfed. But 18th-century rural England was a place where people starved each spring as the winter stores ran out, and where where the “putting-out” system of textile manufacture at home drove workers harder for lower pay than the factories would. The industrial revolution caused a population explosion because it enabled more babies to survive.

There is no longer much doubt that hunter-gatherers were the cause of the extinction of the megafauna in North America 11,000 years ago and Australia 30,000 years before that.

At first, modern humans around the Mediterranean relied almost entirely on large mammals for meat. Then they switched their attention to smaller animals, and especially to warm-blooded, fast-breeding species, such as rabbits, hares, partridges and smaller gazelles. The archaeological record tells this same story at sites in Israel, Turkey and Italy.

Human population densities were growing too high for the slower-reproducing prey such as tortoises, horses and rhinos. Only the fast-breeding rabbits, hares and partridges, and for a while gazelles, could cope with such hunting pressure. This trend accelerated about 15,000 years ago as large game and tortoises disappeared.

The belief that hunter-gatherers have plenty of free time turns out to be a bit of a myth. The measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted food-processing time and travel time, partly because the anthropologists gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles and lent them metal knives to process food.

Even 40,000 years ago, technology and lifestyle were in a state of continuous change, especially in western Eurasia. By 34,000 years ago people were making bone points for spears, and by 26,000 years ago they were making needles. Harpoons, bone spear throwers, and string appeared 18,000 years ago.

15,000 years ago people first domesticated another species — the wolf. 12,000 years ago came agriculture.

Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors.

“Noble or savage?,” The Economist

Women — especially in the developed world — are getting married and having kids later than ever before. According to the UN’s World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of marriage for women is up two years, from 21 in the 1970s to 23 today. In the developed countries, the rise has been from 22 to 26.

In 1960, 70% of American 25-year-old women were married with children. In 2000, only 25% were. In 1970, just 7% of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried. Today, the number is 22%. In today’s Hungary, 30% of women in their early thirties are single, compared with 6% of their mothers’ generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40% of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14% only 20 years ago.

Between 1960 and 2000, the percentages of 20-, 25-, and 30-year-olds enrolled in school more than doubled in the US, and enrollment in higher education doubled throughout Europe. The majority of college students are female in the US, UK, France, Germany, Norway, and Australia, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more traditional countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. In Denmark, Finland, and France, over 1/2 of all women between 20 and 24 are in school.

In the UK, close to 1/3 of 30-year-old college-educated women are unmarried. In Spain, women now constitute 54% of college students, up from 26% in 1970, and the average age of first birth has risen to nearly 30, which may be a world record.

In the US, the proportion of unmarried 20-somethings living with their parents has declined steadily over the last 100 years, despite rising rents and real estate prices.

A 2005 report from MasterCard finds that women take 4 out of every 10 trips in the Asia-Pacific region — up from 1 in 10 back in the mid-’70s.

Canadian single women are buying homes at twice the rate of single men. The National Association of Realtors reports that in the US last year, single women made up 22% of the real-estate market, compared with only 9% for single men. The median age for first-time female buyers: 32.

Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Japanese women between 25 and 29 who were unmarried soared from 40% to 54%. The number of 30- to 34-year-old females who were unmarried rose from 14% to 27%.

A majority of Japanese single women between 25 and 54 say that they’d be just as happy never to marry.

Under European Communist rule, women tended to marry and have kids early. In the late ’80s, the mean age of first birth in East Germany, for instance, was 25, while the West German average was 28. Tying the knot was the only way to gain independence from parents, since married couples could get an apartment, while singles could not. Furthermore, access to modern contraception, which the state proved either unable or unwilling to produce at affordable prices, was limited. Marriages frequently began as the result of unplanned pregnancies.

Many towns in what used to be East Germany now face a lack of women, as women who excelled in school have moved west for jobs. In some towns, the ratio is just 40 women to 100 men. Women constitute the majority of both high school and college graduates in Poland.

Save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels (2.1 children) in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5, and even that number is inflated by a disproportionately high fertility rate among Muslim immigrants. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries — Italy, Spain, and Poland — have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman.

With fewer children, the labor force shrinks, and so do tax receipts. Europe today has 35 pensioners for every 100 workers. By 2050, those 100 may be responsible for 75 pensioners.

By large margins, surveys suggest, US women want to marry and have kids. US fertility rates are lower than replacement level among college-educated women, but are still higher than those of most rich countries (including Sweden and France).

Young women in Vietnam have begun putting off marriage and fertility rates have fallen from 3.8 children in 1998 to 2.1 in 2006.

Fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in several of India’s major cities.

“The New Girl Order,” by Kay S. Hymowitz

A massive new study by Robert Putnam, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has found that found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities. Residents were sorted into the 4 principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships.

More diverse communities tend to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents — all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have. But even after statistically taking these factors into account, the connection remains strong: those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

Levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

In a recent study, Edward Glaeser and Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe — Europe spends far more — can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population.

Matthew Kahn and Dora Costa reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa’s own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.

“The Downside of Diversity,” by Michael Jonas

From the Stone Age to 1800, there was no gain in average living conditions. Now incomes rise steadily.

The average Briton in 1788 ate only as many calories a day as hunter-gatherers (2,300). And the British diet was more monotonous. Life expectancy was only slightly above that of hunter-gatherers (38 years). Height is a good guide to nutrition and health: men in England averaged 5ft 6in, the same as males in the Stone Age. Men then worked 60 hours a week. Compared to hunter-gatherers’ 35 hours.

Englishmen who were economically successful, from the Middle Ages to 1800, left 4 or 5 surviving children at their deaths. In contrast, landless labourers left fewer than 2 children.

Preindustrial England was thus a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the preindustrial economy, the superabundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy to find work. Attributes that ensured later economic dynamism – hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education – were thus spread throughout the population.

From 1200 to 1800 interest rates fell, murder rates declined, work hours increased, the taste for violence declined, and numeracy and literacy spread to even the lower reaches of society.

In both preindustrial Japan and China the rich had more children than the poor, but in a more modest way. The samurai in Japan in the Tokugawa era (1603-1868), for example, produced on average little more than one son per father.

In modern affluent societies, the higher income a person has, on average, the less leisure he has. The source of our compulsion to work may lie in our ancestors’ passage through a preindustrial world that rewarded a compulsion to work and accumulate with reproductive success.

“England’s success may be in our genes,” Gregory Clark