Objective Confirmation of Subjective Measures of Human Well-Being: Evidence from the U.S.A.

By Andrew J. Oswald, Stephen Wu. Science, 2010

718 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Best Things in Life Are Free? Does money buy happiness? Answers to this question differ, depending, in part, on whether one asks an economist or a psychologist. The former would point to correlations between higher incomes and greater self-reported well-being, whereas the latter would argue that happiness shows little correlation with absolute material goods and is instead dictated largely by an individual's so-called set-point. Another strand of research invokes a hedonic treadmill, whereby income matters until subsistence requirements are met, at which point comparisons with one's neighbors are what influence one's sense of life satisfaction. Oswald and Wu (p. 576, published online 17 December; see the Perspective by Layard) establish that the subjective responses from 1 million adults, collected within health surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, do indeed correlate with objective measures of quality of life. Subjective life-satisfaction scores agree with objective measures of well-being across 50 American states. A huge research literature, across the behavioral and social sciences, uses information on individuals’ subjective well-being. These are responses to questions—asked by survey interviewers or medical personnel—such as, “How happy do you feel on a scale from 1 to 4?” Yet there is little scientific evidence that such data are meaningful. This study examines a 2005–2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System random sample of 1.3 million U.S. citizens. Life satisfaction in each U.S. state is measured. Across America, people’s answers trace out the same pattern of quality of life as previously estimated, from solely nonsubjective data, in one branch of economics (so-called “compensating differentials” neoclassical theory, originally from Adam Smith). There is a state-by-state match (r = 0.6, P < 0.001) between subjective and objective well-being. This result has some potential to help to unify disciplines.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/350db36f1ab3e12e9cc4e001acbd2ca4c405d80b

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Citations in the corpus

Marriage and Subjective Well-Being: How and Why Context Matters (2015, neutral): “See Oswald and Wu (2010) for a thorough discussion of the relationship between life satisfaction and state of residence.”
Does High Home-Ownership Impair the Labor Market? (2013, background): “…theory of equal utility across geographical space successfully fits the data for the states of the USA (see Roback, 1982, for example; or recently Herz and Van Rens (2012), on the inability of mismatch to explain recent US experience; or in a different way the work of Oswald and Wu, 2010).”
Sports participation and happiness: Evidence from US microdata (2010, methodology): “Since the choice of OLS or probit models makes little difference on these ratios of estimated parameters, we use OLS, following Oswald and Wu (2010), who use the same self-reported life satisfaction question responses from the BRFSS and also use OLS.”
The effect of social comparisons on commute well-being (2011, background): “At an aggregate level, recent research by Oswald and Wu (2010) has demonstrated a strong state-by-state correlation between objective measures of quality of life and subjective reported satisfaction levels obtained in a national US survey.”
The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness (2014, background): “If this were the case, country fixed-effects would not attract statistically significant coefficients in estimates of subjective wellbeing (Ferreira and Moro, 2010; Luechinger 2009, Oswald and Wu, 2010).”
Long-Term Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence from Moving to Opportunity (2013, positive): “…have shown different measures of self-reported SWB to be correlated in expected ways with objective indicators of well-being such as life events, biological indicators, and reports by other people about the person’s happiness (see for example Kahneman and Krueger (2006) and Oswald and Wu (2010)).”
On the advantages and disadvantages of subjective measures (2014, neutral): “The paper makes a contribution to a recent literature that examines the validity of subjective measures (Bertrand and ullainathan, 2001; Dominitz and Manski, 2004; Kahneman and Krueger, 2006; Olken, 2009; Barr and Serra, 2010; Kaplan nd Pathania, 2010; Oswald and Wu, 2010; Donchev and Ujhelyi, 2009)”
The Engine of Well-Being (2012, background): “…of education, crime and health) as a measurement of quality of life, and advocates have claimed that in combination with objective measures, SWB indicators can provide information that standard indicators cannot offer (Diener & Seligman, 2004; Diener & Suh, 1997; Diener, 2006; Oswald & Wu, 2010).”
Is happiness different from flourishing? Cross-Country Evidence from the ESS (2011, neutral): “7 There are some similarities here to the work of Oswald and Wu (2010), who compare the distribution of subjective and objective outcomes across American States.”
Well-Being across America (2011, neutral): “This paper is complementary to, and covers different ground from, new work by Oswald and Wu (2010), which exploits BRFSS data but uses no mental health information and does not report microeconometric life satisfaction equations.”