How’s life Combining individual and national variables to explain subjective well-being：（怎样的生活结合个人和国家的变量来解释主观幸福感）.pdfVIP

Thursday, 11 April 2002 How’s Life? Combining Individual and National Variables to Explain Subjective Well-Being John F. Helliwell1 1. Introduction This paper attempts to explain international trends and differences in subjective well- being over the final fifth of the twentieth century. This will be done in several stages. First there will be a brief review of some reasons for giving a central role to subjective measures of well- being. This will be followed by sections containing a survey of earlier empirical studies, a description of the main variables used in this study, a report of results and tests, discussion of the links among social capital, education, and well-being, re-estimation of the final model, and concluding comments. 2. Why Study Happiness? The idea of using self-assessments of well-being, or of life satisfaction, as a way of evaluating the quality of a society and its citizens goes back to Aristotle and beyond. It has been argued that ancient ethics “gets its grip on the individual at this point of reflection: am I satisfied 1 Department of Economics, University of British Columbia. The first draft of this paper was prepared when I was enjoying the hospitality of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where I was Christensen Visiting Fellow in the first half of 2001. I am grateful variously for advice, assistance, corrections, and suggestions from Robert Amano, Sudhir Anand, Michael Argyle, Aileen Battye, Andrew Clark, Kerstin Enflo, John Flemming, Bruno Frey, David Halpern, Tom Healy, Brian Henry, Jane Jenson, Thomas Lemieux, Paul Kind, Avner Offer, Andrew Oswald, Robert Putnam, Andrew Sharpe, Alois Stutzer, Tom Sander, Julia Simon, Sarah Stewart-Brown, Ian Walker, Michael Woolcock, and from participants during pre