Abstract: A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries, including 109 developing countries, controlling for education and marital and labor force status, among others, on samples of individuals under the age of 70. The U-shape of the curve is forcefully confirmed, with an age minimum, or nadir, in midlife around age 50 in separate analyses for developing and advanced countries as well as for the continent of Africa. The happiness curve seems to be everywhere. While panel data are largely unavailable for this issue, and the findings using such data largely confirm the cross-section results, the paper discusses insights on why cohort effects do not drive the findings. I find the age of the minima has risen over time in Europe and the USA.
Conclusions
No ifs, no buts, well-being is U-shaped in age. The average age at which the U-shaped minimized across the 477 country-level estimates reported here is 48.3. It is in rich and poor countries.
I found evidence of the nadir in happiness in one hundred and forty-five countries, including one hundred and nine developing and thirty-six developed. I found it in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australasia, and Africa. I identified it in all but six of the fifty-one European countries.26 I have a well-being U-shape for every one of the thirty-five member countries of the OECD.27 I have it for 138/193 member countries of the United Nations.
I found the well-being U-shape in English-speaking countries and non-English-speaking countries. A U-shape is revealed in countries ranked highly in the CIA World Factbook for countries with both high and low life expectancy at birth.28 I found it in twelve countries ranked in the top twenty for life expectancy of 82 or more.29 I also found a U-shape in ten countries in the bottom twenty for life expectancy of 223 countries in the world according to the CIA.30 The curve’s trajectory holds true in countries where the median wage is high and where it is not and where people tend to live longer and where they don’t.
I found additional evidence from an array of attitudinal questions that were worded slightly differently. Evidence of a U-shape was found across European countries in questions relating to an individual’s finances as well as to the state of the economy and democracy and how public services work. In Africa, I used a question that development scholars had used relating to living standards and found a U-shape for thirty African countries. This suggests the U-curve in age may have much broader applicability than just in well-being data. Given the robustness of these findings, it remains a puzzle why so many psychologists continue to suggest that well-being is unrelated to age.
People are struggling. In the USA, deaths of despair are most likely to occur in the middle-aged years, and the patterns are robustly associated with unhappiness and stress. Across countries, chronic depression and suicide rates peak in midlife. Those in middle age in the years since 2008 were most vulnerable to a once-in-a-generation financial shock especially if they were poor and with low levels of education. In the USA, the employment rate in 2020 was below that in 2008. In the UK, real wages were below pre-recession levels at the onset of the COVID-19 crash in March 2020. The financial crisis did not suddenly create frailty in downtrodden communities but simply exposed underlying problems with deep roots in the long decades before. It seems it is normal to have a midlife dip in well-being, but for many, especially those with the least skills, with little social support and few if any savings, that was too much to bear when a giant downturn came along in 2008.
The finding of a zenith in well-being in midlife likely adds important support to the notion that being in one’s forties and fifties exacerbates vulnerability to disadvantages and shocks.31 That is people with disabilities, less education, broken families, lost jobs, and so on are likely also to get hit hardest by the effects of aging. Some might face downward spirals as age and life circumstances interact. Many will not be getting the social/emotional support they need, because midlife is the worst time to present vulnerability. They will be dealing with shame and isolation, in addition to the first-order effects of whatever they are coping with in normal times at a midlife low is tough. It is made much harder when combined with a deep downturn especially when the speed of recovery and the length of lockdown is uncertain.
Interdisciplinary research is clearly needed into how to stem the worst manifestations of the midlife nadir in well-being, such as depression, lack of sleep, suicide, and higher tendency to drug and alcohol abuse. The fact that the happiness zenith occurs in developed and developing countries and it has even been found in great apes (Weiss et al. 2012) suggests there may be something deeply engrained perhaps in the genes.
The pandemic is global. Vulnerable individuals and communities around the world will be devastated by the shock, because of both job and income loss but also from bereavement. The prime aged with low levels of happiness already are especially at risk.
The happiness curve is found in 145 countries. No myth.
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