The Best Years of Older Europeans’ Lives: The likelihood of living the happiest period in life exhibits a concave relationship with age, with a turning point at about 30–34 years and a decreasing trend from that point onward

The Best Years of Older Europeans’ Lives. Begoña Álvarez. Social Indicators Research, Sep 25 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-021-02804-6

Abstract: This paper offers new evidence on the life-cycle pattern of happiness. A novelty of the analysis is that it exploits information on the period individuals recall as the happiest in their lives. Data come from SHARELIFE 2008/09, a retrospective life survey conducted in 13 European countries among individuals aged 50 or more. Using this information, I build a longitudinal data set that extends across the whole lifespan of respondents. The probability of living a happiest year in life at each age is estimated through a conditional fixed effects logit model. Results show that the likelihood of living the happiest period in life exhibits a concave relationship with age, with a turning point at about 30–34 years and a decreasing trend from that point onward. Retrospectively, midlife is not perceived as the least likely happiest period in life. These patterns persist even after controlling for usual correlates of subjective well-being, and they are rather stable across cohorts and genders despite presenting certain variability across European countries.

Conclusions

There is no perfect measure of subjective well-being. Each measure embodies distinct information and comes with its own drawbacks (Frijters et al., 2020; Stone & Krueger, 2018). It is therefore necessary to explore alternative indicators to fully understand the processes that drive individuals’ welfare.

This paper has explored the informational content of older Europeans’ memories on their happiest period in life to address—using a new approach—an old question: How does happiness evolve with age? The analysis exploits retrospective information elicited from a sample of Europeans aged 50 or older. After reshaping the data into a life panel that spans from respondents’ childhood to the moment of the interview, I find that the probability of achieving the happiest period in life evolves systematically with age. The probability increases sharply from childhood to the ages of 30–34, when it reaches the maximum. At this point it is important to remark that individuals’ happiest periods are long on average: for half of respondents this period lasts two decades or longer. Therefore, a more precise reading of the previous finding is that the early 30s is the stage of life with the highest chances of belonging to the happiest period in life, though the probability also remains relatively high at adjacent ages and declines as individuals grow older. The best years in life are strongly explained, on average, by changing personal and family circumstances that are defined throughout young adulthood. Controlling for these and other contextual experiences reduces the age differentials sizably but preserves the pattern.

Retrospectively, individuals recall the decade between the mid-40s and mid-50s (usually identified as the nadir of happiness) as neither the most nor the least likely happiest ages in life. This finding does not contradict the existence a “midlife crisis” because, in fact, the probability of living the happiest period in life decreases at those ages. Yet the age gradient changes across cohorts. In particular, respondents from the younger cohort perceive lower declines in the probability of achieving their happiest period at midlife—with respect to ages at which this probability peaks—than do respondents from older cohorts who judge that life stage from later ages. In other words, individuals who grew up or were already adults through war and postwar periods display higher variability in the probability of living the happiest period in life than do individuals who grew up during more prosperous decades.

After midlife, the average probability of living a happiest period in life does not experience any significant recovery. More specifically, the estimates show cross-country heterogeneity in the happiness trajectories between midlife and the oldest ages recalled by older individuals. A complementary exploration reveals that, in countries with stronger welfare states, individuals’ probability of living the happiest period declines more slowly with age than it does in countries with weaker welfare states.

Overall, the results presented in this paper—and, in particular, the comparison with studies based on individuals’ reports of current levels of happiness or life satisfaction—support the idea that individuals’ judgements of their own SWB depend on the reference they use for comparisons and may experience some systematic revision over time. An advantage of life retrospective accounts on the happiest period in life is that individuals use the same reference across all periods, which facilitates the identification of within-individual changes in happiness. However, reports on the past may be distorted by recall and cognitive biases, especially when the time lapse is large. In addition, it is difficult to disentangle whether individuals’ recall of the happiest period in life reflects an accurate emotional recall of what they lived or, as Easterlin (2002) states, it rather indicates the happiness status that, according to present preferences, individuals should have had, given the restrictions and circumstances they faced in the past. If Easterlin’s statement is true, then previous findings would inform us about how respondents perceive ageing. From this perspective, we should infer that older people elaborate their life trajectory of happiness as an inverted-U curve that decreases from 30 to 34 onward. Even though individuals in their late 60s and 70s may not consider themselves unhappy at present (as the U-curve of happiness implies), in retrospect, they judge this stage of life as having a low probability of being the happiest in life.

Is this information interesting from a policy point of view? The ageing process in Europe has increased the relevance of older people in policy-makers agenda. Exploring how they remember the past and how they associate subjective well-being to different circumstances may help to understand their present decisions and policy preferences (Pudney, 2011). Older people tend to support policies related to their own position in the life cycle—higher spending on pensions and health care—over policies that would benefit younger generations, like education or protecting the environment (De Mello et al. 2017). The findings shown in this paper suggest that these welfare state preferences cohere with the life cycle pattern of happiness presented above and, in particular, with the perceived shrinking of well-being at older ages.

Despite the large body of literature on the life-cycle pattern of SWB, new avenues remain open to contribute to this issue through alternative approaches, data and measures. This paper has illustrated the potential of retrospective surveys such as SHARELIFE for exploring the events and circumstances that have shaped the well-being of the oldest European generations.