The U-Bend of Happiness
Heaven knows I am miserable now. One third way through my 45th year, I suffered a severe bout of indigestion at the breakfast table when I spotted an article in the Telegraph today with the stark headline “44 is the age of depression, say researchers”.
The economics of welfare and happiness has been a remarkably productive area of research in our discipline over recent years. Richard Layard gave a memorable series of lectures on the subject a couple of years back together with a well received book. And top class economists such as Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick and Richard Easterlin have been at the forefront of building survey based research in the drivers of human happiness and mental health. This time Andrew Oswald has teamed up with MPC member David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, USA. Their latest number-crunching is on the back of a huge global sample covering more than eighty countries from Albania to Zimbabwe and two million people.
