Happiness is in the mainstream blog media with this post on Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog. Increased discussion of happiness as a reasonable part of the policy process is excellent. Ezra has begun to refer to happiness and well-being with some frequency on his site. Just a couple of weeks ago, he cited an Urban Institute report about using measures of well-being - in a post about energy, no less!
As for the particular question today, it’s highly intriguing, and as he notes, somewhat paradoxical: having kids tends to make people less happy. The approach the authors of the studies mentioned take seems reasonable to find out in which types of countries people have less of a negative response. Developed countries with substantial safety nets (classified as conservative or social democratic in the studies) seem to result in parents having less of the child-rearing blues. Their well-being declines, but not as much as in other cultures, and it may increase in ever-satisfied Denmark. However, the parents in these countries don’t get all that much happier once kids leave the nest, whereas to do get happier in Mediterranean countries.
I don’t have a particular interest in figuring out social policy. The fact that parents on the whole get somewhat less happy with kids certainly does not lead to a policy of government going out of its way to discourage fertility – a demographically challenged country with a large relative elderly population puts its own strains on happiness. Policies will probably have the most impact tracking the impact on happiness of certain specific policies within countries, such as the push for increased paternity leave in Sweden. Actually declaring the “best” system of governance, whether it’s social democratic, “conservative” or whatever is not an appropriate conclusion from any of these narrowly focused surveys, and it likely is a hopeless question to answer anyway.
