How much does over-work affect happiness?

The results of a survey conducted recently by the Australia Institute apparently shows that half of Australians (61 per cent of those working overtime) were prevented from spending enough time with family in the preceding week as a result of over-work. According to the press release (which is the most detailed description of the study I could find) a lot of people don’t have time to exercise, eat healthy meals or go to the doctor when they should.

If we take the results of this survey at face value it would appear that over-work is a huge problem in Australia. I suspect, however, that the problem or over-work is not as widespread as the Australia Institute suggests. I also suspect that over-work has a much smaller adverse impact on happiness than does under-work.

Cartoon by Nicholson from "The Australian" newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

The results of a study by Bruce Headey, Ruud Muffels and Gert Wagner, based on a long-running German panel survey, shows working hours to be one of the factors that has a long-term impact on life satisfaction. One of the things I like about the study is that the variable used is a measure of the extent to which respondents achieve their preferred tradeoff between work and leisure, rather than divergence of working hours from some arbitrary standard chosen by researchers. The relevant variable was the gap between the number of hours a week respondents said they would prefer to work and the number of hours per week they actually work. Those who worked over 3 hours per week more than they preferred were treated as overworked and those who worked over 3 hours per week less than they preferred were treated as underworked (‘Long running German panel survey shows that personal and economic choices, not just genes matter for happiness’ PNAS, 2010).

The results indicate that the negative impact of under-work on life satisfaction was about four times greater than the negative impact of over-work. The authors suggest that this ‘is presumably because lost consumption rankles worse than lost leisure’. (It would seem that the regression analysis does not control for income levels.) The study suggests that the negative effect of unemployment is much worse than that of either over-work or under-work (about four times greater than for underwork).

Some of the other results of the study might help further to put these findings into perspective. The study shows that social participation – a measure of frequency of meetings with and helping out friends, relatives and neighbours – has a substantial positive effect on life satisfaction of around the same magnitude as the negative effect of under-work. The positive effect on life satisfaction of frequent exercise is of about the same magnitude as the negative effect of over-work. The adverse effect of having a neurotic personality is about ten times greater than that of being overworked, but having a neurotic partner has only about half the adverse effect of being overworked.

What should we make of these findings? One obvious qualification is that it isn’t clear to what extent they might apply outside Germany. Leaving that aside, it seems to me that the most important implication is the importance to individual happiness of having the opportunity to work as many hours as the individuals concerned want to work. Under-work is not as bad as unemployment, but it is likely to be a much worse problem for the individuals concerned than is over-work.

It is hard to see how anyone could argue that overwork could be a huge problem when people are free to choose among jobs on the basis of hours of work along with other employment conditions. Some individuals may make bad choices, allowing themselves too little time for social participation and exercise, but that is not a systemic problem.

Update:
The Australia Institute report has now been published. It has some features that I like e.g. over-work and under-work are judged relative to respondent's desired hours of work. However, I think the findings on percentages prevented from spending enough time with family tend to overstate the extent of the problem. The percentages who always feel rushed or pressured for time are relatively low. It seems that having children living in the household is as great a source of time pressure as working overtime (Figure 4). Finally, the study doesn't tell us much about the emotional well-being of those who work more or less than their preferred number of hours. This seems to me to be an area where data on life satisfaction can be useful.

Postscript:
I have posted more information on this subject, including subjective well-being data for Australia, in a more recent post entitled: Is work-life balance a big problem in Australia?

How should we respond to a small risk of catastrophe?

I try to remember to pay house insurance premiums. Otherwise, I tend to avoid thinking about small risks of catastrophe. There are plenty of other things to worry about.

This avoidance strategy usually helps me to maintain a positive state of mind - atleast, until someone manages to ambush me with the thought of how dreadful it would be if one of those catastrophes actually occurred.

The last time such an ambush had a lasting impact on me was in March this year when I was reading ‘The Science of Liberty’ by Timothy Ferris. This book contains an excellent discussion of the historical links between liberty and the advance of knowledge. I tend to trust Tim Ferris’ judgement on scientific matters. (I have previously written about his book here.)

Tim Ferris’ discussion of the science of climate change begins in a fairly low key fashion until he reaches the point where he suggests that greenhouse gases generated by human activity constitute the most plausible explanation for the gradual increase in the earth’s average temperature since the beginning of the 20th Century. Then, in the following paragraph, he proceeds to suggest progressively less benign consequences of further global warming until, at the end of the paragraph, he mentions the possibility of runaway warming. The next paragraph reads:

‘On which point it may be useful to contemplate Venus, the brightest planet in the sky. Venus is virtually Earth’s twin – the two planets have the same diameter and the same mass – but while much of the earth’s carbon is bound up in its oceans and plants and in fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, the carbon on Venus resides in its atmosphere. The surface temperature on Venus is 457 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt led. Should the earth be pushed into runaway greenhouse warming, it might wind up resembling the Venus of today’ (p. 282).

This wasn’t the first time I had heard about the possibility that Earth’s future could be like Venus. On previous occasions, however, it was obvious that scare tactics were being employed and my defences were activated well before the Venus card was played.

Cartoon by Nicholson from "The Australian" newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

I was reminded of Tim Ferris’ invitation to contemplate Venus while reading ‘The Rational Optimist’. Matt Ridley, the author of this book, adopts a very different position. He begins the discussion by mentioning Martin Weitzman’s argument that if there is some possibility of a huge disaster resulting from global warming, the world should take steps to avoid it. He then suggests that the problem with this reasoning is that it applies to all risks, including the remote possibility of collision with a large asteroid.

I agree with Robin Hanson’s view, in his review of Ridley’s book, that some action may be warranted to reduce the potential impact on human well-being of any potential catastrophe. How we should respond should depend on the nature of the potential catastrophe, the probability that it will occur and what can be done to avoid it.

How should we respond to the small risk of runaway global warming? A fairly obvious answer is to put a tax on carbon emissions in order to provide incentives for development of technologies that generate less CO2, accompanied by an appropriate subsidy for activities that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. In many countries it would be possible to do this at little or no economic cost by substituting a carbon tax for other taxes that impose greater economic distortions. It is important to emphasize, however, that the main aim of the exercise should be to put in place incentives for development of better technologies.

Matt Ridley makes a strong case that climate mitigation is currently being mismanaged and that this mismanagement could be more damaging to human well-being than climate change itself. By encouraging a return to the medieval practice of using biofuels as an energy source, governments have added to misery in poor countries by raising the price of grains and have provided incentives for the further destruction of rainforests. In addition, incentives for greater use of costly wind and solar technologies are raising the cost of electricity substantially and/or requiring substantial subsidies from taxpayers, for little benefit in terms of reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

It is possible that solar technology will become competitive at some time in the future, but subsidizing use of current solar panel technology will not make that happen. If solar panel technology ever becomes competitive it will not need to be subsidized to enable scale economies to be achieved.

I think the current mismanagement of climate mitigation is attributable to scare tactics and panic. Some of us have grown so accustomed to environmental scare tactics that we find it difficult to take seriously the idea that a small risk of catastrophe is worth considering. Others have been too easily panicked into supporting costly policy responses that seem to be directed toward reducing CO2 as rapidly as possible irrespective of cost. The outcome of these conflicting forces in Australia has been a policy to encourage increased use of existing renewable energy technologies that are still highly inefficient. This policy achieves only a small reduction in CO2 emissions per additional dollar spent. (My test of how genuinely concerned enironmentalists are about reducing CO2 emissions in the short term is whether they are in favour of the nuclear power option, which seems to be the best alternative to use of fossil fuels that is presently available. )

There are signs now emerging that people in Australia are becoming concerned about the cost of rising energy prices attributable to the silly policy of encouraging greater use of high cost renewable energy. Hopefully similar concerns in other countries will result in adoption of sensible strategies to encourage development of less costly technologies over the next few decades.

Can progress be attributed to exchange and specialization?

'Somewhere in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, a phenomenon new to the planet was born. A Species began to add to its habits, generation by generation, without (much) changing its genes. What made this possible was exchange, the swapping of things and services between individuals. That gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capricious brain. Two individuals could each have two tools or two ideas while each knowing how to make only one. ... In this way, exchange encouraged specialization, which further increased the number of different habits the Species could have, while shrinking the number of things that each individual knew how to make. Consumption could grow more diversified, while production grew more specialized' (Matt Ridley, ‘The Rational Optimist’, 2010: 350).

Ridley’s bold claim is that human progress can be explained mainly in terms of exchange and specialization. Eric Jones, a scholar who has written extensively on the history of human progress, considers that Ridley makes the case very well, based ‘on the few knowns of early pre-history’. Jones also considers that Ridley gets the story of the industrial revolution ‘mostly right’ (Review in ‘Policy’, Spring 2010, 26 (3)).

The weight that we can place on exchange and specialization as explanators of human progress depends importantly on the extent to which advance of knowledge and innovation can be attributed to exchange and specialization. It is possible to go some distance in explaining technological progress as a consequence of specialization. As Bill Easterly points out in his NYT review, however, many breakthroughs come from creative outsiders who combine technologies generated by different specialties.

Ridley mentions that government actions of various kinds in different countries have often inhibited innovation, particularly the introduction of new products and new ways of doing things that threaten the survival of established patterns of production. The implication is that freedom is a necessary condition for progress comes through clearly in Ridley’s recent contribution to Cato Unbound:

‘I am saying that there have always been liberals, who want to be free to trade in ideas as well as things, and there have always been predators, who want to extract rents by force if necessary. The grand theme of history is how the crushing dominance of the latter has repeatedly stifled the former. As Joel Mokyr puts it: “Prosperity and success led to the emergence of predators and parasites in various forms and guises who eventually slaughtered the geese that laid the golden eggs”. The wonder of the last 200 years is not the outbreak of liberalism, but the fact that it has so far fought off the rent-seeking predators by the skin of its teeth: the continuing triumph of the Bourgeoisie’ (p. 252).

I can’t help thinking that this sounds more like rational pessimism than rational optimism. According to Ridley, the industrial revolution is largely a story about coal - and progress since then has been possible mainly because of abundant cheap energy from fossil fuels. He notes that his optimism wobbles when he looks at the politics of carbon emissions reduction and the potential this has to load economies with further rules, restrictions, subsidies, distortions and corruption (p. 347).

Cartoon by Nicholson from "The Australian" newspaper: http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/

The optimistic note on which Ridley ends his book comes from his view that innovation is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon that it will continue as long as exchange and specialization are allowed to thrive somewhere in the world.

In the end, it would seem that the gains from innovation, exchange and specialization all depend on liberty – liberty is the key to human progress.

Once a neurotic always a neurotic?

Martin Seligman’s view that authentic happiness comes from using your character strengths makes sense to me. For example, it seems reasonable to expect that activities that would bring lasting happiness to a person whose strengths are curiosity, love of learning and zest would differ from those that would bring lasting happiness to one whose strengths are kindness, fairness and a forgiving nature, or to one whose strengths are judgement, perseverance and leadership. (In his book ‘Authentic Happiness’, Seligman identifies 24 strengths under the general headings: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity and love, justice, temperance and transcendence.)

This idea of playing to signature strengths also appeals to the economist in me because it involves specialization on the basis of comparative advantage. Thinking in those terms, specialization doesn’t necessarily enable a person with little education or poor health to achieve a high real income – merely a higher real income than he or she would be able to obtain by attempting to be a jack of all trades. Similarly, a neurotic person – one who has an enduring tendency to experience negative emotions – may not have a life full of joy even if he or she plays to character strengths and focuses activities that do not necessarily require a sunny disposition.

Seligman recognizes that some people whose inherited characteristics make them low in positive affectivity are less likely to be happy. His recommendation for such people is that they should learn to exercise greater control over their emotions by using techniques such as recognizing and disputing negative thoughts.

Do people who successfully follow such advice become less neurotic? From what I have read, the standard answer given by psychologists is ‘no’. For example, Daniel Nettle tells us:

‘High neuroticism scorers will always be vulnerable to negative thoughts and feelings. That they cannot change. However, there are techniques in which they can train themselves that seem to have quite a marked effect on how they deal with this vulnerability, which can make a great deal of difference to their being in the world' (‘Happiness’, 2005: 113).

Timothy Pychyl has a relevant post on the ‘Psychology Today’ blog in which he notes that some leaders in the field of positive psychology have outed themselves as neurotics. (When I did an online test I discovered that I also have a tendency to be somewhat neurotic – but that would probably be only too obvious to readers this blog as well as to everyone else who knows me.) Pychyl suggests that while neurotics can learn to act out of character they can’t change their personalities.

Survey data suggests that personality traits for the vast majority of people tend to remain stable after age 30. End of story? Well, not quite. Such studies also indicate that a small proportion of individuals undergo significant changes in personality (see: Terracciano, Costa and Mc Crae, ‘Personality plasticity after age 30’, 2006).

There is some recent evidence of personality change during treatment for depression both using drugs (Paxil) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). The results of one study, led by Tony Tang, suggest that both the drug therapy and CBT outperformed a placebo and had similar effects in changing neuroticism and extraversion scores.

There has also been some research relating to changes in the brain that might be produced by meditation. A study led by Richard Davidson, which examined changes in brain electrical activity following an eight-week training program in mindfulness meditation, found that the program resulted in significantly larger increases in electrical activity in areas of the brain associated with emotional regulation (‘Well-being and affective style’, 2004). A more recent paper by Davidson includes the following remarks:

‘Mindfulness training can be hypothesized to change an individual’s relationship to his or her emotions so that they are not viewed as fundamental constituents of self, but rather as more fleeting phenomena that appear to the self. We would not necessarily expect mindfulness training to alter the neural circuitry of emotional responding in response to a challenge per se, but rather we might expect a change in the connectivity between emotion circuits and those used for the representation of self. We would predict decreased connectivity between emotion processing and self-relevant processing regions’ (‘Commentary: Empirical explorations of mindfulness’, 2010).

I don’t claim to know a great deal about neuroticism or meditation (apart from my own limited experience) but if meditation helps people to be calm and composed, and less likely to panic, or feel threatened, stressed out, frustrated, or bothered in the face of challenges, then I would have thought that would probably be reflected in lower neuroticism according to standard measures used by psychologists.

Finally, as an economist, it seems to me that revealed preferences are worth considering. As I have discussed previously, the self-help industry seems successful according to the usual market tests. When people engage in meditation or other forms of contemplation instead of sleeping longer or indulging in more immediately pleasurable activities, this suggests to me that they may actually obtain some of the benefits that they claim in terms of desired changes in personality traits.

Postscript
There is an update of this post entitled: How much does personality change over time?