Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP13636
Authors: Thomas Hills; Eugenio Proto; Daniel Sgroi; Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe
Abstract: In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems, higher productivity, and better incomes. For these reasons subjective wellbeing has become a key focal issue among scientific researchers and governments. Yet no scientific investigator knows how happy humans were in previous centuries. Here we show that a new method based on quantitative analysis of digitized text from millions of books published over the past 200 years captures reliable trends in historical subjective wellbeing across four nations. This method uses psychological valence norms for thousands of words to compute the relative proportion of positive and negative language, indicating relative happiness during national and international wars, financial crises, and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and GDP. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s onwards and in comparison with economic, medical, and political events since 1820 and also use a set of words with stable historical meanings to support our findings. Finally we show that our results are robust to the use of diverse corpora (including text derived from newspapers) and different word norms.
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Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Higher subjective wellbeing (I31) | Fewer health problems (I19) |
| Higher subjective wellbeing (I31) | Higher productivity (O49) |
| Higher subjective wellbeing (I31) | Better incomes (E25) |
| National Valence Index (NVI) (D79) | Life satisfaction (I31) |
| Wars and financial crises (G01) | Lower subjective wellbeing (I31) |
| Historical events (N94) | Changes in National Valence Index (NVI) (F52) |
| NVI (Y20) | Better predictor of life satisfaction than GDP or life expectancy (I31) |