pewresearch.org/pubs/301/are-we-happy-yet
Download the complete report Graph: About One Third of Americans Are Very Happy Americans have always had a thing about happiness. We all have certain unalienable rights, declares our Declaration of Independence, among them "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." So then, a couple of centuries into the chase, how are we doing? Just a third (34%) of adults in this country say they're very happy, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey. Another half say they are pretty happy and 15% consider themselves not too happy.
But some of us are happier than others, and this variance helps to paint a portrait of the kind of people Americans are. It also casts doubt on some of the famous wisdom on the subject. For example, remember grandma's aphorism about money not buying happiness? Well, brace yourself, but dear ole grandma may have been misinformed. Our survey shows that nearly half (49%) of those with an annual family income of more than $100,000 say they're very happy. By contrast, just 24% of those with an annual family income of less than $30,000 say they're very happy. This finding definitely puts grandma on shaky ground, but it doesn't necessarily prove her wrong. It establishes a correlation (two things that go hand in hand) rather than a cause (one thing that leads to the other). There are, in fact, any number of possible causes of this correlation. Or perhaps both are influenced by some other, more powerful factor. Later in this report we'll try to sort out which correlations are most powerful. But meantime, we should note at the outset that all of the findings from this survey should be taken with a general caution. Much of the research into the field of happiness -- to say nothing of simple common sense - suggests that at the level of the individual, happiness is heavily influenced by life events (Did you get the big promotion? The Pew survey did not look at life events or psychological characteristics. We only looked at happiness by demographic and behavioral traits. But through this admittedly limited prism, we found some fascinating correlations.
The findings are drawn from a telephone survey of a nationally representative, randomly-selected sample of 3,014 adults, conducted from Oct. You can go directly to the full battery of happiness tables by clicking on this index.
At the highest income category -- $150,000 and above - fully 50% of respondents report being very happy; by contrast, just 23% of those who have a family income below $20,000 say they are very happy. But there is also a way to look at the long term trend in happiness that sheds a different light on the question of whether it is tied to money. As noted above, about a third of the public has been reporting they are very happy ever since 1972, when the General Social Survey (sociological surveys funded largely by the National Science Foundation) started asking the same happiness question that Pew posed in its survey. But during these past three decades, the average annual per capita income in this country has more than doubled in inflation adjusted dollars. Thus, in the aggregate, Americans have more money now than they did a generation ago. So was grandma right after all - money doesn't buy happiness?
trend data also show that what matters on the happiness front is not how much money you have, but whether you have more (or less) at any given time than everyone else. That raises one more question: how about the really rich? Does the linear relationship between happiness and income continue right up into the income stratosphere - with billionaires happier than millionaires, who in turn are happier than the folks just getting by on $500,000 a year? random phone calls don't generate a large enough sample of the super rich. So all we can do is fall back on the wisdom of the popular culture, which is fond of chronicling the travails of the rich and famous. Of course, we can't be sure if these stories are based on a representative sample. But we do notice that reading them often makes us happy. Political Party Affiliation Graph: Republicans Happier than Democrats, Independents Some 45% of all Republicans report being very happy, compared with just 30% of Democrats and 29% of independents.
Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey began taking its measurements in 1972. Pew surveys since 1991 also show a partisan gap on happiness; the current 16 percentage point gap is among the largest in Pew surveys, rivaled only by a 17 point gap in February 2003. Could it be that Republicans are so much happier now because their party controls all the levers of federal power? Since 1972, the GOP happiness edge over Democrats has ebbed and flowed in a pattern that appears unrelated to which party is in political power. For example, Republicans had up to a 10 and 11 percentage point happiness edge over Democrats in various years of both the Carter and Clinton presidencies, and as small as a three and five percentage point edge in various years of the Reagan and first Bush presidencies. Also, we should explain here a bit about how our survey questionnaire was constructed. The question about happiness was posed at the very beginning of the interview, while the question about political affiliation was posed at the back end, along with questions about demographic traits. So respondents were not cued to consider their happiness through the frame of partisan politics. it is not a question about happiness with partisan outcomes. Of course, there's a more obvious explanation for the Republicans' happiness edge. Republicans tend to have more money than Democrats, and -- as we've already discovered -- people who have more money tend to be happier.
controls for household income, Republicans still hold a significant edge: that is, poor Republicans are happier than poor Democrats; middle-income Republicans are happier than middle-income Democrats, and rich Republicans are happier than rich Democrats.
controlling for this ideological factor, a significant partisan gap remains. Conservative Republicans are happier than conservative Democrats, and moderate/liberal Republicans are happier than liberal Democrats. Religiosity Graph: Frequent Church-Goers Are Happier People who attend religious services weekly or more are happier (43% very happy) than those who attend monthly or less (31%); This correlation between happiness and frequency of church attendance has been a consistent finding in the General Social Surveys taken over the years. The same pattern applies within all major religious denominations.
married people with children are about as happy as married people without children. And unmarried people with children are about as happy as unmarried people without children.
difference in average family income among the groups appears to be a factor, but it plays out in different ways for different groups. For non-Hispanic whites, having more family income is clearly correlated with being happier. It's possible that blacks with incomes much higher than $50,000 (say $100,000 or more) are happier than others, but there were not enough of these higher income blacks in our survey for further analysis on this point.
This gap is a bit more pronounced for men, who have a 15 percentage point happiness gap between those who are 18-to-29 years old and those who are over age 65, than it is for women, among whom the equivalent gap is just seven percentage points.
Retired men and retired women are about equally likely to be very happy, as are working men and working women. But among those who are not employed, men (16%) are less likely than women (30%) to report being very happy - presumably because for more women than men, not working outside the home is a matter of choice.
Sunbelt residents are a bit happier than people who live in colder climates. Putting It All Together How do all these factors play out together? Sometimes the correlations tend to reinforce one another. For example, healthy people tend to have more income, and both these traits independently correlate with happiness.
religious profile pushes them up the happiness scale while their finan...
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