Contexts Crawler

A new article from the ‘Health’ section of Newsweek magazine explores how the gloom and doom of current economic news might have a real physical effect on us. The fear of losing one’s job is a daily concern for many Americans and the physical and mental health consequences are now being documented by social science research.

A psychologist weighs in…

Layoffs create a sense of hopelessness. Stress-related complaints such as insomnia and headaches tend to follow, lingering even after victims find new jobs, says University of Michigan psychologist Richard Price, who tracked more than 700 layoff victims for two years. Research based on 17 years of Pennsylvania unemployment records concluded that employees affected by a mass layoff at a plant were 15 percent more likely to die of any cause over the next two decades. Experts blame the cascade of misfortune that often ensues after a layoff, including the loss of health insurance.

The sociological perspective…

Your health can suffer simply from fear of losing your job, says Sarah Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan. After crunching data from two large national surveys, she concluded that chronic job insecurity over a two-year period rivals the anxiety of a job loss or a major illness. Burgard adjusted her data for what psychologists call “neuroticism” and found that even people who aren’t typically worriers report worse health when they believe their jobs are in danger. Fears of poor job prospects may have similar consequences. 

Full story.

The Washington Post reports, “the question of whether the country is happier today than it was in, say, 1970 turns out to have a surprisingly good empirical answer. For nearly four decades, researchers have regularly asked a large sample of Americans a simple question: ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?’”

This new article includes the addition of commentary from sociologist Ruut Veenhoven who disputes a widely accepted theory from USC economist Richard Easterlin, known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox,’ which highlights the paradoxical disconnect between a nation’s economic growth and the growth of its happiness. This theory has traditionally been confined to rich, Western countries.

Easterlin attributes the phenomenon of happiness levels not keeping pace with economic gains to the fact that people’s desires and expectations change along with their material fortunes. Where an American in 1970 may have once dreamed about owning a house, he or she might now dream of owning two. Where people once dreamed of buying a new car, they now dream of buying a luxury model.

“People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more happiness,” Easterlin said. “When they think of the effects of more money, they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going to want a bigger house. They never have enough money, but what they do is sacrifice their family life and health to get more money.”

Sociologist Ruut Veenhoven counters:

Not everyone agrees with Easterlin and his economic-growth-is-not-the-way-to-happiness theory. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist in the Netherlands and the director of the World Database of Happiness, argues that wealth is actually a very reliable predictor of happiness. If you take a snapshot of people in different countries, he argues, the data shows that people in Denmark, Switzerland and Austria report being happier than people in the Philippines, India and Iran, and the people in those nations report being happier than those in Armenia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Veenhoven has even come up with a measure similar to one used by public health officials to measure the burden of disease — how many years of happiness a person might enjoy in different countries. The Swiss apparently have the highest number of “happy life years” — 63.9 — while Zimbabweans have the least — 11.5. People in the United States have an average happiness of 57 happy life years.

Read more.