Explaining Well-Being over the Life Cycle: A Look at Life Transitions during Young Adulthood

Early adulthood is a time of important transitions that shape the future of young adults. How do these transitions affect well-being, and to what degree can they account for the life satisfaction path followed during young adulthood? To answer these questions, longitudinal data from the Swedish Young Adult Panel Study are used for three cohorts interviewed in 1999, 2003, and 2009. Four age intervals covering ages 22 through 40 are constructed. The well-being changes and the main transitions undergone during each age interval are examined. Life satisfaction at ages 22 to 40 follows a slight inverse U-shape peaking around age 30/32 and declining thereafter. The common transition pattern during this time is represented by young adults ages 22 through 30/32 going mainly through partnership (marriage or cohabitation) formation, the school-to-work transition, and the early years of parenting. After age 30 parenting continues as an important life transition, and is joined by an increase in partnership dissolution. This set of transitions alone is found to account for the inverse U-shape of overall life satisfaction. Partnership formation, the school-to-work transition, and parenting younger children are all associated with increasing life satisfaction, mainly through their positive relationship with the financial, and family domains of well-being. After age 30, the monetary burdens, and strains on relationship with partner associated with parenting older children start to set in, and life satisfaction begins to decline

The Happiness-Income Paradox Revisited

The striking thing about the happiness-income paradox is that over the long-term – usually a period of 10 y or more – happiness does not increase as a country's income rises. Heretofore the evidence for this was limited to developed countries. This article presents evidence that the long term nil relationship between happiness and income holds also for a number of developing countries, the eastern European countries transitioning from socialism to capitalism, and an even wider sample of developed countries than previously studied. It also finds that in the short-term in all three groups of countries, happiness and income go together, i.e., happiness tends to fall in economic contractions and rise in expansions. Recent critiques of the paradox, claiming the time series relationship between happiness and income is positive, are the result either of a statistical artifact or a confusion of the short-term relationship with the long-term one.Easterlin Paradox, life satisfaction, subjective well-being

Internal Migration and Life Satisfaction: Well-Being Effects of Moving as a Young Adult

Migration typically leads to higher income, but its effects on life satisfaction remain unclear. Does migration increase life satisfaction? If it does, is the increase in income responsible or are other life domains driving the satisfaction changes? These two questions are addressed using longitudinal data from a Swedish Young Adult Panel Study for 1999 and 2009. Comparing migrants to non-migrants, it is found that internal migration does increase life satisfaction for both, migrants who move due to work and non-work reasons. This finding holds regardless of other life transitions that may accompany migration, such as marriage and joining the labor market. Different channels lay behind the increase in life satisfaction for work and non-work migrants. For both migrant groups, however, these channels are mostly unrelated to income changes. For non-work migrants, improvements in life satisfaction seem to be due to higher housing satisfaction. No increase in income relative to non-migrants is found for this group. For work migrants, changes in occupational composition leading to higher status seem to underlie the higher life satisfaction. Relative income increases experienced by this migrant group are accompanied by constant relative economic satisfaction. The absence of improvements in th

China’s life satisfaction, 1990–2010

Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries—a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life satisfaction of the magnitude that might have been expected to result from the fourfold improvement in the level of per capita consumption that has occurred. As in the European countries, in China the trend and U-shaped pattern appear to be related to a pronounced rise in unemployment followed by a mild decline, and an accompanying dissolution of the social safety net along with growing income inequality. The burden of worsening life satisfaction in China has fallen chiefly on the lowest socioeconomic groups. An initially highly egalitarian distribution of life satisfaction has been replaced by an increasingly unequal one, with decreasing life satisfaction in persons in the bottom third of the income distribution and increasing life satisfaction in those in the top third