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Notes (referenced) on the misuse of poll data which underpins
Oliver James's Affluenza. (And more generally, the Happiness Debate
guff.)
(See also: RDN
on Richard Layard and Oliver James at Social Affairs Unit.)
(See also: RDN's Rich
Is Beautiful: A very personal defence of Mass Affluence, SAU,
2005.)
A note written 17 July, 2007
Lord Layard, the guru of the Happiness debate, argues that £1000
on each depressive would sort most of them out. Nothing wrong in
that suggestion, but it has not much do with Layard's more general
assertions about the statistics of happiness, which are about as
bad as James'.
Reference
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/textonly/research/mentalhealth/RL414d.pdf
There's a good deal of useful data quoted in the next section.
But here is some fresh material.
The
Economist 14 July, 2007, discusses two recent editions of ongoing
research. "The new polls cast some doubt of that [Layardian]
school of thought. They add weight to the contention that growth
and income play a big part in boosting people's satisfaction with
life and their attitude to the future."
(1) Gallup's WorldPoll as reported in the Economist found that
"In all the rich places (America, Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia)
most pople say they are happy. In all the poor ones (mainly in Afrca)
people say they are not.... In general, declared levels of happiness
are correlated with wealth. The pattern also seems to hold true
within countries, as well as between them. Rich Americans are happier
than poor ones; rich Brazlilians happier than poorer ones."
(I would reference this data if I could find it on the Gallup World
Poll site, but can't.)
(2) Ipsos looked at shapers and movers and found that the elite
was more markedly optimistic than the masses in India, Russia and
China and less differentiated (or even slightly more gloomy) in
Europe and America.
So there are complications in this stuff and all of it needs taking
with a pinch of salt.
BTW: In general the better-off bounce back more quickly than the
poor from mental health crises.
Reference
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/bow0603.pdf
A note written in early 2007, specifically on Oliver James'
work
OJ argues that the Anglosphere (Britain and the US) suffers from
Affluenza. He is pursuing an old line: that the Brits would do well
to consider why the Continental model of France and Germany, or
the Scandinavian model of Denmark and Norway, or the Mediterranean
model of Italy or Greece are nicer.
Oliver James's narrative depends to some extent on data and it
is worth looking at what this actually says.
OJ's thesis is that the "selfish capitalism" of some
countries explains what he calls their high rates of mental distress.
He uses inequality tables as a proxy for "selfish capitalism"
and he uses two main sources for his evidence of countries' mental
health. He doesn't factor in the degree of "socialism"
of countries: the UK is unequal but quite highly-taxed, for instance.
The UK ranks with the US in OJ's thesis, but they are probably not
very alike as societies, and not so different from other countires
(Germany, for instance) which look very different to them on OJ's
ranking.
A brief look at UNDP's inequality data does not help OJ's case.
Its "gini index" measures the percentage deviation from
a notional totally equal distribution of national income. Denmark,
Japan, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Germany are all in the
21-30 per cent range. France, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the UK,
Israel, Portugal, New Zealand, Poland, the US and Russia are all
in the 31-40 per cent range (the US only just, at 40 per cent).
Hong Kong, China, Mexico, Zimbabwe and Malaysia are all in the 41-50
per cent range. It falls to Chile, Colombia, Zimbawe to exceed 50
per cent.
Put this another way. OJ's Anglosphere villain, the UK, sits perfectly
well in a range of Continental examples, though at the higher end
of inequality compared with them. Only the Scandinavians and Japan
are likely to be 10 percent more equal. But the Scans love childcare
for the very young, which OJ inveighs against.
Reference:
[http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/147.html]
Other measures of inequality do rank "selfish capitalism"
more as OJ would like. The ratio of the wealth held by the top 10
per cent of society vs that held by the bottom 10 per cent does
coral and rank the Anglosphere as OJ would like, with Australia,
New Zealand, the UK all close, and the US as an upper outlyer. But
if that correlated well with mental distress (which it doesn't),
his book would have had to be called "Envy-flu", since
it is the very few, very rich who are noted by this statistic.
Reference
[http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/145.html]
OJ thinks he has identified a middle class disease, and that is
arguably well charted by the inequality of the top 20 per cent vs
the bottom 20 per cent. This is indeed the measure he uses. That
gives the rough ranking OJ would like, with the US as something
of an outlyer. But it corals and ranks some OJ heroes and villains
much more closely than would really suit his case. The top 20 per
cent of Brits have over 7 times the wealth of the bottom 20 per
cent. The figures is 6 times for the Spanish top 20 per cent, 6.5
for the Italian, and 5.6 for the French. There may be some tipping
point at a sevenfold inequality, but it doesn't seem all that plausible.
Reference
[http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/146.html]
OJ explicitly dismisses "happiness" data as merely anecdotal
and more indicative of cultural mores than well-being. He may take
this route because the Eurobarometer and other measures of happiness
don't rank countries' well-being as he would like. The UK emerges
as a cheerful country from Eurobarometer.
Reference
[http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_information/documents/ebs_248_en.pdf]
It is true that OJ's two preferred tables in his three Appendices
of countries' well-being do rank them as he states. One lists several,
but not the UK, which comes from elsewhere. They round-up rather
complicated data sets.
Reference
[http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content-nw/full/291/21/2581/TABLEJOC40199T2]
He uses another dataset to slot the UK in. It is interesting to
note the UK material: it is much more reassuring than OJ implies.
Reference
[http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1333]
I suspect all the mental health rankings here are dubious, but
I am especially suspicious of the UK ranking.
The correlations he posits are conflicted. Some countries conventionally
regarded as "nice" (France, Canada, Netherlands) score
badly for mental health, whilst other "nice" ones (especially
those with the admired mediterranean lifestyle) score well inspite
of being unequal (Spain but especially Italy are posited as having
both moderately high inequality and very good mental health). Subtract
the dubious ranking of the UK from OJ's Appendix 2 and one is left
with an even more muddled picture. OJ's own data does not demonstrate
inequality equating with misery, with or without the UK's dubious
position.
There are other datasets which OJ ignores and which are much more
optimistic for the UK, and for "selfish capitalism". For
example The State of Mental Health in the European Union (Health
and Consumer Protection directorate-general, Brussels, 2004) presents
a very different picture and is on all fours with OJ's purposes
(that is, it is about mental illness not happiness).
Reference http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2001/monitoring/fp_monitoring_2001_frep_06_en.pdf
This study has the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany at the top
of the mental health well-being table, and in that order (the UK
leading the pack of wellness). Spain, Italy and France are well
behind, and in that order, with France being quite the least well-off.
Reference
Figure 9. Psychological Distress in Seven EU countries
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2001/monitoring/fp_monitoring_2001_frep_06_en.pdf
If one moves to suicide, Greeks and Portuguese kill themselves the
least, with the UK about as suicidal as the Portuguese. Finns (in
spite of other data suggesting they are generally very cheerful,
see the Eurobarometer data) kill themselves most frequently amongst
Europeans, but the French, Danes, and Italians are all much more
prone to suicide than the British.
Reference
Figure 13. Total Suicide Mortality Rates Across Europe, 1997
[http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2001/monitoring/fp_monitoring_2001_frep_06_en.pdf.
Figure 13 ]
OJ wants us to believe that affluence relates to mental illness.
Data at the Office of Applied Statistics of the US Department of
Health and Human Services has better-off males at considerably less
risk of mental illness than the poorest, with middling income people
in between them. US men are at least as mentally well as the Continentals
OJ admires. It's true that US women are much more prone to depression
than US men, but rich women only very slightly more so than poor.
Reference
Table SP78.2B http://oas.samhsa.gov/depressTabs.htm
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