commentary
Countries for old men (and women)
BY
LEONID BERSHIDSKY
PUBLISHED: APRIL 7, 4:12 AM
Want to be happier when you are old? Get a job.
In recent years, researchers have made a lot of progress in understanding how happiness changes with age.
The relationship is now widely believed to be a U-curve: The level of well-being drops until one’s late 40s and then starts to go up again.
An important study in 2010 by Professor Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University and his collaborators showed that in the United States, people are happier at 80 than at 20.
While the level of sadness remains relatively constant throughout a person’s life, with a slight bump in middle age, older people worry a lot less, experience much less stress and are less frequently angry.
MID-LIFE BURDENS
More recent studies show that the U-curve holds throughout the world, with a few exceptions. There are, however, important variations: The age where the curve bottoms out differs across countries and the subsequent rise in subjective well-being is not equally steep.
Professor Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution talked about this in a recent podcast. She plotted the curve for various countries based on data from the Gallup World Poll and found that the low point was at 44 in the US, 48 in Latin America and 50 in Russia. In middle age, “people are stressed, people often have the double burdens of teenage kids and older parents”, Prof Graham explained. “There is also the effect of learning who you’re going to be when you grow up. Expectations align with reality.”
The point where that happens depends a lot on factors such as when people start working, get married and have children, then reach their career peak. But perhaps a few years’ difference in when you reach your nadir is not as important as the knowledge that things will get better from there.
Prof Graham provided some country-specific data to The Washington Post, which produced stunning graphs that showed that subjective well-being grew fast after the middle-age pit in China and the United Kingdom, moderately in Latin America and the US, slowly in Germany and not at all in Russia.
Some of that divergence could be written off to cultural and historical differences. In China, for example, the culture of respect for older people is deeply ingrained. In Russia, entire generations of older and middle-aged people were ruthlessly pushed to the sidelines when the Soviet Union collapsed because they had trouble fitting in with an entirely new economic system.
National character peculiarities tend to skew the data in various ways: Britons, for example, reported lower life satisfaction in person than on the phone. Even tangible and intuitively understandable factors such as health, though, cannot fully explain why people’s sense of well-being recovered faster in some rich countries than in others.
WORK, HAPPINESS IN OLD AGE
In a recent paper, Prof Graham explored the relationship between well-being and late-life work. She found that there were “well-being benefits to voluntary part-time employment as well as to remaining in the workforce beyond retirement age”. These results were especially pronounced in countries where part-time work is the norm and people work past retirement age out of choice rather than necessity.
In France and Germany, for example, voluntary part-time work is most widespread among the 36-to-45 age group, while in the UK and Portugal, it is more prevalent at ages 55 to 65. This, in part, explained why the well-being-age curve is steeper in the UK than in Germany.
Older workers work the most in the US, UK, Sweden and Portugal, making them, somewhat counter-intuitively, the best developed countries in which to grow old.
In the end, older people are happier, and feel healthier, when they are active and feel needed.
A happy, work-free retirement is a myth. Prof Graham’s study showed that self-employment starts providing a “happiness bonus” in one’s 60s.
So, instead of looking for a sunny place to retire, it makes sense to settle in a country where it is normal for older people to have meaningful, flexible employment. BLOOMBERG
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View contributor. He is a Moscow-based writer and author of three novels and two nonfiction books.
Countries for old men (and women) | TODAYonline
