Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing using Millions of Digitized Books

Thomas Hills, Eugenio Proto, Daniel Sgroi and Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe
Additional contact information
Thomas Hills: Department of Psychology, University of Warwick
Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe: Alan Turing Institute, British Library

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems, higher productivity, and better incomes. For these reasons subjective wellbeing has become a key focal issue among scientific researchers and governments. Yet no scientific investigator knows how happy humans were in previous centuries. Here we show that a new method based on quantitative analysis of digitized text from millions of books published over the past 200 years captures reliable trends in historical subjective wellbeing across four nations. This method uses psychological valence norms for thousands of words to compute the relative proportion of positive and negative language, indicating relative happiness during national and international wars, financial crises, and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and GDP. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s onwards and in comparison with economic, medical, and political events since 1820 and also use a set of words with stable historical meanings to support our findings. Finally we show that our results are robust to the use of diverse corpora (including text derived from newspapers) and different word norms.

Keywords: Historical Subjective Wellbeing; Big Data; Google Books; GDP; Conflict JEL Classification: N3; N4; O1; D6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear ... lls_proto__sgroi.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing using millions of digitized books (2019)
Working Paper: Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing using Millions of Digitized Books (2019)
Working Paper: Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing using millions of Digitized Books (2019)
Working Paper: Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing Using Millions of Digitized Books (2016)
Working Paper: Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing Using Millions of Digitized Books (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:236

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