Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing Using Millions of Digitized Books

Thomas Hills (), Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi
Additional contact information
Thomas Hills: University of Warwick

No 9195, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our methods. We analyse data for six countries (the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain). To highlight some results, we find a positive short-run effect for GDP and life expectancy on subjective wellbeing. An increase of 1% life expectancy is equivalent to more than 5% increase in yearly GDP. One year of internal conflict costs the equivalent of a 50% drop in GDP per year in terms of subjective wellbeing. Public debt, on the other hand, has a short-run positive effect. Our estimated index of subjective wellbeing generally does not feature any positive trend, which is consistent with the Easterlin paradox, although we caution against long term analysis given the historical variation of written texts (which parallel similar issues with historical GDP statistics).

Keywords: GDP; conflict; big data; historical subjective wellbeing; Google books (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 N3 N4 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2015-07
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)

Published - extended version published in: Nature Human Behavior, 2019, 3 (12), 1271–1275

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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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