December 21st: health and autonomy matter for life satisfaction — but how much?

I have now found an even bigger dataset that combines the World Values Survey and European Values Study data into one: a total of 135,000 respondents across 81 countries. It doesn’t have all the questions in either survey, so has its limitations, but it does have comprehensive data on three variables of interest for today: life satisfaction, health, and autonomy (or, free choice and control over one’s life outcomes).

Questions asked:

All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

How much freedom of choice and control you feel you have over the way your life turns out?

All in all, how would you describe your state of health these days?

Numerous studies have found that, at both the country and individual level, a sense of control over one’s life outcomes is one of the most important predictors of people’s satisfaction with their lives. Other important predictors are health, relationships, employment, age, income and non-criminality.

It makes sense: regardless of what those life outcomes are, it would seem intuitive that someone who chose to be there has arguably satisfied their life goals and is now content; whereas someone who feels that circumstances have conspired against them is likely to feel somewhat resentful (either with themselves for failing to achieve some goal, even against the odds, or with the world at large). [There is a whole enormous, and complex, literature around the psychology of this which I don’t claim to even start to understand.]

The studies uncovering variables that explain individual differences in life satisfaction are all well and good. However, for anyone who is not an econometrician or familiar with reading econometric papers, interpreting the results can be challenging. That’s one of the reasons I often like to look at the raw data — however unscientific this may be. And I think today’s attempt has yielded quite some interesting results.

The chart shows how average life satisfaction varies between different types of groups. On the left, we can see that as people’s sense of autonomy increases (from “None at all” to “A great deal”), their satisfaction increases very significantly — much more than the difference between people in the lowest and highest income deciles in each country (right hand panel). There does seem to be some non-linearity to this relationship: the improvements in life satisfaction taper off somewhat at the highest levels — but this could simply be a function of the type of scale that was used.

When it comes to health, the differences between those in poor health and those in good health are even bigger (middle panel). In life satisfaction terms, crudely speaking, going from “Fair” to “Very good” health would be “worth” the same gain as going from the bottom income decile to the top income decile. People in the highest health group report life satisfaction that is around 75% higher than people in the lowest health category.

[Note: there are a huge number of caveats with this analysis, if one wanted to be scientific about it, and I’m going to mention only the most important ones here. While the data is weighted to be representative of the underlying country demographics, no other controls have been applied. The data simply reports differences between people in the different categories. It says nothing about what would happen to some specific individual’s life satisfaction if they moved from one category to another. And, by definition, this kind of analysis cannot say much about causality.]