In the pursuit of happiness, extroverts get a head start

When Bob Hawke famously said economists were in the happiness-raising business, he wasn’t wrong. But he didn’t endear himself to the profession, which these days prefers to think of itself as in the incentives business.

A few economists study happiness, but for the most part they leave it to psychologists – who prefer to call it by the more scientific sounding “subjective wellbeing”. How satisfied you feel with your life or, as I prefer to think of it, how fulfilled you feel.

One finding we got last year from the world of happiness research is that people with certain types of personality tend to be happier than the rest of us.

Social psychologists have put decades of work into studying personality, and are widely agreed on the “big five” personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extroversion.

Conscientiousness refers to being industrious, orderly and dependable. It’s about the way we control, regulate and direct our impulses. Conscientious individuals avoid trouble and achieve success through planning and persistence.

Agreeableness refers to co-operation and social harmony. Agreeable people value getting on with others. They're considerate, friendly, generous, helpful and willing to compromise their interests with others’ interests.

The trait psychologists call neuroticism would be better labelled by its inverse: emotional stability. So it’s one on which you’d like a low score. Neurotics have a tendency to often experience negative feelings such as anxiety or depression – or always getting angry. They can be moody and irritable. People who score low on neuroticism are less easily upset and less emotionally reactive. They tend to be calm and emotionally stable.

Openness to experience refers to being intellectually curious, imaginative, creative, inventive and insightful. Less open people prefer familiarity over novelty and tend to be conservative and resistant to change.

Extroversion refers to being outgoing, talkative and bold. Extroverts want to engage with the outside world. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented, assertive and want to draw attention to themselves (some of them wear loud ties or go everywhere in sneakers).

Although surveys often show us to be wildly overconfident about our own capabilities – a recent survey shows 65 per cent of Americans think they’re more intelligent than the average person, for instance – a study last year by Stefano Di Domenico of the Australian Catholic University and others has found we’re quite accurate in assessing our own personality.

You give yourself a score out of 10 for each of the five factors, where 5 is average, 1 is very low and 10 is very high.

I’ve written before about the benefits of being an optimist – which, fortunately, about 80 per cent of us are. Unsurprisingly, optimists are happier than pessimists.

Optimists score well on four of the big five personality traits – emotional stability, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness – with only openness being of limited relevance.

But last year’s big news about the effect of personality on happiness concerned the benefits of extroversion. Psychologists have long known that extroverts rate highly in measures of wellbeing. And they’re less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety or other mental health problems.

So much so that some studies seem to be encouraging us to act in more extroverted ways in the hope of becoming happier. Fake it till you make it.

A study by Dr Luke Smillie, of the University of Melbourne, and others has found it’s not that simple.

Their randomised control trial confirmed that people told to “act extroverted” did become happier. But it turned out that those who were naturally extroverted benefited the most, whereas those who were relatively introverted didn’t seem to benefit at all.

This - and other evidence – suggests that our personality has a bigger influence on how happy we feel than many have assumed. That is, how happy we are with our lives is less susceptible to our conscious control than we thought.

Smillie (who must be terribly tired of hearing the words “nominative determinism”) and colleagues say that’s not as bad as it sounds, however. Our personality may shape our lives, but it also changes. “Personal change may not be easy,” they say, “but we now know personality is not ‘fixed’.”

Research suggests personality is most likely to change between the ages of 20 and 40, but can occur at older ages.

This fits my own experience. When I first became a journalist, I dreaded having to phone people I didn’t know. But I must have become more extroverted over the years because, when I try to tell people I’m actually quite shy, they just laugh.

In any case, I think it’s possible to be more extroverted in some aspects of your life – some “domains”, as psychologists say – and less in others. Just ask my wife.

Smillie & Co say they’re not meaning to imply you need to be extroverted to be happy. Scoring well on other character traits will get you there.

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In poor countries income does trickle down

Try this test of your economic literacy: has world poverty decreased or increased since 1990? If you said decreased, congratulations. You’re smarter than the average bear.

If you were sure it had increased, you’re the victim of a news media gone overboard in indulging your preference for bad news over good.

A lot of bad things are happening in the world, but also some really good things, and we immiserate ourselves when we fail to give them the notice they deserve.

In October the Word Bank issued a report announcing that world poverty had fallen in the two years to 2015. But since this was the continuation of a longstanding trend, the media took little notice.

So let me give it the fanfare it deserves. World poverty has been falling continuously – and rapidly - for the past quarter century. In 1990, 36 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, but by 2015 this had fallen to 10 per cent – the lowest in recorded history.

This means the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by a billion, from almost 2 billion to 736 million. And that really does make it “one of the greatest human achievements of our time”.

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $US1.90 a day, which has been adjusted for the US dollar’s differing purchasing power in different countries in 2011.

But how did this great achievement come about? It’s the result of rapid economic growth in the developing countries over the past three decades, particularly in China (and its trading partners in east Asia) and India (and other south Asian countries, including Bangladesh).

These countries have made no herculean efforts to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, they’ve just grown a lot over a sustained period. Which makes the fall in poverty in these countries a fabulous advertisement for the benefits of market economies and freer trade between countries.

And it’s a reminder that, in poor countries at least, a fair bit of the income generated by economic growth does trickle down to those at the bottom. Low-income households also benefit as more of the country’s income is spent on increasing primary education and spreading access to electricity, decent water and sanitation.

Actually, lower-income households in Australia have benefited from our 27 years of continuous economic growth, with their incomes growing quite strongly in real terms. That’s because of employment growing faster than the working-age population, wages growing faster than prices (until five years ago) and pensions (but not the dole) being indexed to wages.

But real wage and pension growth occur because of government policy. And since, in truth, tax cuts for companies and high income-earners do little to boost the economy and employment, their benefits don’t trickle down to any great extent.

Back to the point. Though the rate of extreme poverty has fallen in all the world’s regions since 1990, it’s fallen only a bit in Sub-Saharan Africa, while its population has continued growing strongly.

This means the Sub-Sahara now accounts for more than half the 736 million people remaining in extreme poverty, with south Asia accounting for a further quarter. It’s been largely eliminated in east Asia and the other regions.

If India’s present strong economic growth continues, its share of world poverty will fall away. The World Bank projects that, by 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa will account for nearly nine out of 10 of the world’s extreme poor.

Globally, poor people live overwhelmingly in rural areas and have lots of children. Judge poverty not by people’s income but by their access to education, electricity, water and sanitation, and the proportion in rural areas is even higher.

Note that the World Bank’s austere “international poverty line” of $US1.90 a day is an absolute measure of poverty. You work out the value of goods needed to barely stay alive, then adjust it for inflation over time, ignoring what’s happening to the incomes of the better-off.

By contrast, in rich countries like ours we measure relative poverty: how are real incomes at the bottom (often defined as half the median income) travelling relative to those around the middle and at the top?

So absolute poverty falls whenever low incomes grow faster than inflation whereas, for a fall in relative poverty, the real incomes of the poor need to grow at a faster rate than everyone else’s.

This, by the way, explains why absolute poverty in China and India can fall even while income inequality – the gap between rich and poor – increases. As it usually has.

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Compared to you and me, the feudal serfs had it easy

Back at work yet, or still enjoying your summer break? Either way, you probably wish you had more annual leave. I could tell you to count your blessings, that today’s full-time workers get much longer holidays than workers have ever had.

But maybe that isn't true. It’s certainly true that we get longer holidays and work fewer hours than workers did in the 19th century but, according to the sociologist Juliet Schor, the 19th century – not long after the end of the Industrial Revolution – was an aberration in the history of human labour.

Indeed, if we’re to believe Dr Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, we’re working a lot harder than medieval peasants did. “Ploughing and harvesting were backbreaking toil,” she says, “but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.”

The church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent holy-days. Weddings, wakes and births might mean a week off, quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment, she says.

There was no work on Sundays, and when ploughing and harvesting seasons were over, peasants got time to rest, too. In fact, according to Schor, during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.

I’m not sure every scholar would agree with this assessment, and the 14th century was the tail end of England’s feudal system, which began after the French Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

So if you’re not sure you’d have been happier as a serf – good thinking.

Feudalism was the system of political and economic organisation that preceded England’s Agricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution, before we got to a capitalist or market economy approximating what we have today.

According to the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, feudalism was a social and economic system defined by inherited social ranks, each of which possessed social and economic privileges and obligations. Wealth derived from agriculture, which was arranged not according to market forces but on the basis of customary labour service owed by serfs to landowning nobles.

The king owned all the country’s land, but leased much of it to nobles, often called barons. The barons ran the decentralised, feudal system. These “lords of the manor” were in complete control of their manor, meting out justice, minting their own money and setting their own taxes.

The barons divided some of their land between their knights. The knights, in turn, distributed some of their land to the serfs, also known as villeins or peasants.

That covers people’s privileges, now their obligations. In return for their land, the barons paid rent to the king and provided him with knights to fight his battles when required. In return for their land, the knights provided their baron with personal protection and military service to the king.

In return for their land, the serfs paid their master with maybe a third of the food they grew, as well as being compelled to work on his own land. They couldn’t leave the manor and needed their lord’s permission to marry. They were often charged a fee for use of any of the improvements on the manor – roads, bridges, mills and bakehouses. And sometimes they had to fight in the baron’s battles.

Serfs lived with their animals in one-room homes they built themselves with wattle-and-daub (woven twigs daubed with mud). Their clothes were self-made, mainly of wool and very scratchy. They grew rye, wheat and other grains, grazed sheep on the common, had a kitchen garden and a few apple and pear trees.

Most of what they ate they grew themselves: little meat, but lots of rye bread and a stew of peas, beans and onions, called pottage. Berries, nuts and honey were gathered from the woods.

The feudal system fell into decline for many reasons. One was that the military became full-time professionals. Another was the Black Death (bubonic plague) of 1348, which killed many of the serfs. Landowners desperate for workers to harvest their crops had to do the unthinkable: pay actual wages to anyone who’d work their land – and the wages were high. Thus did the lords lose their hold over the serfs.

But Professor Richard Grabowski, of Southern Illinois University, has advanced a more economic theory. Manorial agriculture wasn’t very efficient, even though productivity could have been improved by such measures as removing stones from fields, adding mineral fertilisers and making greater use of fodder crops.

But the system of forced labour precluded use of these techniques because they required more care and skill than the serfs had any incentive to apply when working in the lord’s fields rather than their own.

Creating this incentive would have required shifting to paid labour, but this would cost the lord the ability to order his serfs to help fight a rival lord trying to grab his land. The first lord to free his serfs would lose his land to the others.

So the lack of national enforcement of property rights was another barrier to greater productivity. As the feudal system gradually broke down, the basis for power shifted from how many serfs you controlled to how good you were at using your land to generate more income.

England’s long Agricultural Revolution involved moving to market relationships between land owners and labourers, and almost all rural production being sold in markets, as well as huge improvements in agricultural productivity, making the nation much more prosperous.

People may have worked more hours on more days in the year, but they were much better paid to do it.

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What the economy really needs more of: trees

I think the first economist must have been named Horatio. He’s the one who had to be reminded there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in his model.

I try to keep my horizons wide by regularly consulting my second-favourite website, The Conversation (with academics who know a lot of interesting things about a lot of topics), to which I’m indebted for most of what follows.

We’re meant to know all about photosynthesis, but did you realise it means that, “with a bit of sun, a tree uses the natural miracle of photosynthesis to combine a little water with carbon dioxide from the air to produce the building blocks for its own growth, as well as oxygen,” according to Associate Professor Cris Brack, of forest measurement and management at the Australian National University?

So, to oversimplify a little, we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, whereas trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen – making them useful things to have around when we have a problem with excess carbon emissions.

But trees do far more for us than help with our greenhouse problem. For a start, they cheer us up. Academics at the universities of Melbourne and Tasmania examined 2.2 million messages on Twitter and found that tweets made from parks contained more positive content - and less negativity - than tweets coming from built-up areas.

Why are people in parks likely to be happier? Because parks help them to recover from the stress and mental strain of living in cities, and provide a place to exercise, meet other people or attend special events.

The world is becoming more urbanised. There’s now more than half the world’s population living in cities. In Australia, two-thirds of us live in capital cities and nine out of 10 of us live in urban environments.

There are sound economic reasons why so many of us are piling into big cities, but it seems there are also health and social problems. According to the experts, cities are becoming the epicentres for chronic, non-communicable physical and mental health conditions.

But there’s growing recognition of the crucial role of urban green spaces in helping reduce these health problems. More than 40 years of research shows that experiences of nature are linked to a remarkable breadth of positive health outcomes, including improved physical health (such as reduced blood pressure and allergies, less death from cardio-vascular disease, and improved self-perceived general health), improved mental wellbeing (such as reduced stress and better restoration), greater social wellbeing and promotion of positive health behaviours (such as physical activity).

Our cities are getting hotter, more crowded and noisier, while climate change is bringing more heatwaves, according to environmental planners at Griffith University. The obvious answer is more air-conditioning, but this brings more carbon emissions, so a better answer is more infrastructure – “green infrastructure”, otherwise known as street trees, green roofs, vegetated surfaces and green walls. In reality, however, vegetation cover in cities is declining, not increasing.

Planting trees in parks, gardens or streets has many benefits, helping to cool cities, slowing stormwater run-off, filtering air pollution, providing habitat for some animals, making people happier and encouraging walking.

According to those environmental planners, shading from strategically placed street trees can lower surrounding temperatures by up to 6 degrees – or up to 20 degrees over roads. Green roofs and walls can naturally cool buildings, substantially lowering demand for air-conditioning.

By contrast, hard surfaces – including concrete, asphalt and stone – increase urban temperature by absorbing heat and radiating it back into the air.

But though scientists have much evidence that trees and other greenery improve our mood and health, they know less about the actual mechanisms by which this occurs. Japanese research, however, suggests that when we walk through bushland we breathe in three substances: beneficial bacteria, plant-derived essential oils and negatively-charged ions.

We live our lives surrounded by beneficial bacteria, breathing them in and sharing our bodies with them. Gut-dwelling bacteria break down the food we can’t digest and produce substances that benefit us physically and mentally.

Plants and the bacteria living on them produce essential oils that fight off harmful micro-organisms when we ingest them.

And despite the nonsense talked about negative-ion generating machines, there’s evidence that negative air ions may influence our mental outlook in beneficial ways.

This may sound very new and scientific to some (or pseudo-scientific to others) but, as Hugh Mackay observes in his latest book, Australia Reimagined, being connected to nature is a traditional source of relief from anxiety: gardening, bushwalking, strolling in a park, walking the dog, climbing a tree, swimming in the sea or sailing on it, picnicking in a tranquil and beautiful setting, playing games that take you outdoors and into a natural environment.

We know instinctively that “grass time” – running on it, rolling in it, throwing and catching a ball across it – is vital for the health and wellbeing of children. Particularly if they’ve been cooped up indoors, glued to a screen. But adults are no different, the wise man says.

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Find parenting tough? Be glad you're not American

I have a news flash: being a grandad beats being a parent. Parenting is now a much tougher gig, whereas grandparenting is all care and no responsibility. And it’s a lot cheaper.

These thoughts are prompted by an article in the New York Times, in which Claire Cain Miller writes that parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

“Over just a couple of generations,” she writes, “parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.”

(How does she know how much time mothers spend on their kids? Because the US government conducts regular surveys of how people use their time. We used to do so too, but have since decided we can’t afford to keep it up. Great decision, guys.)

“The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s,” she writes.

The most momentous social change in my lifetime came sometime in the 1960s when Australia’s parents decided (as did parents in most advanced economies) that their daughters were just as entitled to a good education as their sons.

That simple attitudinal change has had huge economic and social ramifications, to which we and our governments are yet to fully adjust.

These days, most kids go to year 12, and most of those go on to uni. But girls outnumber boys in year 12 and at uni. When girls (and their parents and the taxpayer) have invested so much time and money in attaining a good education, it’s hardly surprising most of them want to put that education to work, so to speak, to gain the monetary reward but also to gain more intellectual (and social) stimulation than they would staying at home.

This “economic emancipation of women” has greatly increased the rate at which women participate in the (paid) labour force, making Australians a lot more prosperous, including by creating a lot of jobs for women performing services most women formerly performed for themselves at home, such as childcare.

The rise of the two-income family is one factor contributing to higher house prices. Governments have had to do a lot of work (and spend a lot of money) renovating the institutions of the labour market which, over the centuries, were designed exclusively to meet the needs of male breadwinners.

They’ve had to spend a lot more on high school and university education, legislate to ensure women (and later men) keep their places when they go on parental leave, receive at least some payment while on that leave, and receive big subsidies for a greatly expanded and heavily regulated system of childcare – in which childcare workers are better trained and much better paid.

Now there are strengthening efforts to ensure women get a much bigger share of the top jobs (with pay equal to the top men) – including in parliament.

Meanwhile, however, the nature of parenting has changed. Two-income families have more money to spend on fewer kids, and spend it they do – partly, I suspect, because mothers feel guilty about the time they don’t spend with their kids (I’m not saying they should, just that many do).

Parents, mainly mothers, put much time and money into taking their kids to after-school sporting and cultural training and (particularly in NSW) exam coaching. Many imagine sending their kids to expensive private schools will buy them a better education.

We’ve entered the era of “intensive parenting”, which brings us to Miller’s point that modern American mothers spend just as much time parenting as their stay-at-home mothers or grandmothers did. They just do different things.

As yet, however, it’s not nearly as bad in Oz as it is in the US. The gap between rich and poor has widened so much in America (with a bigger cost and status gap between government-funded universities and private Ivy-League colleges), that parents worry their kids won’t be able to live as well their parents did. In the States, parenting has become a lot more competitive.

Nor is it nearly as true here that children are most expensive before they get to school and after they leave it and head to uni. Our childcare is much more heavily subsidised than America’s. And our HECS-HELP “income-contingent loans” for uni tuition fees are much more concessional than what the Yanks do.

We have no need to worry about our kids being loaded up with HECS debt.

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