KEEPING UP WITH THE SCHMIDTS: DO BETTER-OFF NEIGHBORS MAKE
PEOPLE UNHAPPY?
Gundi Knies
Commentary by Anita Drever
Happiness is enormously complex.
And in attempting to analyze one factor’s contribution to happiness or life satisfaction
Gundi has taken on a very challenging task indeed. As is made clear by her paper, the
variety of factors that influence life satisfaction are dizzying. For one they operate at
different scales –that of the individual, the household, the neighborhood, the city and the
region. Further, life satisfaction is not merely a response to the environment or events;
rather it’s mediated by an individual’s personality…. some people are just happier by
nature. Further humans are also greedy animals; therefore happiness is not merely about
what you have, but also how much more of it you have than everyone else, as the
literature review in this paper makes clear.
What I really enjoyed about Gundi’s paper is she tackles this complexity head on.
And I think she tackles it well, using both sophisticated statistical tools and the richness
in the SOEP data.
Gundi for example put a great of thought into the independent variable selection, so she
looks not only at neighborhood income levels, but also at the kind of housing people are
living in and whether or not they are living in small towns, big cities, etc… She doesn’t
just look at married and unmarried persons, but she breaks these categories down into
never married persons, divorced persons, widowers etc… It is these kinds of details that
assure me I’m reading the paper of someone who has really thought long and hard about
their analysis.
I also like that she does things like look to see if there is an interaction effect for dog
owners, and parents of teenagers, though I personally would have included parents of all
children given the birthday party competition I see among the parents of toddlers living in
the US.
Now my job as the discussant is not simply to gush, but also to talk about what I might
have liked to have seen done differently.
A minor point is the fact that the central research hypothesis --that people experience a
decrease in life satisfaction if their neighbors are wealthier than they-- seems to me a
straw man, a hypothesis set up to be easily disproved. I just wasn’t able to buy into the
idea that there could be any possibility that people would be made less happy by wealthy
neighbors. Maybe this is simply because I spent a decade living in Los Angeles where
people will pay a million dollars for a shoe box if it’s in Beverly Hills. So this could
merely be my own biases at work. However I’m also concerned that the paper’s
hypothesis detracts from some of the most important findings uncovered by the analysis.
As a geographer I couldn’t but help notice how large an influence location has on
happiness. If I’m reading the coefficients correctly it appears that in 1994, living in East
Germany was about a bad a blow to one’s life satisfaction as being permanently disabled.
Wow. Further, I was astounded by how much happier people living in one or two family
houses in rural Germany are than the rest of the country and the effect generally that
living in an apartment dwelling appears to have on life satisfaction. Living in Altbau
housing stock in an inner city area appears to be about as bad for your life satisfaction as
being divorced. It was also interesting to me that once all the financial controls were
introduced, the income of one’s neighbors was a statistically significant predictor of life
satisfaction in 1999, but not 1994 and that lead me to wonder if this was a product of
error, or a consequence of growing income inequality and the increasing importance of
the wealth of one’s neighbors in a country where financially strapped city governments
are being forced to reduce their role in the public sector. In any case, fascinating findings
that of course I, as a geographer, would love to have seen spotlighted.
But again, overall I think this was a well-written and well-researched paper on a very
complex topic that provides a variety of insights into life satisfaction and also establishes
an important precedent of using commercial data in academic research to come up with
new and interesting findings.
.