Europeans suffer macro-misery

Reports by Phil Baty from the Royal Economic Society's annual conference at Staffordshire University this week. See research papers.

Macro-movements in the economy have a clear effect on people's happiness, according to Warwick and Oxford University researchers. Warwick's Andrew Oswald and Oxford's Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch found that high inflation and high unemployment can make people miserable. Their paper, The Macroeconomics of Happiness, analyses a random survey of a quarter of a million Europeans from the 1970s to the 1990s, who recorded their "happiness" on a simple numerical scale each year.