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Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing using Millions of Digitized Books

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  • Hills, Thomas
  • ,
  • Sgroi, Daniel
  • Illushka Seresinhe, Chanuki

Abstract

In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems, higher productivity, and better incomes. For these reasons subjective wellbeing has become a key focal issue among scientific researchers and governments. Yet no scientific investigator knows how happy humans were in previous centuries. Here we show that a new method based on quantitative analysis of digitized text from millions of books published over the past 200 years captures reliable trends in historical subjective wellbeing across four nations. This method uses psychological valence norms for thousands of words to compute the relative proportion of positive and negative language, indicating relative happiness during national and international wars, financial crises, and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and GDP. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s onwards and in comparison with economic, medical, and political events since 1820 and also use a set of words with stable historical meanings to support our findings. Finally we show that our results are robust to the use of diverse corpora (including text derived from newspapers) and different word norms.

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  • Hills, Thomas & , & Sgroi, Daniel & Illushka Seresinhe, Chanuki, 2019. "Historical Analysis of National Subjective Wellbeing using Millions of Digitized Books," CEPR Discussion Papers 13636, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13636
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    2. Ali Kabiri & Harold James & John Landon-Lane & David Tuckett & Rickard Nyman, 2020. "The Role of Sentiment in the Economy: 1920 to 1934," CESifo Working Paper Series 8336, CESifo.
    3. Nicholas Crafts, 2022. "The 15‐Hour Week: Keynes's Prediction Revisited," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 89(356), pages 815-829, October.
    4. Tykhonov, Vyacheslav & van Leeuwen, Bas, 2021. "Regional sentiments in Covid tweets in the Netherlands before and during peak infections," MPRA Paper 110879, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Daniel Gallardo-Albarrán, 2024. "Capital, Productivity, and Human Welfare Since 1870," Springer Books, in: Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert (ed.), Handbook of Cliometrics, edition 3, pages 2023-2048, Springer.
    6. Ifcher, John & Zarghamee, Homa & Goff, Sandra H., 2021. "Happiness in the Lab: What Can Be Learned about Subjective Well-Being from Experiments?," GLO Discussion Paper Series 943, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    7. Rossouw, Stephanie & Greyling, Talita, 2020. "Big Data and Happiness," GLO Discussion Paper Series 634, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    8. Mohsen Joshanloo & Veljko Jovanović & Tim Taylor, 2019. "A multidimensional understanding of prosperity and well-being at country level: Data-driven explorations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(10), pages 1-31, October.
    9. Alexandre Hyafil & Nicolas Baumard, 2022. "Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(4), pages 1-21, April.
    10. Alessandro Sontuoso & Sudeep Bhatia, 2021. "A notion of prominence for games with natural‐language labels," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(1), pages 283-312, January.
    11. Bai, Ling & Xiong, Long & Zhao, Na & Xia, Ke & Jiang, Xiong-Fei, 2022. "Dynamical structure of social map in ancient China," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 607(C).
    12. Sudeep Bhatia & Lukasz Walasek & Paul Slovic & Howard Kunreuther, 2021. "The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Evidence from Natural Language Analysis of Online News Articles and Social Media Posts," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(1), pages 179-203, January.
    13. Lushi Chen & Tao Gong & Michal Kosinski & David Stillwell & Robert L Davidson, 2017. "Building a profile of subjective well-being for social media users," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(11), pages 1-15, November.
    14. Jiang, Xiongfei & Xiong, Long & Bai, Ling & Zhao, Na & Zhang, Jiu & Xia, Ke & Deng, Kai & Zheng, Bo, 2021. "Quantifying the social structure of elites in ancient China," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 573(C).
    15. Ali Kabiri & Harold James & John Landon‐Lane & David Tuckett & Rickard Nyman, 2023. "The role of sentiment in the US economy: 1920 to 1934," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 76(1), pages 3-30, February.
    16. Christoph Kronenberg, 2021. "A New Measure of 19th Century US Suicides," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 157(2), pages 803-815, September.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N3 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy
    • N4 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation
    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
    • D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics

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