Life satisfaction, loneliness and togetherness, with an application to Covid-19 lock-downs
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Life satisfaction, loneliness and togetherness, with an application to Covid-19 lock-downs Daniel S. Hamermesh
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Received: 23 May 2020 / Accepted: 30 July 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Using the 2012–2013 American Time Use Survey, I show that both “who” people spend time with and “how” they spend it affect their life satisfaction, adjusted for numerous demographic and economic variables. Life satisfaction among married individuals increases most with additional time spent with one’s spouse. Among singles, satisfaction decreases most as more time is spent alone. Additional time spent sleeping or TV-watching reduces satisfaction, while longer usual workweeks and higher incomes increase it. Nearly identical results are shown using the 2014–2015 British Time Use Survey. The US estimates are used to simulate the impacts of Covid-19 lock-downs on life satisfaction. Keywords Time use Isolation Well-being Coronavirus ●
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JEL classification I31 J22 I12 ●
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1 Introduction A substantial economics literature has arisen examining the determinants of human life satisfaction, arguably going back to Pollak (1976), with the early literature summarized by Easterlin (2001).1 Throughout this immense literature, however, very few studies have related satisfaction even to reports on work time in annual or monthly household surveys. The relationship between “how” one spends non-work time and happiness has also been studied (e.g., Kahneman et al. 2004). No study, however, has examined how the nature of a person’s interactions with others—“with
* Daniel S. Hamermesh [email protected] 1
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Barnard College and IZA, Manhattan, NY, USA
See Diener et al. (2010) for a broad compendium of fairly recent research and Blanchflower and Oswald (2017) for a recent effort by economists.
D. S. Hamermesh
whom” they spend their non-work time—relates to life satisfaction; and none has simultaneously examined how uses of time and with whom it is spent affect happiness or life satisfaction. I examine these relationships here, parsing out the determinants of satisfaction in two major population groups, married couples without young children, and singles. Section II links the discussion to consumer theory. Section III describes the data and samples used to study how different relationships to the people with whom one spends time and how one uses it affect life satisfaction. Section IV presents sets of estimates based on these data, while Section V presents a confirmation using British time-use data. Since the widespread lock-downs associated with Covid-19 alter “with whom” one spends time, and probably also change “how” one spends it, Section VI reports the results of simulations of possible impacts of lock-downs on well-being using the American results.
2 A theoretical consideration Neoclassical consumer theory has agents maximizing utility defined over goods/ services. Becker’s (1965) generalization of the theory re-defined the maximand as being over “commodities”—home-pro
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