Sociability Predicts Happiness: World-Wide Evidence from Time Series

We provide macro evidence that in the long run the trends of social capital are a strong predictor of the trends of subjective well-being. Our measure of social capital is the individual membership in groups or associations. We apply the bivariate methodology used in Easterlin and Angelescu (2009) to investigate the long run relationship between subjective well-being and income. We consider all countries for which there exist comparable long time series on social capital, for a total of 14 developed and 5 developing countries. Moreover, we provide several robustness checks of Easterlin and Angelescu’s analysis, confirming confirming that they are unrelated in the long-term.