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Did the Decline in Social Capital Decrease American Happiness? A Relational Explanation of the Happiness Paradox
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TL;DR: The authors showed that the inclusion of social capital does improve the account of reported happiness and provided evidence of a decline in social capital indicators for the period 1975-2004, confirming Putnam's claim.
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Abstract: Most popular explanations of the happiness paradox cannot fully account for the lack of growth in US reported well-being during the last thirty years (Blanchflower and Oswald (2004)) In this paper we test an alternative hypothesis, namely that the decline in US social capital is responsible for what is left unexplained by previous research We provide three main findings First, we show that the inclusion of social capital does improve the account of reported happiness Second, we provide evidence of a decline in social capital indicators for the period 1975-2004, confirming Putnam's claim (Putnam (2000)) Finally, we show that failed growth of happiness is largely due to the decline of social capital and, in particular, to the decline of its relational and intrinsically motivated component
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Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community
TL;DR: As an example of how the current "war on terrorism" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says "permanently marked" the generation that lived through it and had a "terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century."
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References
Well-Being Over Time in Britain and the USA
TL;DR: In the United States and Great Britain, life satisfaction has run approximately flat through time in Britain this article, consistent with the Easterlin hypothesis [Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honour of Moses Abramowitz (1974) Academic Press; J. Econ. Behav. Org., 27 (1995) 35].
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How important is methodology for the estimates of the determinants of happiness
Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell,Paul Frijters +1 more
- 01 Jul 2004
TL;DR: The authors developed a conditional estimator for the fixed-effect ordered logit model and found that assuming ordinality or cardinality of happiness scores makes little difference, whilst allowing for fixed-effects does change results substantially.
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Individual-Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital
John Brehm,Wendy M. Rahn +1 more
TL;DR: This article analyzed the pooled General Social Surveys from 1972 to 1994 in a latent variables framework incorporating aggregate contextual data and found that the relationship between community involvement and interpersonal trust is in a tight reciprocal relationship, where the connection is stronger from participation to interpersonal trust rather than the reverse.
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The social context of well-being.
TL;DR: This work confirms that social capital is strongly linked to subjective well-being through many independent channels and in several different forms, both directly and through their impact on health.