I bet you didn’t know MTV (the cable music and entertainment network) is also in the survey business. I didn’t until I saw this news story reported by Reuters. The story begins:

Young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts, a survey says. According to an MTV Networks International (MTVNI) global survey that covered more than 5,400 young people in 14 countries, only 43 percent of the world’s 16- to 34-year-olds say they are happy with their lives.

It goes on to say:

MTVNI said this figure was dragged down by young people in the developed world, including those in the United States and Britain where fewer than 30 percent of young people said they were happy with the way things were.

The surprising winners in the survey:

Young people from Argentina and South Africa came joint top in the list of how happy they were at 75 percent.

They also calculated an overall Wellbeing Index:

The MTVNI survey took six months to complete and resulted in the Wellbeing Index which compared the feelings of young people, based on their perceptions of how they feel about safety, where they fit into society and how they see their future.
The overall Wellbeing Index was more mixed between rich and poor. India came top followed by Sweden and Brazil came last.

Happiness research is on the rise. In principle it makes sense to try to measure happiness and see what economic and social factors explain it. In practice, it turns out to be extremely difficult to do well for a number of reasons. For instance, there is very little consistency in a person’s rating of their own happiness from day to day, or even based on the questions that are asked on the survey before and after the happiness questions. This paper by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan does a nice job of discussing some of the issues. (The link to their paper will only work if you are at an academic institution that subscribes to JSTOR.) My favorite part is the research they cite that shows that if you ask a young man about his last date before you ask him how happy he is, his reported happiness becomes extremely highly correlated with how his late date went. When you ask how happy he is first, and only ask about the date later, the two responses are almost uncorrelated.

As Dan Gilbert points out in his fantastic book “Stumbling on Happiness” and also in this brilliant talk he gave at the TED conference, people make many mistakes in forecasting what will or will not make them happy in the future. Gary Becker and Luis Rayo have written an interesting paper on this subject as well.

I think this MTV survey shows how badly you can go awry when taking responses to happiness questions too literally.

Economists have a notion called “revealed preference.” By looking at people’s actions, you can infer how they feel. Applied to this MTV survey, if their measure of happiness or Wellbeing Index were meaningful, then I would expect that we would see a steady flow of unhappy young people from the United States and the United Kingdom immigrating to happy places like South Africa and Argentina and Wellbeing places like India.

History tells us that the flow of immigrants has always been and continues to be in the other direction, which to an economist, is the strongest evidence that whatever people are looking for, developed countries like the United States are where they are finding it.

(Hat tip: Tim Gowan)

The L.A. Times ran an article yesterday about the runaway popularity of economics blogs. They are so popular, in fact, that the Times chose to run the piece on Thanksgiving, when the paper is read by approximately 18 people. But here’s the weirdest thing: even in the online version of an article about blogs, there are no links to the blogs themselves.

Not long ago, a reader from Portland, Oregon, wrote to us:

Hello, Mr. Levitt and Mr. Dubner… I wanted to say thank you for writing your book. It has really changed the way I think about my life and the world. You’ve also saved me money. As an African-American using Match.com and Yahoo personals, I always wondered why it was so hard to me someone on-line. Especially after hearing about all the success stories out there.

I canceled my membership right away. Thanks again for the great book, I very much enjoyed my time reading it and I look forward to your next book. Have a great day!

I wrote back, interested to know a bit more about his online-dating experience, and why it was so bad. I was particularly interested in the specifics of his user profile. Here’s his reply, reprinted with his permission.

I no longer have a profile on either my Yahoo Personals or Match.com account. But to the best of my recollection, here’s what I did have posted. Keep in mind, this was before I read your book. In the section about who would be my perfect match, the only thing I highlighted was no kids. All other questions were labeled as Any.

He didn’t send me a copy of his picture, but I assume since he posted it he’s at least average-looking. So if his failure was the result of something other than being African-American — a trait that white online daters say is not an obstacle, but which the data argue is just that — I sure can’t figure out what it might be.

With the Summer Olympics coming to Beijing in 2008, all of China is busily buffing itself for the TV cameras and crowds of tourists. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, one element of this charm offensive surrounds the museum trade. From the article, by Mei Fong:

Daishan, a fishing community three hours from [Shanghai], is building a museum devoted to typhoons. Tropical Hainan, a resort island, recently built a tree-root museum. The industrial town of Changzhou is enlarging its smoking museum. Its aim is “to broaden the spread of cigarette culture,” according to its proprietor Ge Xiaoxing … Around the country, other new museums in development include showcases for the history of oil lamps, beer, salt, and piped water. Leaders of the world’s most populous nation have issued orders to build or refurbish 1,000 museums by 2010. Museum expert Lu Jiansong has been asked to conceive, design, and plan more than 25 of them, with themes ranging from aerospace to tea leaves. How Chinese officials came up with the goal is a mystery enshrined in a five-year plan.