At last! The key to happiness is…

Afternoon all,

Career advice time. Want to feel perky? Get the right job, not just the right salary. Florists, priests…. and politicians are near the top of the well-being curve according to our deep dive into data on well-being this week. Now fair enough on the florists and priests end – I’d be happy pocketing what was being charged for a droopy rose on Thursday. Or if eternal life was coming my way.

No idea what’s keeping our politicians perky, but the country’s well-being would definitely increase if they stopped rowing about Churchill and dealt with our biggest political crisis since the guy was puffing cigars in Downing Street – fiddling while Rome family incomes burn is not a good look.

Have a good weekend,

Torsten
Director, Resolution Foundation

[Birthplace] size matters. A challenge with big debates is that they can get so big that engaging in them prevents you joining them up to other issues. Take two examples. There’s lots of great research looking at how the concentration of highly productive economic activity in our big cities challenges the idea of fairly shared growth if it leaves some towns and rural areas behind. There’s also an ever-growing literature on how economic success is passed down from one generation to the next, undermining ideas of meritocracy. Too rarely do we join these place and generational debates together, but that is exactly what a great new paper does, asking how much does where we are born matter when it comes to how much we earn? A lot is the answer. The size of the place you were born is two-thirds as important as that of where you live right now. The conclusion = worry (a bit) less about those with high skills being forced to move to London (nearly half of us only ever work where we were born) and worry instead that our best universities are stuffed full of Londoners (because parents in big cities have the high incomes or qualifications that lead to their kids getting better qualified).

[Team] size matters. Teams of researchers are getting bigger. But does that mean science will be getting better? Not necessarily, says a study looking at 65 million papers, patents and products since the 50s. It finds that it’s small teams that do best at disrupting and advancing science and technology, while bigger teams are better at consolidating and building on breakthroughs. You’ll be glad to know that the Resolution Foundation remains small and perfectly formed for maximum disruption….

Ageing firms. An impressively short and sweet  Bank of England blog this week reminds us that while humans are more likely to die as they get older, the opposite is true of firms. But while firms are less likely to go bust in a given year as they age, they don’t get more productive. Instead their growth is driven by employing more people. This challenges how much we should think about productivity growth as being about firms getting better at what they do, and instead encourage us to pay more attention to productivity growth resulting from rubbish firms closing, and good (more productive) ones growing.

Shhh. Men. We’re always keen to share not just interesting economics with you but also insights into the weird ecosystem that produces the work. We’ve touched before on gender balance and how being a more attractive economist (of any gender) gets you published in the best places. This week we bring you something different in our David Attenborough-style roam around the economist zoo: loud (male) economists. The issue (and some solutions) are set out in a new blog published by the World Bank. Economics seminars are similar to lots of other walks of life, with men more likely to ask questions or speak than women. But they are unusual compared to other academic subjects (or indeed real life) in that plain rudeness is much more common and accepted. The author has a few suggestions for reducing the problem. First, just have a rule that speakers don’t get interrupted for the first fifteen minutes to get an event off on the right foot. But then they’ve got a more radical option. Men could just shhh a bit. It’ll never catch on.

DIY maths. If less talking in seminars would help, so too would better maths for most of us. So, in line with the happiness/self-help focus of this week’s email, here’s the National Numeracy Challenge – a little quiz to help you check which level of maths wizardry you’ve got, and show you how to improve bits you’re less good at. For the show offs among you, once you’ve brushed up on a bit of Pythagoras you might want to have a go at some of these tricky (unsolved) maths problems …

Chart of the Week It might seem crazy what I’m ’bout to say, but this week’s chart, from our aforementioned well-being report, shows the relationship between our incomes and happiness. Yes, higher income does make us happier, but the extra well-being you get for each extra £1 falls as people get richer. A quid is much more use to a person A on £10k a year than person B on £100k. The conclusion: we can increase average happiness by person B handing it over to person A via a bit of tax and spend. Clap along if you feel like happiness redistribution is the truth.