Why are recessions so depressing?

Have we missed the true cost of the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009? That seems a strange question: the financial crisis, the deep recession that followed and slow growth for many years after seem like the defining economic events of a generation – and it’s not as if we’ve been ignoring them.

But perhaps we haven’t taken the recession nearly seriously enough. That’s the conclusion of Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, an economist at University College London and the London School of Economics. De Neve says that the “untold story” of the recession is its psychological cost. In plain language: recessions make us very sad.

It might seem obvious that recessions are disheartening experiences. It’s not, for the simple reason that the link between economic growth and happiness is itself not obvious.

The opening salvo in a long intellectual battle was fired by Richard Easterlin, an economist who, back in 1974, found that richer people in any society tended to be more satisfied with their lives, and yet richer societies showed no tendency to be happier than poorer ones. Thus was born the “Easterlin paradox”: money buys happiness within a society but money does not make society as a whole happier.

There are several ways of accounting for this finding. One is to say that it’s wrong: that data on life satisfaction weren’t very good in 1974 and now we know better. Recent research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers finds that there is no paradox: richer societies are indeed happier. A second response is that it all depends on what you mean by “happiness”. Angus Deaton, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel memorial prize in economics, have found that income is better at buying some forms of happiness than others. People in rich societies say they are more satisfied with their lives but that does not mean that from day to day they will be in a better mood. A third explanation, favoured by many Easterlin fans, is to say that what Easterlin showed is that we live in a rat race: what makes us happy isn’t money but feeling richer than our neighbours. It’s a race not everyone can win.

This is the backdrop against which De Neve and five of his colleagues began to investigate the impact of recessions on our wellbeing. When you look at surveys of life satisfaction, people in rich countries typically rate their satisfaction at 6.5 or 7 out of 10. The answers are stable, barely changing as economies grow. One might expect that the impact of a recession – of the economy shrinking – would be similarly hard to detect in surveys of life satisfaction.

But a couple of years ago, De Neve was sitting in the Brussels office of Gallup, the polling company, reviewing the latest data on life satisfaction with colleagues. Something strange had happened: Greece and Portugal had disappeared.

On closer inspection it turned out the researchers couldn’t find Greece and Portugal on a graph because they had dropped out of a cluster of EU countries and were suddenly reporting life satisfaction of around 5 or 5.5, on a par with Afghanistan. Greece and Portugal had both suffered severe contractions but not so severe as to put their incomes anywhere near that of Afghanistan. So what had happened?

De Neve and his colleagues believe that the impact of economic growth on happiness is highly lopsided. Their statistical analysis is based on several large international data sets surveying life satisfaction, and finds that happiness is around six times more sensitive to economic growth when that “growth” is negative. If you have six years in which the economy grows a couple of per cent a year, followed by one year when the economy shrinks by 2 per cent, the economy itself will have made substantial progress but the wellbeing of citizens will not.

This is just one research paper but it chimes with a 2003 study by Wolfers, another expert in the economics of happiness. Wolfers found when macroeconomic indicators such as inflation or unemployment were volatile, that volatility was associated with lower life satisfaction.

What might explain the disproportionate impact of recessions on happiness? There’s a longstanding finding in psychology that losses are more keenly felt than gains so maybe that’s the answer.

Yet loss aversion is not the only explanation for why recessions seem to depress us. Another is that recessions are associated with an increase in uncertainty. Uncertainty is unsettling in its own right – and it is also attention-grabbing. When the economy is growing, we take that for granted. A recession, with lay-offs, bailouts, bankruptcies and emergency budgets, is far more noticeable.

Perhaps the connection between the economy and wellbeing is simple: when the economy is doing something that we notice, it affects how we feel – and recessions have a habit of calling themselves to our attention. This suggests a new happiness paradox. Even though we may have underestimated the psychological costs of the recession, those costs would be less if only we’d stop talking about it.

Tim Harford’s book, “The Undercover Economist Strikes Back”, is out in paperback.

Twitter: @TimHarford

Illustration by Harry Haysom