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%T Explaining happiness trends in Europe %A Easterlin, Richard A. %A O’Connor, Kelsey J. %J Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) %N 37 %P 1-4 %V 119 %D 2022 %K welfare programs; European Values Study Longitudinal Data File 1981-2008 (EVS 1981-2008) (ZA4804 v3.0.0); European Values Study 2017: Integrated Dataset (EVS 2017) (ZA7500 v3.0.0) %@ 1091-6490 %~ FDB %> https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-92378-8 %X In Europe, differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal conclusion from a time-series study of 10 Northern, Western, and Southern European countries with the requisite data. In the present study, cross-section analysis of recent data gives a misleading impression that economic growth, social capital, and/or quality of the environment are driving happiness trends, but in the long-term, time-series data, these variables have no relation to happiness. %C USA %G en %9 Zeitschriftenartikel %W GESIS - http://www.gesis.org %~ SSOAR - http://www.ssoar.info