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World Cities Summit Issue, Jun 2008
Cities, Culture and Happiness
Bruno S. Frey
HAPPINESS AND CULTURE
For many people, consuming art obviously provides a highly satisfactory experience. This opinion is supported by the enormous number of people who visit museums and, above all, special exhibitions, and attend the thousands of festivals that are held all over the world. It has to be remembered that nobody is “forced” to visit such a cultural site (except perhaps school children). Rather, people do it willingly and expect to receive some pleasure from such an activity.
Modern social science can help us to shed light on the relationship between happiness and the arts due to advances in survey research and statistical estimation techniques. In particular, it is possible to answer the question to what extent people derive satisfaction from artistic activities. Over the last few years, it has become possible to capture the subjective well-being of persons in a satisfactory way.17-20 One of the ways is through large scale surveys. In the following, the German Socio-Economic Panel, generally considered to be the best data source in the world, was used. It is based on surveying 22,000 comparable persons for their entire lives yielding 125,000 observations. These proceedings allowed changes in life circumstances and preferences of particular persons to be captured over time. To answer the question if and to what extent “art makes people happy”, two survey responses must be combined. It must measure how happy people consider themselves while establishing, at the same time, how often they attend cultural activities.
The survey question with respect to happiness is: “Overall, are you satisfied with the life you lead?” The answer to this question captures a long-term and deep-seated evaluation of one’s well-being, which in scientific terminology is called “subjective, self-reported life satisfaction”.21 It thus differs from a short-term affect. Those indicating “0” on the scale ranging from 0 to 10 consider themselves “deeply unhappy”, while those indicating “10” are “extremely happy”. Most persons are quite satisfied with the life they lead; the average person chooses values between 6 and 8. The subjective life satisfaction indicated by the respondents corresponds well to objective observations. Individuals, who consider themselves happy, laugh more, have fewer problems and absences from their workplace, are more sociable and more optimistic, and are less prone to attempt suicide.
The next question captures attendance at cultural activities: “How often do you attend cultural activities such as concerts or theatre performances during your leisure time?” It was found that almost half the respondents (45%) “never” attended any cultural activity. Thus, the consumption of culture thus does not seem to be very popular in Germany, a country proud to be considered a “nation of culture”. This impression is strengthened when taking into account that 44% of the respondents stated that they attend a cultural event “less than once a month”. Hence, almost 9 out of 10 Germans have little, if any, active contact with cultural activities. 15% of respondents stated that they visit a cultural occasion “once a month” and a minute 1% stated that they do so “weekly”. These figures may well be an over-estimation, as at least some of the respondents tend to state that they attend more cultural events than they actually do so as not to look “uncultured”. These figures indicate that “culture” in the sense of attending artistic activities takes place in an isolated sphere away from the interests of the large majority of the population. Great efforts are needed to change this picture.
Figure 1 shows the results of the surveys on life satisfaction and cultural attendance. Persons who attend cultural events often are more satisfied with the life they lead than those who consume art rarely or never. The positive correlation between happiness and cultural consumption is marked. Those who “never” attended any artistic manifestation have a self-reported life satisfaction of 6.7 (on a scale from 0 to 10). In contrast, those who had attended a cultural event “weekly” reveal a happiness level of 7.3, and therefore indicated that they are much more satisfied with the life they lead.
Figure 1 also shows the relationship between artistic consumption and satisfaction with leisure (instead of, as before, with life as a whole). There is again a marked positive correlation between the two. Those who are culturally active consumers are also those more satisfied with how they spend their leisure time.
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