In this section we attempt in a preliminary way to see if our overall evidence calculating well- being by gender and age actually matches the experience of people in different cohorts as they progress through their own lives. To do this we have used the Gallup World Poll data, for a smaller set of 99 countries with full or almost- full survey coverage, to construct synthetic cohorts for a series of 10-year birth cohorts, starting with those born in or before 1932, and ending with those born between 1983 and 1992. We then plot the survey-to-survey history of average ladder scores for each of the synthetic cohorts. Figure 3.10 shows the cohort analysis separately for each of the nine global regions, since cohort-specific influences are more likely to appear at the regional than at the global level. The samples are still too small to split by gender as well, although we will report some gender analysis at the global level.
Figure 3.10 adds three main sorts of detail not previously seen in this report. First, we can see, for each 10-year birth cohort, how their average life evaluations have changed from one survey round to the next, shown for each survey year from 2007 to 2013.22 Second, we can see how the levels and changes in life evaluations differ for people born in different decades. Third, we can see how the effects of the global recession
on life evaluations differed by global region and people’s ages at the time the recession hit. The first panel of Figure 3.10 shows separately the 2007-2013 life evaluations for each of seven age cohorts of GWP respondents living in Western Europe. The peak effects of the economic crisis for all cohorts lie between 2008 and 2009, with the effects largest for those at the beginning and ends of their working careers. Life evaluation recovery since 2009 has been slow or absent for all cohorts, except perhaps the eldest group. As has already been seen in Chapter 2, there has been a great variety of experiences within the Western Europe group of countries, which include three of the seven countries with the largest drops in life evaluations 2005-07 to 2012-13 – Greece, Italy and Spain. But there were other countries in the same region where ladder levels had fully recovered by 2012-2014. Thus each cohort contains people undergoing quite different experiences, although averaging across countries, almost all cohorts had declin- ing life evaluations.
The mixed NANZ group of countries, which by population weighting represents mainly the United States, shows a marked U-shape of life evaluations looking across age cohorts, and a mixed picture within cohorts. The youngest cohort shows the expected drop through time, but so also does the cohort in their 70s. Most other cohorts showed drops over the first three years, on average, and then recovery back to the starting values.
In the CIS plus Eastern Europe, the experience was rather different, with the economic crisis showing only small effects for all cohorts, but with both the levels and trends being worse for the older cohorts, who perhaps gained less in fresh opportunities than they lost during the transition process. The steep drop in ladder scores across the age groups, from about 5.8 in the youngest cohort to 4.5 in the oldest cohort, appears if anything to be getting steeper, as
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post-2007 gains are more prevalent in the three younger cohorts than in the four older ones. In Southeast Asia there was a sharp drop from 2007 to 2008 in all but the eldest cohort, followed by subsequent gains that produced net gains for all cohorts, especially the three younger ones. Looking across the cohorts, there is a slight U-shape, with life evaluations highest in the youngest and the oldest age groups.
In South Asia, there is a very flat gradient across cohorts, and an uneven but nonetheless substantial drop within each cohort from 2007 to 2013. In East Asia, there were drops from 2007 to 2009 in each cohort, followed by increases to
2013 levels above those in 2007. Across cohorts, the U-shape in age is more marked than elsewhere in Asia.
Latin America and the Caribbean show a quite different picture, with every cohort showing substantial gains from 2007 to 2013. The youngest three cohorts saw the largest gains, averaging more than 0.5 on the 10-point scale, from 2007 to 2009, the same years when the economic crisis was causing major well-being losses in Western Europe and elsewhere.
That picture is reversed in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, where every cohort saw substantial losses in life evaluations from 2007 to 2013. These declines were led by
Figure 3.10: Cantril Ladder: Trends by Birth Cohort and Region
Figure 3.10 Cantril Ladder: Trends by Birth Cohort and Region
6 6.5 7 7.5 8 6 6.5 7 7.5 8 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
W.Europe N.A. & ANZ CEE & CIS
S.E. Asia S. Asia E. Asia
LAC MENA SSA
Ca nt ril L ad de r
Median Age of Cohort
1983-92 1973-82 1963-72 1953-62
1943-52 1933-42 <=1932 Fitted values
Birth Cohorts
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Egypt, which was seen in Chapter 2 to have been second only to Greece (-1.2 vs. -1.47) in terms of drops in life evaluations between 2005-07 to 2012-14. Some of the MENA drop is due to changes in the survey procedures, as in a number of Arab countries the Gallup World Poll was initially directed only to Arab respondents but from 2013 and beyond is attempting to cover the whole resident population. This is tending to lower the average evaluation in countries with a lot of guest workers, as the life evaluations by respondents born, for example, in India, tend to be lower than those of Arab citizens, though they are above those of average respondents in their home country. Looking across the cohorts, the gradient is fairly flat.
In sub-Saharan Africa the gradient across cohorts is also fairly flat, while also having little trend within each cohort, with a general modest trend upward reversed in 2013.
The regional data samples by cohort are too small for us to find significant gender differences. Using gender-split cohorts for all regions combined, the genders have equal matching paths for the youngest cohort, but above the age of 25, as full-time work becomes more prevalent for males than females, there is more evidence of an increasing ladder gap favoring women within and between the next three cohorts. For the two oldest cohorts, including all those born before 1942, there is a diminishing gender gap, so that the calculated trend lines for males and females meet at the top and bottoms of the age distribution.