The richer the country, the unhappier its youth

children at school

Photo:

Daniel Bockwoldt / picture alliance / dpa

People in rich countries are happier than people in poor countries.

Science agrees on this, and several studies have established this connection.

But now two economists have come to a surprising conclusion: the richer a country, the more unhappy it is when it is young.

Robert Rudolf and Dirk Bethmann from Korea University recently published this connection in a study in the "Journal of Happiness Studies".

To do this, they compared data from almost half a million 15-year-olds from 72 countries.

They come from student surveys that were collected in 2018 as part of the PISA study.

Accordingly, the life satisfaction of young people decreases when the per capita income increases.

The two authors attribute the result to the fact that the more prosperous their country is, the more stress the young people experience.

This is a paradox that has not yet been known scientifically.

"Parental investment in their children's education is highest in high-income countries, as are teachers' and parents' expectations of children's cognitive efforts," the authors write.

The learning intensity is higher than in less prosperous countries, they say.

In middle-income countries, educational requirements "tend to be low," and young people there experience "a high level of well-being."

However, the results do not suggest that young people in poor countries are happiest.

Because countries with low economic power do not appear in the study at all, as there is no data from them.

Only middle- and high-income countries were compared.

"Adults in Germany have a higher level of life satisfaction than expected," said study author Rudolf of the "FAZ".

However, this does not apply to young Germans.

The extremely unhappy young people in Turkey and Great Britain are also interesting.

Rudolf describes these as “political outliers” in 2018. Brexit in Great Britain and increasing authoritarianism in Turkey have had a negative impact on the sensitivities of the young people living there.

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