Last month, we celebrated an unofficial Scioto Analysis holiday, the annual release of the World Happiness Report. This is the gold standard for subjective wellbeing research across the globe, and is the inspiration for many of our own projects, as well as Gross National Happiness USA, an organization my colleague Rob Moore was president of in recent years.
There are a ton of interesting facts that come out of this report. This year focuses especially on how people care for each other, and how people are more benevolent than we perceive them to be.
I’d highly recommend reading through the whole report. There is so much good information and it really is a good experience to read about humans being good to each other. Today though, I wanted to highlight one section that stood out to me.
The importance of shared meals
One of the seminal books in the subjective wellbeing field is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone which talks about how Americans are losing social capital by interacting less with others across basically every aspect of their lives. For example, bowling alone instead of in a bowling league.
While the importance of social connections is well studied, this year’s World Happiness Report adds to our understanding by looking at a new dataset on how frequently people share meals with each other.
One of the takeaways from this new dataset was that there is a lot of variation in meal sharing across countries, and this variation is not very well explained by income, education, or employment. It just appears that on a case-by-case basis, in some countries almost everyone shares their meals while in others almost everyone eats alone.
This is an important note because this dataset also shows that how often people share meals is actually a very strong predictor of their subjective wellbeing. From the chapter on sharing meals: “Those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect. This is true across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and regions.”
In the United States, about 25% of people who responded to the American Time Use Survey reported eating all of their meals alone in the previous day. This is a trend that has been increasing in recent years, especially for young people.
This is a worrying trend, especially because it is difficult to see what steps we can take to reverse it. In a meeting earlier this week, I jokingly suggested that we could incentivize sharing meals by enacting a new tax that only applies to people who go to restaurants by themselves. This is a bad idea, but it shows just how hard it is for policymakers to change these types of trends.
Public policy is really good at shifting resources around our economy. It is not so good at getting people to change their behavior. Policymakers can adjust incentives on the margins to make certain choices relatively more appealing, but unless you actually think adding a tax on people who go out to eat alone is a good thing, I have a hard time seeing a path for policy to dramatically change what's happening.
Part of the reason it seems like public policy doesn’t have the tools to address this issue is that we still don’t understand it very well at all. This World Happiness Report is the first time the issue of shared meals has been analyzed as a driver of subjective wellbeing.
We’ve written about this before, but there needs to be more data collected in this country about subjective wellbeing. Because it is hard to do evidence-based policymaking without evidence.