The Scots May Be Brave but They Are Neither Healthy Nor Happy

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE SCOTS MAY BE BRAVE BUT THEY ARE NEITHER HEALTHY NOR HAPPY David Bell David G. Blanchflower Working Paper 11911 http://www.nber.org/papers/w11911 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 January 2006 We thank Diane Coyle, Geraint Johnes, Karen Norberg, Andrew Oswald, Daniel Kahneman and Bruce Sacerdote for discussions and to two referees for helpful comments. All errors are ours. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ©2006 by David Bell and David G. Blanchflower. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Scots may be Brave but They are Neither Healthy Nor Happy David Bell and David G. Blanchflower NBER Working Paper No. 11911 January 2006 JEL No. J4 ABSTRACT On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of the English or Welsh, even after taking into account any differences in characteristics. Scots also suffer from higher levels of self-assessed depression or phobia, accidental death and suicide than those in other parts of Great Britain. This result is particularly driven by outcomes in Strathclyde and is consistent with the high scores for other measures of social deprivation in this area. On average, indicators of social capital in Scotland are no worse than in England or Wales. Detailed analysis within Scotland, however, shows that social capital indicators for the Strathclyde area are relatively low. We argue that these problems seem unlikely to be fixed by indirect policies aimed at raising economic growth. David Bell Department of Economics University of Sterling Scotland UK [email protected] David G. Blanchflower Department of Economics 6106 Rockefeller Hall Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755-3514 and NBER [email protected] 1 SCOTLAND THE BRAVE Hark when the night is fallin, hear, hear the pipes a'callin Loudly and proudly callin' down thru the glen There where the hills are sleepin', now feel the blood aleapin' High as the spirits of the old highland men! Towering in gallant fame, Scotland the mountain hame! High may your proud standards gloriously wave! Land of the high endeavour, land of the shining river, Land of my heart, forever, Scotland the brave!1 1. Introduction The principal policy objective of the Scottish Executive is to increase Scotland’s rate of economic growth.2 Yet, as Oswald (1997), points out “economic performance is not intrinsically interesting. No-one is concerned in a genuine sense about the level of gross national product last year or about next year’s exchange rate.” The proposition that measures of economic performance are not valued in themselves is very plausible. It is therefore reasonable to ask why economic growth is elevated above all other policy objectives by the Scottish Executive. Economists’ usual response is that growth increases gross national income which in turn leads to increases in “wellbeing”, “welfare” or “life satisfaction” among the population. Growth is therefore a means to an end. It permits higher levels of consumption which in turn leads to higher levels of wellbeing among the population. Put simply, more growth leads to more haggis (or, better still, more rounds of golf) being consumed, which in turn makes people feel more satisfied with life. 1 Click on this link for the rest of the words to 'Scotland the Brave' and the tune played on the bagpipes! http://www.cabarfeidh.com/scotland_the_brave.htm 2 This policy was agreed in May 2003 by the Liberal-Democrat/Labour coalition. At this time, it was believed that Scotland’s growth rate lagged well behind that of the UK as a whole. But data revisions published in 2004 show that differences in growth rates between Scotland and the rest of the UK over the last four decades have been negligible. Until recently, economists have tended not to question the link from measures of economic performance to individual wellbeing or happiness. But with the advent of surveys which question individuals about their views of “life satisfaction” or “happiness”, a substantial literature on these links has built up. There is even a world database on happiness.3 For a summary of this literature, see Blanchflower and Oswald (2004a, 2004b). The questions asked in the Eurobarometer survey are fairly typical. In a majority of the Eurobarometer surveys respondents have been asked the question: On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life you lead? For the years 1975-1986 respondents were also asked about their happiness – Taking all things together how would you say things are these days, would you say you’re very happy, fairly happy or not too happy these days? Even though such questions have been asked for a considerable time in Scotland, to our knowledge there has been no attempt to analyze such data. This paper is the first to examine these data for Scotland in detail. Most of the recent literature has focused on the analysis of subjective measures of wellbeing. There is however, a wealth of objective indicators of wellbeing in Scotland other than those that are commonly rehearsed in the economics literature. These relate to issues such as health, crime and lifestyle. For example, if the self-assessed wellbeing data are meaningful, one might expect to see correlations between these measures and objective measures of mental health, at least at an aggregate level, and this is what we find. There is also a growing literature on social capital and its impact on growth and wellbeing. As well as making a broad assessment of its relation to a variety of socio-economic indicators, this paper extends the previous literature on wellbeing by including information on 3 http://www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness/ individuals’ assessments of their own mental health. It also discusses an extreme manifestation of mental ill-health – suicide. It also extends research on the association between individual wellbeing and social capital. The geographical context for these developments is Scotland. Thus we report how Scotland fares in relation to standard indicators such as the labour force participation rate, employment and unemployment rates, income inequality, poverty, the performance of its schools as well as to indicators of health and wellbeing. Our conclusions are generally pessimistic. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of the English or Welsh, even after taking into account the differences in the characteristics of the Scots, Irish and Welsh. Scots also suffer from higher levels of self-assessed depression or phobia, accidental death and suicide than those in other parts of Great Britain. This result is particularly driven by outcomes in Strathclyde4 and is consistent with the high scores for other measures of social deprivation in this area. Crime is lower in Scotland than in the UK as a whole although it does have a higher homicide rate. The contrast between Scotland and the UK as a whole is also much greater on these health and wellbeing measures than it is on measures of poverty or income inequality. Real household incomes in Scotland have risen dramatically over the last decade or so, even for those at the lowest quintile of the income distribution. Scotland also scores relatively well on social capital compared with the rest of Great Britain. Scotland’s main problems are its low levels of health and wellbeing. Arthur Herman (2001) argues in his book How the Scots Invented the Modern World that at the turn of the twentieth century “Scotland had finally arrived – at least as far as Great Britain was concerned. Glasgow was now the industrial workshop of the empire…Its iron and steel 4 This is the area of western Scotland centered round Glasgow, Scotland’s largest population centre. foundries and shipbuilding yards turned out close to one third of the nation’s total output in each industry. It supplied locomotives and boxcars to Canada, South America and the rest of Europe as well as India and Asia Shipbuilding firms along the Clyde…turned out one fifth of the world’s total shipping tonnage ” (2001, p.347-348). Adam Smith fathered Economics. James Watt invented the steam engine, John Boyd Dunlop the bicycle, and Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, while George Stephenson built the first modern railway. Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stephenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name but a few, had written great literature. In the years before the First World War the Scots had dominated British politics – from 1894 to the outbreak of WW1 three of the five prime ministers were Scottish (Rosebery, Balfour and Campbell-Bannerman) and Asquith was married to a Scotswoman and sat for a Scottish constituency for his thirty-five year career. This was all to change. “As the nineteenth century waned, the intellectual capital of the Scottish Enlightenment waned with it. …Scotland’s days as the generator of Europe’s most innovative ideas were over. However, she had done her work: the future direction of the modern world which Scotland had done so much to chart and establish, was now set. What still hung in the balance was the fate of Scotland itself.” Herman (2001, p.347) Herman notes that even at the peak of Scotland’s industrial and intellectual power poverty and ill-health remained a major problem.

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