Synthesis summary

Here you can find two articles which you can synthesize in a summary report. Please send me you one-page double-spaced summary by Thursday, 24th of April.

The U-bend of life
Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older

According to many recent social, medical and economic studies, people should not dread ageing, as life is not a long slow decline but rather a U-bend.
After a cheerful adulthood and a depressing mid-life crisis, luckily things do not go downhill further. Although old age means losing treasures such as vitality, mental sharpness and looks, what is surprising is that the elderly finally find what they spend their lives pursuing, namely happiness.
Unconvinced by the conventional direct relationship between money and well-being, some economists have established a new branch of economics based on the new concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which policy makers have been increasingly taking into account.
Statisticians have been trying to find the answer to the perennial question of what makes people happy. Surveys have been conducted to measure two sides of this issue, i.e., global well-being and hedonic or emotional well-being. Moreover, the following four main factors have emerged from the collected data: gender, personality, external circumstances and age.
The U-bend was noticed in the early 1990s, and if turned upside down, it becomes an arc, peaking at the age of 46, when people are the most depressed.
Researchers believe that the U-bend must be the result of internal changes, not external circumstances. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflicts; they are better at controlling their emotions and at accepting misfortunes; they are also less prone to anger, and come to accept their strengths and weaknesses.
The U-bend also shows us that old people are healthier, as happier people are less likely to catch viruses and recover from illnesses more quickly. Thus, the cheerfulness of the old helps counteract their crumbliness and loss of productivity due to declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world is trying to work out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

Money really can buy you happiness with some qualifications
 
It is widely believed that money cannot buy happiness, and that growth-oriented free-market economies have got it wrong. Many recent studies have shown only a loose correlation between money and happiness when measured over time or across countries. The “Easterlin paradox” suggests that well-being depends not on absolute, but on relative income. For, people feel miserable not because they are poor, but because they are at the bottom of the particular pile in which they find themselves.

As data on the effect of income on well-being is now available almost everywhere in the world, the huge variation in life satisfaction across countries is becoming increasingly evident. Although developed countries score up to eight and developing countries as low as three out of ten, cultural factors are also at work, such as the ones prevailing over the surprisingly gloomy Portuguese in the Western World. Another example is the case of Hong Kong and Denmark, which have similar incomes per person, but respectively score 5.5 and eight on the ten-point scale. Along the same lines, the saddest place in the world relative to its income per person is Bulgaria.