The Economist: Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older.
ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as
Maurice Chevalier: "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative." Stiffening joints,
weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern
world's careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect-better than death, perhaps, but
not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit
uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.
When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill
from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far,
so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age
they lose things they treasure-vitality, mental sharpness and looks-they also gain what people
spend their lives pursuing: happiness.
This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory
measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for
utility-the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists,
unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go
to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.
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