Why happiness levels shoot up after 50

A few months ago, bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel had an essay in The Atlantic saying that, all things considered, he would prefer to die around age 75. He argued that he would rather clock out with all his powers intact than endure a sad, feeble decline.

The problem is that if Dr Emanuel dies at 75, he will likely be missing his happiest years. When researchers ask people to assess their own well-being, people in their 20s rate themselves highly. Then there is a decline as people get sadder in middle age, bottoming out around age 50. But then happiness levels shoot up, so that old people are happier than young people. The people who rate themselves most highly are those aged 82 to 85.

Psychologists who study this now famous U-Curve tend to point out that old people are happier because of changes in the brain. For example, when you show people a crowd of faces, young people unconsciously tend to look at the threatening faces, but older people’s attention gravitates towards the happy ones.

Older people are more relaxed, on average. They are spared some of the burden of thinking about the future. As a result, they get more pleasure out of present, ordinary activities.

My problem with a lot of the research on happiness in old age is that it is so deterministic. It treats the ageing of the emotional life the way you might treat the ageing of the body: As this biological, chemical and evolutionary process that happens to people.

I would rather think that elder happiness is an accomplishment, not a condition, that people get better at living through effort, by mastering specific skills.

I would like to think that people get steadily better at handling life’s challenges. In middle age, they are confronted by stressful challenges they cannot control, such as having teenage children. But, in old age, they have more control over the challenges they will tackle and they get even better at addressing them.

Aristotle teaches us that being a good person is not mainly about learning moral rules and following them. It is about performing social roles well — being a good parent, teacher, lawyer or friend.

IMPROVING WITH AGE

It is easy to think of some of the skills that some people get better at over time. First, there is bifocalism, the ability to see the same situation from multiple perspectives.

Dr Anthony Kronman of Yale Law School once wrote: “Anyone who has worn bifocal lenses knows that it takes time to learn to shift smoothly between perspectives and to combine them in a single field of vision. The same is true of deliberation. It is difficult to be compassionate, and often just as difficult to be detached, but what is most difficult of all is to be both at once.”

Only with experience can a person learn to see a fraught situation both close up, with emotional intensity, and far away, with detached perspective.

Then there is lightness, the ability to be at ease with the downsides of life. In their book, Lighter As We Go, Dr Jimmie Holland and Dr Mindy Greenstein argue that while older people lose memory, they also learn that most setbacks are not the end of the world. Anxiety is the biggest waste in life. If you know that you will recover, you can save time and get on with it sooner.

“The ability to grow lighter as we go is a form of wisdom that entails learning how not to sweat the small stuff , learning how not to be too invested in particular outcomes,” write Drs Holland and Greenstein.

Then there is the ability to balance tensions. In Practical Wisdom, Dr Barry Schwartz and Dr Kenneth Sharpe argue that performing many social roles means balancing competing demands.

A doctor has to be honest, but also kind. A teacher has to instruct, but also inspire. You cannot find the right balance in each context by memorising a rule book. This form of wisdom can only be earned by acquiring a repertoire of similar experiences.

Finally, experienced heads have intuitive awareness of the landscape of reality, a feel for what other people are thinking and feeling, an instinct for how events will flow.

In The Wisdom Paradox, Dr Elkhonon Goldberg details the many ways the brain deteriorates with age: Brain cells die, mental operations slow. But a lifetime of intellectual effort can lead to empathy and pattern awareness.

“What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight,” Dr Goldberg writes.

It is comforting to know that, for many, life gets happier with age.

But it is more useful to know how individuals get better at doing the things they do.

The point of culture is to spread that wisdom from old to young; to put that thousand-year heart in a still young body.

 THE NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, is an author of several books.

That's happiness.

Will and I could hardly wait for the morning to come to get at something that interested us. That's happiness. -- Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane

The key to happiness

Being successful is great but it isn’t the key to happiness. It’s the other way around. The happiness is the key to success. So logically, if you love what you do, you’ll be successful.

No one ever thinks they’re awful

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.” Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Fear is what we think it is and nothing else

        The only place where fear exists is in the mind.

This is what happens to long term foster kids

“Look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” Jacob A. Riis

To learn who rules over you

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”               

                                                                                                                                       Voltaire 

Don't worry, be happy

Happiness is in the moment you are in

Colleen Crawford  Battlefords News-Optimist

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” — Buddha

Life is sending me little messages everywhere I look.



An inspirational email spoke of the topic of happiness. If you cannot be happy in the moment you are in, you will not find it when you stumble across a financial windfall or when you retire or when you go on a vacation. Happiness is now, within you, every moment. It is not what happens to you, it is how you choose to react to life's little surprises.



Another message was short and sweet. It said, "Stop worrying. Yes, 'you'!" It was as if someone read my mind at that very moment. I was letting everything pile up. I was worrying. I know worrying is a waste of energy, but I was doing it anyway. It was time to do what is within my power to do, and to stop worrying, now!



I found myself wallowing in the negativity of the moment one day. It was a half hour after lunch.

In my role as a daycare provider, clean up and after lunch digestion takes extensive time and energy. More so, when you have a two-year-old in the mid-phases of toilet training. I read the signs and knew he “had to go.” He didn't. After some time we gave up on that moment. Then minutes later, he “went.” And it wasn't where he was supposed to go. Aaaack!



I plunked myself down in the middle of the living room floor and started picking up a few toys before I put the kids down for their naps. I was quite likely pouting. I was not exuding an aura of happiness.



Then my little one-year-old sat down beside me and twisted her body so she was face to face with me and said, "Hi!" This little girl lights up my world. Her heartfelt, eye-to-eye "Hi!" changed the way I saw the world at that moment. Then? She leaned in and gave me one of her famous bear hugs. Then another. And another.

There is nothing like surrounding yourself with one- and two-year-olds to remind you that happiness is in the moment you are in. And of the magic of a hug.

Be present in each and every moment today. See what wonder you can find in what you already have. Live your day with childlike wonder and rediscover why a child’s smile lights up a room.

The Geography Of Happiness: Where Americans Are Happiest And Why

Ben Schiller is a New York-based staff writer for Co.Exist, and also contributes to the FT and Yale e360. He used to edit a European management magazine, and worked as a reporter in San Francisco, Prague and Brussels

Sorry, city dwellers. Suburban counties tend to be happiest (as long as you don't have to get in your car to go to work).

The United States was founded so people could pursue happiness, but some places seem to do a better job of it than others. There's a big difference between the happiest and least happy places in the country, according to new research.

Led by Stephan Goetz, a professor at Penn State, the study looks at the number of "poor mental health days" reported per county—that is, the number of days people said they were in a negative mood. The "least happy" communities reported up to 8.3 days a month, compared to less than half-a-day for the happiest. (See the results plotted on the map here, with the highest number of mental health days in red and the lowest in green).

What's behind the variation? Goetz says suburban counties tend to be happier than urban or rural ones, and that non-white counties tend to be happier than whiter ones. People were also happier when they commuted less, moved homes less often, and lived in places deemed to have more closely-knit communities (higher levels of "social capital").

For example, a 1% increase in the share of non-whites in a county reduced the average number of poor mental health days by 0.08%—which is actually a larger number than it might seem, when you consider the whole country. "After controlling for other factors including income, educational attainment, place of residence, commuting time, social capital, there is still a residual, unexplained factor that leaves whites a little bit less happy than non-whites," Goetz says via email. "One possible factor that may explain this difference could be religious adherence, to the extent that it varies between whites and non-whites."

Goetz says suburbanites can have the best of both worlds. They can be close to their jobs but also near enough to activities downtown. They can avoid being around a lot of other people, but then they're not too far away either. However, the effect is dulled by commute times: The research found the longer people spend traveling, the less happy they feel.

The results are based on a large-scale phone survey (using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) and come from a six-year average of data from 2002 to 2008. The researchers deliberately chose a period before the recent recession, fearing that might skew the results. The study is the first to look at the factors behind mental health at a county level, the researchers say.

Interestingly, Goetz says poverty is a bigger factor in making people unhappy than inequality, despite the prominence of the latter issue recently. "Recently, inequality has received considerable attention from the public. As a result, the issue of poverty has received less attention," he says. "Our work suggests that policies directed at reducing poverty will go further in terms of reducing poor mental health than will policies directed at reducing income inequality."

Goetz argues that the level of down-days is an important economic indicator as unhappy counties tend to be less productive. The real benefit of the study is that we now know where people are unhappy and what might be driving that.

Good luck

 We seldom realize it when it happens, but every now and then not getting what we want the most is an incredible stroke of good luck.

Don't worry...be happy

Five daily practices to bring happiness

By Aisha Sultan

There are times when a foggy malaise can settle into a spot. Even when cracks of sunlight break through this vapor, a heaviness lingers.

Despite being a reporter – a job where we’re conditioned to notice and document what’s wrong, unfair, tragic and broken – I usually enjoy being a happy and positive person. But there has been so much striking and detailed pain on display in our world recently.

This summer, the gruesome images of the war in Gaza were soon joined by heartbreaking ones out of Ferguson. Couple this with the fact that my generation has entered that period of life when there’s a steady stream of devastating personal news among our peers: Parents (or even children) die, alarming diagnoses are more common, and friends divorce.

We have been through cycles of tragedy, death and destruction before. But this prolonged dark period provoked a deeper anxiety in me. From the personal to the political, the onslaught of bad news has felt relentless.

During this run of gloominess I decided to embark on a happiness project. Not happiness as in a constant state of chipper: Some of the most outwardly cheerful people I’ve known have been deeply unhappy inside. But happiness in the way that psychologists have defined it: the pleasure of feeling good; engagement in living a good life with family, friends, work and hobbies; and finding meaning in being able to use our strengths toward a greater purpose.

Is it possible to increase those pieces of happiness, thereby becoming happier?

There’s an entire body of research that looks at ways to make people happier in life and work. I sifted through some of this positive psychology analysis and watched the most popular TED talk on the subject.

Positive psychology experts Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan have written extensively about the habits that can train our brains to think more positively, which they argue leads to our brains making us feel happier. Scientists say there’s a biochemical process at work: Positive emotions like love and joy release dopamine and serotonin into our brains. This biochemical wash helps our brain process new information, think more quickly and creatively, and connect better with others.

Achor and Gielan suggest that incorporating these five daily habits for as few as 21 days can make us happier:

1. Write down three unique and new things you are grateful for every day. This teaches the brain to scan for new, good things.

2. Spend a few minutes writing down in detail the most meaningful moment from your day. This allows you to relive what made it meaningful for you.

3. Praise or thank a different person in your social network every day, either by email or phone, for something specific. This will remind your brain of the support around you.

4. Exercise for 15 minutes a day. The effects can be as powerful as taking an antidepressant.

5. Take two minutes to meditate and breathe. Pay attention to your inhale and exhale. It will focus your attention and lower stress.

I tried to do all five habits and recorded my efforts daily for 21 days last month. The only ones I did religiously for three weeks were listing three new gratitudes each day, describing the most meaningful moment and thanking a person for a specific act each day. The 15 minutes of exercise was hit or miss. I completely failed on the meditating. That was very challenging.

About a third of my meaningful moments were with my children. The rest were interactions at work, with friends or with people who were essentially strangers. It was revealing to keep track of which moments moved me during the day.

And the researchers were absolutely correct. While I was committed to this task, I became more attuned to the good things, no matter how small. I spent more minutes in my day contemplating the positive. I felt more grateful and engaged with people and connected to the meaning in my life.

A few times, I struggled to come up with a meaningful moment or a different person to thank. On the days I was very tired, it felt like a chore. But overall, it lifted my spirit. When things looked especially bleak, this happiness project was an antidote.

The only defense we have against the sometimes overwhelming and random pain in this life is belligerent happiness.

Aisha Sultan is a St. Louis-based journalist who studies parenting in the digital age. On Twitter: @AishaS.

The seeker

“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.” Mahatma Gandhi

Happiness, Bodybuilding, and a Ph.D.

A Q&A with the world's leading expert on happiness (who is also a huge meathead).

BY KIT FOX

The Willpower Workout Four ways to train willpower like a muscle.

Paul Dolan is one of the world’s foremost experts on happiness research. The 46-year-old holds a chair in behavioral science at the London School of Economics. He counts Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb as fans of his book Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think. And he’s also a huge meathead, nicknamed “The Prof” by the competitive bodybuilders he trains with. Here he talks about how to be happier, weightlifting, and why he consulted scientific data before having children.

MF: What is happiness?

PD: I argue that happy lives are ones that contain a good balance of pleasure and purpose. If you’re having lots of fun in life, you could probably be happier if you found something fulfilling and equally, if you’re doing lots of things that make your life experiences purposeful, you could probably be happier overall by having more pleasure.

MF: Basically what you’re saying is if I have all the money in the world and I just go and live on my private island, I’m not going to be the happiest I can be? Why is purpose so important?

PD: I think the interesting question is why you think you would be happy on your island with all that money. When you’re thinking about being on the island with all that money, you’re not actually thinking about being on the island with all that money; you’re thinking about becoming someone who is initially on the island. That’s what we project. We don’t project what it’s like after 20 years. We think about what it’s going to be like after 20 minutes. For those first few days, weeks, or even months, being on the island with all that cash is going to be great. But you’ll get used to it.

MF: How will I know if something is going to make me happy then?

PD: If something doesn’t feel like it’s either pleasurable or purposeful, you should probably ask yourself ‘why the hell am I doing this?’ For example, sports stars go run at 5 o’clock in the morning; it’s pissing down rain; it’s a miserable, horrible experience; what for? For some prospect of running a faster time in some race? Actually, I think that waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning feels quite purposeful to them, but if getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning is only ever painful and it doesn’t feel like it’s worthwhile in any sense to you, then you should probably stop doing it.

MF: So how do I become happier?

PD: One of the things we know is happiness slows down the passage of time. We’ve found time passes really slowly for children, and we think the principle reason is because every day is a new day with a new set of experiences for them; whereas when you get older you do the same thing and you've seen it all before, so time passes really quickly. Having new experiences is a really important thing to do, and that's why you should try lots of different things. If you do something and it feels really awful, you should probably stop. And if you find something pleasurable or purposeful then you should carry on.

MF: How do I know if something is purposeful, or if I really just don’t like it?

PD: What you should do is pay attention to the feedback that you get from those experiences. Take two people who are going out on a 5 a.m. run. One of them is doing it because they have some story that they're telling themselves; that this is a good thing to do and the kind of person that does this is happier, or healthier, or better in some way. But it just only ever feels painful. They should stop. They should stop listening to the story and pay attention to the experience. In contrast, someone else is going out on the 5 a.m. run and they just feel like there's something purposeful and good about the experience. That’s how I feel in the gym. The pain of the rip in the muscle fibers, I actually love that. There's a real purpose in the pain. It's lovely knowing that muscle soreness is a byproduct of something purposeful.

MF: This all makes so much more sense to me and is really making me rethink the terrible early morning run I just had.

PD: That's really good though. One thing that behavioral science teaches us is that we are creatures of habit. So basically your brain is lazy. It wants to conserve energy and it will create habit loops to make life easier for you. It wants to keep things in an automatic system. That means sometimes you will create bad habits. You've gotten this idea that doing your 5 a.m. run is good for you, it's a habit you've always done so of course it’s making you happy. Well actually, you need to pay attention to the feedback of the experience to know whether it does or not.

MF: Do other things become automatic, like in the office?

PD: It happens with a job. It also happens with partner selection. One of the researchers I work with dumped her boyfriend of eight years after reading my book because she realized that she was living in a story. He was, on the face of it, the perfect boyfriend. But her day-to-day experiences with him were quite different. They weren’t actually making each other happy, even though she could tell a very good story. Her parents liked him and all her friends liked him. How could she not be happy with this great guy? Whatever you do, you need to think about how it feels and not just how you think it should feel.

MF: So it’s the beginning of the year and I'm a guy who knows that I'm feeling miserable. What's the first thing I need to do?

PD: I think you've already done the first thing actually. You've accepted that you could be happier. Most of the time we think we need to beat ourselves up about not being the kind of person we want to be because that will motivate us to change. That is complete nonsense. The only way that you can ever change is to accept yourself. And then, the simple behavioral science insight is that if you want to do something, make it easier. And if you don't want to do something, make it harder. If you actually think about your own life for a second, you probably make it quite hard for yourself to do things you want and pretty easy to do things you don't.

MF: Like what?

PD: Maybe you want to eat less takeaway food, but every day you walk past a takeaway on the way home from work. Well, you just made it very, very easy for yourself to do something that you don't want to. If you don’t want to eat it, walk home on a different route. Maybe you want to exercise more but you think you need to do that in a gym and the gym is on the other side of town. You just made it really hard to do something that you want to do. You could work out in the house. Or maybe you say ‘I really want to be someone who’s fitter and exercises more,’ but you hang out with lazy people. You need to re-group your social system to pay attention to the people you want to be more like. One of the reasons I train so hard is because I train with someone that does competition bodybuilding. What a perfect training partner for me. If I had a fat slob as a training partner I wouldn't exercise as hard. So design environments that make it easier to do the things you want.

MF: If I have a goal in mind, like writing a book or running a marathon, how will I know if it’s something that will actually make me happier, or if I just like the idea of wanting to do it?

PD: What you need to do is, if you think that's what you should do, try and think of a way in which it would make it easier for you to get started. Start it. See how it feels and how you like it, and stop doing it if you don't. At least that way you will know, rather than living in a story about what you think should make you happy.

MF: Have you used any of this advice to make your life happier?

PD: I definitely wouldn't have been a father had I not thought about purpose. You can’t do a more significant thing on the basis of happiness than that. When I was thinking about whether to become a father or not, as a good happiness maximizer, I thought I should look at what the data tell me. And the data tell me that at best, children are neutral and probably most likely to make you more miserable than they would make you happy, so there would be no good reason to have children. But I think while having children might not make you happier, it makes you differently happy. So teaching my kids the times table is just a different sort of happiness for me now. It's more purposeful and a little less pleasurable. It seems to me to make a lot more sense to be a pleasure machine when you are younger and a purpose engine as you get older.

MF: Do you hold the secret to happiness then? What’s the greatest thing you’ve done to be happy?

PD: One thing I did leave out in the book is my wife. She’s 34 but she suggested I leave her age out because it might make me look like I was trying to show off a little bit about having a younger wife, but I do think that's a key to happiness. Find yourself a younger wife.

Be creative

Actually I lost 17 pounds since Thanksgiving

This is what a hero sounds like

Excited

Laugh the bastards off

Keep it open

You are who you are, be happy with that, God doesn't make junk

Guess where I'm from..............

Write hard

Don't worry, be happy

 Your body could use a belly laugh

Markham Heid @markhamh

It may not be the best medicine. But laughter’s great for you, and it may even compare to a proper diet and exercise when it comes to keeping you healthy and disease free.

That’s according to Dr. Lee Berk, an associate professor at Loma Linda University in California who has spent nearly three decades studying the ways the aftershocks of a good laugh ripple through your brain and body.

Berk says your mind, hormone system and immune system are constantly communicating with one another in ways that impact everything from your mood to your ability to fend off sickness and disease. Take grief: “Grief induces stress hormones, which suppress your immune function, which can lead to sickness,” he says. Hardly a week goes by without new research tying stress to another major ailment.

Why mention stress? “Because laughter appears to cause all the reciprocal, or opposite, effects of stress,” Berk explains. He says laughter shuts down the release of stress hormones like cortisol. It also triggers the production of feel-good neurochemicals like dopamine, which have all kinds of calming, anti-anxiety benefits. Think of laughter as the yin to stress’s yang.

Thanks largely to these stress-quashing powers, laughter has been linked to health benefits ranging from lower levels of inflammation to improved blood flow, Berk says. Some research from Western Kentucky University has also tied a good chuckle to greater numbers and activity of “killer cells,” which your immune system deploys to attack disease. “Many of these same things also happen when you sleep right, eat right, and exercise,” Berk says, which is why he lumps laughter in with more traditional healthy lifestyle activities.

Berk has even shown that laughter causes a change in the way your brain’s many neurons communicate with one another. Specifically, laughter seems to induce “gamma” frequencies—the type of brain waves observed among experienced meditators. These gamma waves improve the “synchronization” of your neuronal activity, which bolsters recall and memory, Berk says.

How does laughter accomplish all this? That’s where things get murky, says Dr. Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.

Provine calls himself a “reserved optimist” when it comes to laughter’s health-bolstering properties. “One of the challenges of studying laughter is that there are so many things that trigger it,” Provine explains. For example, you’re 30 times more likely to laugh around other people than when you are by yourself, he says. Social relationships and companionship have been tied to numerous health benefits. And so the social component of laughter may play a big part in its healthful attributes, Provine adds.

Here’s why that matters: If you’re going to tell people they should laugh to improve their health, there may be a big difference between guffawing on your own without provocation, watching a funny YouTube clip or meeting up with friends who make you laugh, Provine says.

“That doesn’t mean the benefits aren’t real,” he adds. “But it may not be accurate to credit laughter alone with all these superpowers.”

But even for researchers like Provine who aren’t ready—at least not yet—to coronate laughter as a panacea, he doesn’t dispute the benefits associated with a hearty har har. He only questions science’s current understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

When we laugh, we’re in a happy place,” he says. “That’s always a good thing.”

Don't worry, be happy

Good news? Sure, if you look for it

D.J. TICE , Star Tribune

Ordinarily, I am inclined to defend my profession against the familiar charge that we journalists overemphasize bad news.

The accusation is perfectly true, of course, in the sense that dramatically dark events make up a tiny fraction of everything that actually happens in the world — but play a vastly larger role in “the news.” Yet journalism that tried to represent these proportions correctly might soon become tiresome and unwieldy.

“Nearly all Minnesotans survive Tuesday,” would read the banner headline. “Here are their stories.” Or “Major disasters few and far between again this week.”

What’s more, trouble, scandal and conflict — admittedly, the holy trinity of the news business — often genuinely need to be reported. They often are symptoms of situations that need fixing.

And then, less nobly perhaps, there’s this: Trouble is interesting. It makes a good story. Great tale tellers from Homer and Shakespeare on down have seldom conjured fictional worlds where mostly everything went just fine.

All that said, it is true that dramatically good news often gets too little attention, or rather too quickly becomes ho-hum old news. The result may be that we don’t learn all we can from welcome events. Why things ever go right, after all, is at bottom just as mysterious and worthy of study as why they too often go wrong.

The mood of the moment seems a bit gloomy — or so, naturally, the news and the polls tell us. In honor of the holiday season, devoted to being of good cheer, here are reminders of three good-sized good-news stories worth keeping in mind.

First, the stunning decline in crime. This story has surely been told, but polls suggest that the facts still aren’t well and widely understood — especially the scale and durability of the trend. Almost certainly this is in part because news coverage of crime has declined much less than crime itself has — crime being important and interesting and all.

Still, while some places continue to endure chaos and carnage, the overall signs of a receding crime wave — confirmed in the FBI’s release of 2013 statistics a couple months ago — are remarkable.

The FBI reports that the rate of violent crime across America (per 100,000 people) has been cut just about in half over the past 20 years (down 48.4 percent). This includes a 50-percent drop in the murder rate, 36 percent for rape, and 54 percent for robbery.

More than 1 million fewer violent crimes were committed in 2013 than would have occurred if the 1994 rate of mayhem had remained unchanged.

This magnitude of improvement in a complex social ill almost defies explanation, especially because it has happened nearly everywhere, even internationally. The debate over its causes — everything from more incarceration to legalized abortion has been credited — can quickly turn this good news into a source of strife. But much research suggests that a significant part of the transformation remains simply unexplainable, except as an abrupt generational shift in attitude, notably among young minority males.

 Of course, there is still too much crime, and — as we know from the troubles in Ferguson, Mo., and New York and elsewhere — too much suspicion and violence between minority communities and police. But the overall story about crime in America today is good, inexplicably good. That’s worth remembering just now.

Another place where bloodletting has diminished is on our highways. Yet here again, one sometimes hears transportation advocates or politicians, lamenting the sorry condition of our infrastructure, slip into suggestions that roads have become more dangerous. Happily, it’s not so, not even close.

According to “Crash Facts,” published by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, 387 people died on Minnesota roads in 2013. That was down from 655 just a decade ago — and down from 1,060 in the peak year of 1968.

Far more impressively, the fatality rate (per million miles driven) was down last year by more than 87 percent from its peak in the late 1960s. (The national trend is similar, though Minnesota’s is better.)

More than 2,500 additional Minnesotans (about seven per day) would have died in crashes in 2013 if our roads had remained as dangerous as they were half a century ago.

Arguments can certainly still be had about government-mandated safety equipment, drunken-driving laws and more. But there’s no denying that a combination of safer cars, safer roads and safer drivers has brought about a stunning decline in highway tragedy in our time.

Finally, on the world scene, it’s easy in this age of economic stress and dissatisfaction in the rich West to miss the historic progress made in recent decades in easing the worst extremes of poverty and deprivation in the developing world. Levels of want and disparity are still appalling. But a glimpse of the encouraging trend is found in the United Nation’s “The World Population Situation in 2014: A Concise Report.”

The report shows that in the early 1950s, well over 20 percent of the whole world’s children died before the age of 5. In Africa, it was well over 30 percent. Today, the world rate is about 5 percent and Africa’s about 10 percent.

Still much too high. Yet this is one sign of our era’s economic and social progress in the world’s poorest places, on a scale and at a pace never known before.

Surely worth noticing, just like a lot of other good news — and even if one has to look a little harder to find it.

Don't worry be happy

Good News Is Bad News For News Portals

 Russian News Website Reports All Good News For A Day

Newspapers and news portals report bad news everyday, focusing on crimes and accidents. Although bad news can damper anyone’s mood, there is a good reason behind this, and a Russian news website learned the hard way.

In a social experiment, the Russian news website the City Reporter only published good news for an entire day. The company asked its readers a simple question a day before the experiment.

 “Do you feel like you are surrounded by negative information? You don’t want to read the news in the morning? Do you think good news is a myth? We’ll try to prove the opposite tomorrow!”

On December 1, the City Reporter only reported good news as promised. All the headlines had a positive tone, such as “No Disruption on the Roads Despite Snow.”

Despite their efforts to publish only good news, the website lost two-thirds of its audience that day, BBC News reports. It seems that good news is not enough to interest readers.

According to Metro the website’s Deputy Editor, Viktoriya Nekrasova, was disappointed that the social experiment did not turn out the way they expected.

 “We looked for positives in the day’s news, and we think we found them. But it looks like almost nobody needs them. That’s the trouble.”

She also thanked all the readers who stayed with them through their day of reporting only good news. A day after the experiment, the news website decided to go back to their more reliable headlines, “Car Crashes and Burst Water Pipes.”

Why are people attracted to bad news? In a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, researchers found out that people who closely followed the news dropped from 30 percent to 23 percent from the 1980s to the 1990s, and then boosted back up to 30 percent in the 21st century.

According to the study’s author, Michael J. Robinson, this has nothing to do with the media outlets used. The readership has something to do with the news stories.

 “The ’80s were more ‘interesting'; the ’90s, less so; the 00’s have been most interesting so far.”

While some people might argue that bad news allows people to act and make the world a more positive place, some might also say that negative news can leave people leaving hopeless.

News websites have different motivations for spreading bad news, but as evidenced by the recent social experiment, good news does not sell as much as bad news. The case may be different for social media websites, however, where the video of a cute puppy can spread as quick as wildfire.

Don't worry, be happy

Andres Oppenheimer: World’s happiest countries — in Latin America?

MIAMI

Reading a Gallup Poll about the happiest countries on earth, I couldn’t help being surprised that nine out of the 10 happiest countries — led by Paraguay — turned out to be in Latin America.

According to Gallup’s Positive Emotions Index, one of several such worldwide studies that aim to measure people’s levels of happiness, Paraguay was for the third year in a row the country in which people said they experienced the most positive emotions.

The poll asked people in 138 countries whether they experienced positive emotions — such as lots of enjoyment, laughter, smiling a lot, feeling well rested, and being treated with respect — on the previous day.

In Paraguay, 87 percent of respondents reported having positive experiences on the previous day, followed by Panama (86 percent), Guatemala, Nicaragua and Ecuador (all 83 percent), Costa Rica, Colombia and Denmark (82 percent), Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador (81 percent).

Further down the list are the United States, Sweden, Argentina, Chile and several other countries with 78 percent of the people reporting positive emotions, and Mexico, China and France with 76 percent. At the bottom of the list is Syria, with 36 percent.

Other studies, such as the United Nations’ World Happiness Report, asked questions that placed a greater emphasis on people’s well-being, and came to different conclusions. The World Happiness Report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness as Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden.

So which of these studies should we believe? It turns out that it depends on whether you measure positive emotions, or well-being, Gallup pollsters say. Positive emotions mostly reflect a mood, while well-being mostly reflects a general satisfaction with one’s standard of living, they say.

A few days ago, I had a chance to interview Daniel Kahneman, one of the world’s foremost experts in behavioral economics, and to ask him extensively about these rankings of the world’s happiest countries.

Kahneman, 80, an Israeli-American psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University, is one of the few non-economists ever to win a Nobel in economics. He was not surprised at all by the results of Gallup’s Positive Emotions Index.

Kahneman told me that Latin Americans “are more emotional, not necessarily happier.” He added, “When you look at how Latin Americans answer questions about how unhappy they are, you sometimes find that they are unhappier than other people. So they are (both) happier than other people, and unhappier than other people.

“The point I’m making with Latin Americans is that they maybe express emotions more than other cultures, so that would be true both for good emotions and for less good emotions.”

According to Kahneman, money buys happiness, but only to a point. His studies have found that, in the United States, income only makes a significant impact on people’s positive emotions when they make more than $75,000 a year. After that threshold, there is not much of a difference in how happy people feel.

“Money does not buy experiential happiness, but lack of money buys you misery. It’s not so much that being rich is good, but that being poor can be very bad,” he told me.

But what I found most interesting of what Kahneman said about these happiness polls is that they are focusing on the wrong question.

“I don’t think that it’s so important to measure how happy people are. People keep talking about measuring happiness and well-being, but what is really important is measuring misery,” Kahneman said. “It is much more important for a society to reduce the misery of its population.”

I fully agree. The rankings for world happiness are not only very subjective, but can lead to an illusion of happiness that leads to complacency, and to a false sense of achievement. If Gallup’s Positive Emotions Index had added a question asking Paraguayans whether they are satisfied with their standard of living, or the public services they receive, or if they are as happy as the Scandinavians, the results might have been different.

The bottom line is that, as Kahneman said, rather than ask questions about happiness, we should ask questions about misery — and do something about it.

Andres Oppenheimer (aoppenheimer@miamiherald.com) is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald.