Getting older isn't all that depressing, according to a happiness researcher speaking on campus Sept. 15. In fact, people report feeling happier each year after age 48 until they are quite old.

"[But] there is selection bias here," admitted Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, to an audience in Malott Hall's Bache Auditorium, "because happier people actually live longer."

Graham, author of "Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires" (2009), also said in her University Lecture of the same title that "Happiness correlates with outcomes public policy cares about. Some of these outcomes include productivity, health, life expectancy and social inequalities."

Graham, who studies how measures of well-being can inform public policy, said that understanding well-being is particularly useful for economic policy.

"Happiness economics is a new method that combines the tools and methods of economists … with those typically used by psychologists, which are surveys of well-being," said Graham. "The method captures broader dimensions of welfare than just plain income data alone."

Economists do not typically use surveys, but Graham finds they are useful to better understand unquantifiable reasons for the choices people make. For example, well-being surveys provide insight into behaviors that are driven by norms, addiction and issues of self-control, she said.

While marriage, higher incomes and being female tend to correlate with higher levels of happiness, Graham's research reveals a less intuitive trend: the paradox of growth.

"In 122 countries around the world… we find that higher rates of growth are actually negatively correlated with life satisfaction," said Graham. "Higher rates of growth are also negatively correlated with satisfaction with standard of living and health satisfaction."

According to Graham, middle-income countries that experience rapid growth and change tend to be responsible for these paradoxical trends in happiness. "People don't like change, even positive change," said Graham. "It's unsettling. It creates insecurity."

She noted, for example, how the American public reacted after the economic downturn in 2008. As markets stabilized and uncertainty decreased in 2009, happiness levels increased to above the levels they were before the downturn.

Adaptation mechanisms, which allow people to find their grounding in difficult situations, may explain why people who live in high-crime areas or regions with poor health care infrastructures can experience unexpectedly high levels of happiness. While adapting to these norms might bode well for an individual's happiness, a collective tolerance of dangerous circumstances can help perpetuate their existence -- a situation that Graham referred to as a "bad equilibrium."

Graham has also studied happiness levels in Arab Spring countries. "A society that promises opportunity and development and doesn't deliver will probably produce more unhappiness and, ultimately, revolution than will a very sort of stable traditional society where there isn't the promise of change," said Graham.

Graham also spoke on "Does More Money Make You Happier? Why So Much Debate?" Sept. 16 at a Dyson School seminar on campus.

Michelle Spektor '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.