As expected, objective poverty determines subjective poverty (Schmidt et al. 2023). According to the survey data analyzed here, Romania falls into the category of poor countries where many people are dissatisfied with their lives, along with Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Baltic states, and Italy, Portugal and Greece in the south of the country. continent.

introduction

Can you, as humans, be at the peak of happiness and dissatisfaction with your life at the same time? No, for the simple reason that the two moods are strongly positively associated. If you have nothing to pay your monthly bills, can you be very happy or satisfied with your life? Again, no, because subjective well-being does not arise from nowhere, but is a reflection of the objective. Questions are not global, anywhere and anytime. This applies to Romanians living in the European Union (EU) today. And they are not rhetorical. I start with a debate started at the beginning of December 2023 about happiness-satisfaction by a British magazine (The Independent), picked up by several media in Romania, which is in line with the British approach (DG24, Libertatea, etc.). or dissonant (Speranța TV, DCNews, LinkedIn, etc.).

We are not following the reconstruction of the discussion here, but are trying to give a sociological answer to the question raised in the title of the material. For the answer, we use microdata from a prestigious European survey, Eurobarometer 98.2 (EB98), from early 2023. I chose this option because the EB98 data is readily available as microdata. Poll source for the above debate Survey of incomes and living conditions (SILC 2022), and the data from which the discussion began are aggregated by country and socio-demographic characteristics. With microdata from EB98, analyzes can be more refined than with aggregated data.

EB98 measures life satisfaction (SV) on a scale from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 4 (very satisfied), and SILC, in the version reported by the mentioned media channels, on a scale from 0 (not at all satisfied) to 10 (very satisfied). ). Of course, different ways of measuring SV also cause differences in estimation. However, both scales still refer to SV.

To pay the monthly bills and be satisfied with life

A very high percentage of Europeans surveyed (84%) say they are satisfied or very satisfied with their lives in general. Table 1 with EB98 data clearly indicates a positive correlation between economic and administrative development and life satisfaction. We measured economic and administrative development by the proportion of those who stated that they had no difficulty paying their monthly bills in the past 12 months (approximately 64%). What is the relationship at the individual level between paying monthly bills and SV? Great difficulties are expected to bring dissatisfaction. Inspection of the summary data in Table 1 confirms, at first glance, the hypothesis. The more difficulty the population of the control country has in paying bills, the lower the degree of SV. From this point of view, Greece is a case in point: with a very high level of anxiety about paying bills (81%), there is also a relatively low level of life satisfaction (61%). Romania is in this category with high difficulties in paying monthly bills and a relatively low SV, together with Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Croatia and Portugal. At the other pole, with accentuated economic development and a high level of JI, there are such developed countries as Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Germany.

And these simple data, analyzed in tabular form, testify to the dependence of the JI, at least at first glance, on the country’s economic development. Since happiness is positively associated with SV (Gundelach&Kreiner 2004), the implication is that, even with these data, it is unlikely that Romanians are at the peak of happiness, although economically and institutionally (corruption, non-meritocratic selection in many cases, etc.) d.) they have problems with full. In any case, the country cannot be at the top of happiness with the population at the same time, but, changing the welfare indicator, also at the top of dissatisfaction.

Perhaps if we introduce into the analysis at the individual level control variables such as age, sex, education, subjective social class, living environment, for the interviewed persons, we will come to different conclusions. In general, it is not appropriate to extrapolate conclusions from the aggregate, national level, in this case, to the individual level (ecological fallacy). To avoid such a mistake, we continue to monitor the variation of SV depending on several variables simultaneously at the individual level.

Who is really unhappy with life?

It seems that, in addition to the country effect, socio-demographic variables also operate at the European level. Urban retirees with a low level of education are more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives compared to less educated youth from rural areas. (Table 2). If you have more financial difficulty paying your monthly bills and consider yourself lower class, then you are more likely to be unhappy. Likewise, if you have a negative perception of public services.

Table 2. Predictors of life satisfaction in the European Union

Gender, accounting for other variables in the model, has no significant effect on SV.

Even if we control for the mentioned social and demographic variables, there is still a country effect on SV. Romania is the country where the effect of dissatisfaction with the quality of life is the greatest. Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Baltic countries are also in the same group in terms of the negative influence of countries on NE from Eastern Europe. Also in this category are southern countries such as Greece, Italy and Portugal. The country context, in terms of life dissatisfaction, for Romania in 2023 is very similar to that of 2007 (Sandu 2007). The prevalence of SV is high, especially in the developed countries of the North, including the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands.

What is Romania in the European context? It is poorer in terms of meaningful connections, definition of SV. Older people who have trouble paying bills and are not good at using the Internet tend to be more dissatisfied in Romania. Why do living environment, education and subjective social class not significantly affect JI in Romania? It is possible that a high degree of dissatisfaction homogenizes sentiment, especially regarding the mentioned variables. Almost the same significant determining relationships were statistically revealed in the case of interviews with bulgarage (We performed a similar regression analysis for all European countries included in the survey. The results are not presented here.)

Romania tends to be closer to the Eastern European SV model, less defined by significant relationships, compared to the model of the old EU member states. Neither belonging to a particular habitat nor subjective social class is significant for determining SV, neither for Romania nor for the new member states of the Union (a detailed analysis is not presented here). _

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