to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader can make their appearance. However, they are captured in subjective well‐being data (Veenhoven, 2012), which are increasingly perceived as a meaningful and consistent way of measuring people’s welfare (Senik, 2011). Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. (2017) and World Bank (2014a). The validity of these assumptions for our data can be questioned, so we examine whether the Lewbel requirements are met. In addition, perceptions about corruption became more important for people’s life satisfaction, particularly in the Arab Spring countries where the uprisings were most intense. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. This section explores the degree to which each of these factors has contributed to the change in life satisfaction in the period 2009‐10, immediately preceding the Arab Spring, using a procedure known as the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition (Blinder, By continuing to browse this site, you agree to its use of cookies as described in our, I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of Use, The ‘Unhappy Development’ Paradox in Developing Arab Countries, Major Factors Behind Life Dissatisfaction in Developing MENA Countries, Sample Statistics on Life Satisfaction in Developing MENA Countries, Determinants of Life Satisfaction in MENA: Weighted Least Squares Estimates, Determinants of Life Satisfaction in MENA: Lewbel Estimates, Reasons for the Arab Spring according to the People in Developing MENA, Key Characteristics of Employment Regulation in the Middle East and North Africa, A Comparative Analysis of Subsidy Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa Region, Financial Distress and Happiness of Employees in Times of Economic Crisis, A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010, Why has Happiness Inequality Increased? Poor job market conditions are significantly and negatively related to life dissatisfaction in developing MENA countries—a result that remains significant even after including all other subjective domains (models 4 and 7, Table 2). E-mail address: arampatzi@ese.eur.nl. As the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 14 mission, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon. The ruling elites controled large parts of the private sector and profited from monopoly rights and cheap access to land and other resources (Cammett and Diwan, 2013). The effect of immigration on natives’ well-being in the European Union. Are the unhappy unemployed to blame for unrest? Despite the region’s consistent progress with poverty reduction, shared prosperity, and human development, life satisfaction in many MENA countries remained below the average expected for their level of development (Figure 1a) and it had dropped significantly in the years prior to the Arab Spring, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen—the Arab Spring countries where the uprisings were most intense (Figure 1b). Use the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. At the same time, the public had few if any channels of safe expression of opinions and grievances and opportunities to develop diverse civil society. Cross‐Country Evidence from the ESS, Economic Growth and Subjective Well‐Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox, Why Social Policy Needs Subjective Indicators, “Happiness: Also Known as: ‘Life Satisfaction’ and ‘Subjective Well‐Being’, Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt: Facts and Perceptions Across People, Time, and Space, Impact of the Number of Response Categories and Anchor Labels on Coefficient Alpha and Test‐Retest Reliability, Subjective Well‐being and Nonviolent Uprisings, Middle East and North Africa: Sustaining the Recovery and Looking Beyond, Global Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change, Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016. After some time, though, if their lane remains blocked, hope will give way to envy and frustration. Unemployment is a myth. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a m ion miles out and say. Form and Substance in Democracy and Social Justice. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Controlling for per capita incomes, several recent cross‐country studies by Deaton (2008), Graham and Lora (2010), and Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) even find that people living in fast‐growing economies are on average less happy than those living in slow‐growing economies. It’s a restless feeling of yearning for … Who justifies attacks on civilians? “Our country is the best country in the world. Edgar Mitchell Just like how Twilight isn't a book about vampires, so to speak, but a book about how vampires affect people. This procedure was followed to instrument separately and simultaneously all independent variables, shown in Table 3. The country dummies capture time‐invariant, country‐specific factors, such as the size of the country, culture, language, distance to markets and the structural features of the political and economic environment. How Important is Methodology for the Estimates of the Determinants of Happiness? The second part of Table 4 indicates that for both developing MENA and the Arab Spring countries over 60 percent of the life satisfaction between the two years is explained by deterioration in conditions or the change in circumstances (change in the explained component). This question should be addressed in future research. read: “Taking all together, how happy would you say you are: very happy, quite happy, not very happy, not at all happy?” (standard item in the World Value Studies) or “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. Satisfaction with Life and GDP per Capita, 2007–10. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. For instance a discrete change from 0 being satisfied with standards of living to 1 being dissatisfied decreases life evaluation by 0.26 points in developing MENA and by 0.27 points in the Arab Spring countries. Teacher absenteeism was high (Brixi et al., 2015) and learning outcomes were disappointing (Devarajan and Ianchovichina, ). The deterring effect of unemployment on happiness is more severe for the long‐term unemployed (Clark and Oswald, 1994), which is particularly high in the MENA region, and for people with limited job opportunities (Clark et al., 2010). Second, we investigate systematically the factors behind the decline in life satisfaction by decomposing the decline into two components: an effect associated with changes in the prevalence of dissatisfied individuals and an effect associated with changes in the relative importance of these factors for life satisfaction. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. Figures 3-6 show a graphic representation of the decomposition of the differential between 2009 and 2010 for the developing MENA and the Arab Spring countries2727 The detailed Blinder‐Oaxaca decomposition can be found in Appendix D. The coefficient and their respective confidence intervals are available in Appendix D, Table D2. Life Satisfaction and Noncognitive Skills: Effects on the Likelihood of Unemployment. The increased prevalence of dissatisfaction with the standard of living contributed the most to the decline in subjective well‐being during this period, followed by worsening labor market conditions manifested in increased unemployment and decline in self‐reported earnings. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. See more. These marginal effects are in line with our findings. For instance, respondents cannot indicate a neutral attitude. This result supports our initial finding that people are predominantly dissatisfied by corruption associated with cronyism and nepotism (“wasta”). French Translation of “dissatisfaction” | The official Collins English-French Dictionary online. Similarly, Morocco’s score decreased from 4.7 to 3.4 during the same period. In sum, despite economic and human development progress in the prior two decades, a decline in life satisfaction from already relatively low happiness levels preceded the Arab Spring uprisings—a situation described as “unhappy development” paradox. It covers entire countries including rural areas except for unsafe or inaccessible regions in few countries.1818 In Algeria, some sparsely populated areas of the south, home to 10 percent of the population, were excluded. These personal characteristics are related to gender, age, marital status and household composition, education level, migration status, and religion. Unfortunately the later in life dissatisfaction with unresolved world dynamics, systemic poverty, the plight of the underprivileged seemed why Alinsky, … Reforms in the 1990s were implemented in an uneven way, benefiting mainly the elites (Chekir and Diwan, 2012; Rijkers et al., 2014) who dominated a range of economic sectors (Malik and Awadallah, 2013). Ecclesiastes 6:10-12 Verse 10 is essentially saying that God is sovereign, and some things that He has established cannot be changed. international politics look su petty. In models 2 through 6, we separately include each of the subjective domain satisfaction variables associated with dissatisfaction in developing MENA, along with related objective factors. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Options to Bridge the Gap between Economic Theory and Policy Analysis, Trust, Voice, and Incentives: Learning from Local Success Stories in Service Delivery in the Middle East and North Africa, The China Puzzle: Falling Happiness in a Rising Economy, The ‘Arab Spring’ Stress Test: Diagnosing Reasons for Revolt, The ‘Technology of Happiness’ and the Tradition of Economic Science, The Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings, Why was the Arab World Poised for Revolution? If parents want their children to attend school, or take part in many extracurricular activities, they must accept. In Morocco, people in the southern provinces, representing 3 percent of the population, were not interviewed by Gallup World Poll. The life satisfaction gap in Arab Spring countries between 2009 and 2010 can largely be explained by the deterioration in satisfaction with living standards, followed by losses in income and the increase in the percentage of unemployed individuals. This Stoic insight was captured brilliantly two thousand years later in the words of American astronaut Edgar Mitchell as he looked out at earth from the quiet confines of the Apollo 14 lunar module: “In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” The answer to the question: “Is corruption widespread within government?” could be that the level of corruption within government is limited, recorded as 0, or widespread, recorded as 1. Several explanations have been put forward for the grievances that led to the rise in dissatisfaction rates on the eve of the Arab Spring. Table 4 shows the Blinder‐Oaxaca decomposition for developing MENA and Arab Spring countries, where the uprisings were most intense. Lack of quality jobs is another reason for the discontent and remains a significant factor even after controlling for employment status. In other words, we make the case that both objective and subjective (or perceptions) data matter for understanding the relative importance of grievances for the collective action observed during the Arab Spring (see Okulicz‐Kozaryn, 2013; Jahedi and Méndez, 2014). For instance, although access to free public health and education improved dramatically over the years, teacher and doctor absenteeism became a severe problem hurting learning outcomes and forcing people to pay out of pocket for better quality private‐sector services (Brixi et al., 2015; Devarajan and Ianchovichina, ). As we start the new year, there has been no shortage of memes, social media posts, and other commentary justifiably expressing an intense dissatisfaction with the events of 2020. The results of this empirical analysis are presented in Section 4. Libya and Tunisia were ranked 111th and 118th of 177 countries, respectively, and so they appeared among the stronger and less fragile countries in the world (Goodwin, 2011). From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Over 100,000 French translations of English words and phrases. Robust standard errors in parentheses; ***. These include: (1) limited freedom and voice in predominantly autocratic states; (2) dissatisfaction with the standards of living; (3) unhappiness with persistently high unemployment and lack of high‐quality jobs; and (4) dissatisfaction with corruption and cronyism, which have constrained the opportunities for economic growth of those who work hard. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Section 2 discusses the potential root causes of dissatisfaction with life in developing MENA. In Egypt, for instance, average life‐evaluation levels plunged on a 0–10 scale44 The two extreme ends of the range capture worst possible life (0) and best possible life (10). In the restricted sample, 0.27 percent of the respondents did not respond to the life evaluation question, while a small percentage of the respondents were dropped from the sample because they did not respond to question on satisfaction with living standards (0.55 percent), satisfaction with efforts of the government to increase the number of available quality jobs (1.61 percent), cronyism (2.16 percent), freedom in life (1.79 percent), presence of corruption in government (9.10 percent)1818 Non‐respondents were further examined but were not found to have significant differences in life evaluation compared to respondents. Sailors take warning The greater frequency of lightning strikes in shipping lanes, as opposed to in less-frequented regions of the ocean, may be connected to exhaust particles. Our findings suggest that perceptions provide valuable information about public preferences and needs, which are typically not reflected in objective data (Veenhoven, 2002). Although in general the choice of Z can be random, subject to the conditions above, we opted to follow a different strategy to select our instruments. You develop an instant global consciousness. Unsuccessful Subjective Well-Being Assimilation Among Immigrants: The Role of Faltering Perceptions of the Host Society. The annual Gallup World Poll includes at least 1,000 randomly selected respondents (adult population of 15 years and older) per country and is representative at the national level. This paper does not explore the question why some developing MENA countries experienced political violence and regime change, whereas in others the protests remained peaceful and limited in scope. Respondents who are dissatisfied with the educational system report 0.17 points lower satisfaction with life than those who are satisfied with the education system (models 4 and 7, Table 2). Most interestingly working for the government was less positively correlated with life satisfaction in 2010 compared to 2009, herewith increasing the difference in life satisfaction between 2009 and 2010. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. "You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. In the Arab world, the “tunnel effect” may have been felt by the middle class, in particular, as reforms implemented to boost economic growth benefited instead a happy few, especially those with connections to the regimes in power. “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Naming a thing is an indication that the thing so named is set. The relative importance of the objective and subjective determinants of life satisfaction vary over time and across individuals (Diener and Suh, 2000; Easterlin and Sawangfa, 2007). This section discusses the baseline results and the results from alternative specification, the sensitivity of the results to changes in variable specifications and data aggregations, as well as endogeneity bias issues. Dissatisfaction, intense lobbying ahead of February 6 cabinet expansion in Karnataka BS Yediyurappa (File photo) BENGALURU: A wave of dissatisfaction has hit the six-month-old BJP government against the backdrop of chief minister B S Yediyurappa's announcement to induct 13 aspirants in the second cabinet expansion on February 6. In addition, we control for whether people are employed in government positions or not (reference category is “Other”). Employment’s Role in Enabling and Constraining Marriage in the Middle East and North Africa. “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. In Yemen, gender‐matched sampling was used, while the sample for Palestinian territories includes people in East Jerusalem. The three distributions are distinctly different as indicated by the results from the Kolmogorov‐Smirnov test for equality of distributions. Crazy hard. Enter your email address below and we will send you your username, If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to retrieve your username. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Following Lewbel (2012), we performed a Breusch‐Pagan Lagrange Multiplier Test to test for heteroskedasticity. The world's highest achievers have the highest levels of dissatisfaction. Prior to the Arab Spring uprisings, most developing MENA countries were seen as relatively stable places. Please check your email for instructions on resetting your password. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. Body dissatisfaction develops when people have negative thoughts about their own body image. The Gallup World Poll constitutes an almost exclusive source of information supplied by individuals to inform on several aspects of their life, including how satisfied they are with their life as a whole and how satisfied they are with different domains of their life. These findings are in line with a poll by Zogby in 2005, in which respondents in developing MENA countries indicated that the lack of employment opportunities, corruption, healthcare, and schooling were seen as the most pertinent problems in developing MENA countries (Zogby, 2005). The incomes of the bottom 40 percent, measured as 2005 PPP‐adjusted per capita expenditure, grew at higher rates than average expenditures in many developing Arab countries for which information was available (Ianchovichina 2015). The time dummies control for exogenous factors that changed over the period of interest, including contagion effects in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Some Empirical Evidence. The concepts of unhappy growth and unhappy development are related, however they differ in that “unhappy development” captures broader aspects of progress than those associated with income growth alone, including factors related to inequality, employment conditions, and access to infrastructure, health and education services (World Bank and International Monetary Fund, 2015). On average, in the fully specified model 7 in Table 2, the life satisfaction score of dissatisfied respondents is 1.24 points lower than the life satisfaction score of respondents who are satisfied with their living standards. Only two MENA countries—Iraq (7th) and the Republic of Yemen (15th) —made it to the top 25 of the 2010 Failed States Index11 The Failed States Index measures stability based on economic, political, and military indicators. Dissatisfaction with job market conditions was particularly strong in the developing MENA countries on the eve of the Arab Spring. Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope. At a time when public sector employment was contracting, private sector growth was sluggish, stifled by distortions, including policies that offered advantages to a few firms with political connections.1212 There was fear that a rise of the nouveau rich would challenge existing power relations. The Gini inequality indexes were moderate by international standards and did not worsen in most MENA economies (Ianchovichina, 2018). “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. This is in line with our initial findings (Table 2, models 7,8). Inflation stemming from increases in food and energy prices put a strain on households as they spent more of their income on meeting basic needs.77 According to Maslow (1943), in the hierarchy of individual demands, a person’s physiological needs for basics such as food, water, and shelter dominate all other needs. We also include subjective evaluations of living standards based on the answers to the following question: “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your standard of living, all the things you can buy and do?” The answers to this question are coded as 0 if satisfied and 1 if dissatisfied and capture the effect of both monetary and non‐monetary factors on people’s experience with living conditions. Unemployment and Life Satisfaction: A Cross‐Cultural Comparison, Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability. By 2005 for the first time in history, more than half of the world's population was living in democracies. I am deeply dissatisfied - about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works - and in some ways, my dissatisfaction drives my storytelling. Rep, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, and Yemen, Rep. Libya is an Arab Spring country but it is not in this sample due to missing data. In this context, our study highlights that not only objective conditions count, but also the subjective awareness of shortcomings in these objective conditions. In the first model specification (1), we have LS as a dependent variable regressed only on control variables for personal characteristics. This in turn may have increased people’s aversion to inequality and social injustice (Cammett and Diwan, 2013; Verme et al., 2014) and it may have negatively affected their levels of happiness. In Jordan, excluded areas are home to 12 percent of the population. Dissatisfied with standard of living: Yes, Dissatisfied with efforts to increase high quality jobs: Yes. From out there on the moon. High dependence on imported food and limited fiscal space meant that the global commodity price increases of the 2000s would transmit to domestic markets despite the presence of food subsidies (Korotayev and Zinkina, 2011; Ianchovichina et al., 2014). In developing MENA (Figure 2a), growing dissatisfaction (i.e. Scrutinising participation in the Arab Spring uprisings. Strikingly, civil and political freedom (42.4 percent) only comes in fourth place and is, hence, neither found associated with dissatisfaction in developing MENA nor regarded as one of the most important grievances related to the uprisings. In Egypt, the crisis was associated with a steep decline in real earnings growth; in Tunisia, it reinforced the upward trend in unemployment; and in Jordan, it slowed employment growth. Huxley wrote that the focus of Brave New World isn't science itself, but science as it affects people. Life satisfaction was measured using a single question, known as the “Cantril Ladder” or “Self‐Anchoring Striving Scale” (Cantril, 1965). You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. Perceptions of inequality of opportunities (or “wasta”) due to corruption and nepotism are significantly and negatively associated with life satisfaction in developing MENA (models 5, 6, and 7, Table 2). To analyze the roots of dissatisfaction with life in developing MENA on the eve of the Arab Spring, we used cross‐sectional data from the Gallup World Poll for the years 2009 and 2010 and a standard life satisfaction model (see Di Tella et al.. Distribution of Life Satisfaction Scores in Developing MENA in 2009–10. Longer, more optimistic, lives: Historic optimism and life expectancy in the United States. Jul 12, 2017 - “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion … Hence, perceptions about worsening standards of living, labor market conditions, corruption and “wasta” are not only strongly associated with dissatisfaction with life and decline of subjective well‐being levels before the Arab Spring, but are also viewed as the main grievances associated with the Arab Spring protests. average life satisfaction in 2009 minus average life satisfaction in 2010) can be related to decline in perceived standards of living, losses in income and growth of the percentage of unemployed individuals.2828 However, changes in coefficients for some of the control variables contributed to the difference in life satisfaction between 2009 and 2010. Tunisia’s score, for instance, declined from 5.2 in 2000 to 4.3 in 2010 (lower scores indicate highly corrupt countries). We present the marginal effects of our estimates in Appendix C4. The paper empirically tests the direction and strength of association of a range of objective and subjective factors with subjective well‐being in the Middle East and North Africa in the years immediately preceding the Arab Spring uprisings (2009–10). This reasoning is in line with the “tunnel effect,” introduced by Hirschman (1973). Ott (2010) also found that the correlation between happiness and democracy is relatively weak in the MENA region. We control for objective measures of standards of living by including individual income (given in international dollars). You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch". To our knowledge, we are the first to examine empirically the relative importance of different explanations provided for the declining life satisfaction in developing MENA on the eve of the Arab Spring. The MENA distribution is different from the one for Latin America and the Caribbean and is closer to the one for Sub‐Saharan Africa as seen on Figure 2a, although the latter is shifted to the left of MENA’s. "You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. Dissatisfaction with basic public services such as healthcare, housing, schools, and infrastructure also grew in the developing MENA countries, according to Gallup World Poll data, reflecting the erosion in the quality of public services. The responses indicate that the main grievances behind the outburst of social discontent during the Arab Spring uprisings are closely linked to the domain satisfactions shaping the level of subjective well‐being in developing MENA prior to the Arab Spring (Table 5). According to Layard (2011), objective factors such as gender, age, marital and education status, financial situation, and health determine to a large extent life satisfaction, but subjective factors associated with perceptions and expectations about family relationships, work, community and friends, personal freedom, institutional quality, and personal values are also imperative to individual happiness. Relative Deprivation as a Factor of Sociopolitical Destabilization: Toward a Quantitative Comparative Analysis of the Arab Spring Events. Assimilation Among Immigrants: the publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any information. 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