Scientific Proof That Rebecca Black Was Right

John Helliwell and Shun Wang report on the happiness increasing properties of the weekend (this is via Annie Lowrey):

This paper exploits the richness and large sample size of the Gallup/Healthways US daily poll to illustrate significant differences in the dynamics of two key measures of subjective well-being: emotions and life evaluations. We find that there is no day-of-week effect for life evaluations, represented here by the Cantril Ladder, but significantly more happiness, enjoyment, and laughter, and significantly less worry, sadness, and anger on weekends (including public holidays) than on weekdays. We then find strong evidence of the importance of the social context, both at work and at home, in explaining the size and likely determinants of the weekend effects for emotions. Weekend effects are twice as large for full-time paid workers as for the rest of the population, and are much smaller for those whose work supervisor is considered a partner rather than a boss and who report trustable and open work environments. A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays (7.1 vs. 5.4 hours). The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.

Extra government-mandated three day weekends could be costly in terms of overall economic output, but would seem, on this basis, to have substantial hedonic benefits. But it also serves as a reminder that many of our social and economic arrangements are more tenuously grounded than we like to admit. The series of events that’s led to the convention that an ordinary full-time worker is expected to have a ratio of 5:2 workdays to days off is pretty arbitrary. What if the French Republican Calendar had taken off as well as the metric system and most countries were doing ten day weeks? We’d probably have a 7:3 ratio and be working a slightly higher proportion of days.