Comments on Krueger Presentation and Article

Abstract

The Princeton team has generated a great body of diverse evidence on the meaning of daily life, putting it at the center of new measures of the quality of life (QOL) in a society. In their comparison of QOL in France and America, they have taken a bold and controversial step in cross-national research, one in which many scholars would argue that we still haven't been able to make sense of subjective indicators within a single country. However, they strengthen their research by using multiple measures, and cross-checking their results with earlier national surveys, to show that rather much the same findings hold in both countries (for women anyway). Unfortunately, they did not include men in these comparisons, but most QOL studies do not find large gender differences on these types of questions. Their historical integration of affective responses with time-diary activity for 1965 2005 in Fig. 2 is similarly impressive as a measure of how much the daily lives of men and women are improving (or not in this case). In this way, it reinforces most QOL analyses indicating little improvement over a 40-year period in which there has been significant gains in people's economic well-being (Robinson & Land 2008). However, there are two concerns about their research I would like to highlight. First, as Tom Juster's response above brought out, the research approach is not new and second and more importantly, it's not clear that dismissing the general measures in favor of diary ratings is justified, even in the face of their several studies comparing the two. The main evidence to the contrary comes from time-diary studies that cover the com plete spectrum of daily activity. Table 1 below reviews these earlier data from diary studies done 20-30 years ago, both national probability surveys that first examined how people rated their day's activities. It first needs to be noted that the two studies employed different methodologies for rating daily activity. The first 1975 University of Michigan study on the right, done by Juster and Stafford, asked respondents to rate how much they generally enjoyed the spe cific activities on the right side of Table 1 ("Work", Sleep", etc.). The second 1985 University of Maryland study took the Princeton team approach, as shown on the left side of Table 1. It used the same 0-10 enjoyment scale as in the Michigan study, but