Your Well-Being Declines When Others Are Unemployed, and Not Because of Empathy

A 1 percentage point increase in local unemployment depresses still-working people’s well-being to a degree that’s roughly equivalent to a 4% decline in household income, according to John F. Helliwell of the University of British Columbia and Haifang Huang of the University of Alberta, both in Canada. The apparent reason has nothing to do with workers’ feeling badly for the unemployed; instead, rising unemployment leads people to fear they’ll lose their own jobs, the researchers say.