The Effects of Education on Happiness: Implications for the Easterlin Paradox

The purpose of this article is to investigate how education affects happiness in selected developing and developed countries in the period 2005-2016. For this purpose, using dynamic and static panel methods, the factors affecting happiness with emphasis on training indicators have been estimated. The estimation results in selected developing countries have shown that preschool enrollment rate and elementary enrollment rate have no significant effect on happiness, but secondary enrollment rate and university enrollment rate have a significant negative effect on happiness. The estimation results in selected developed countries have also shown that the preschool enrollment rate has a significant positive effect on happiness, which shows the attention of the preschool education system in these countries to improve the level of happiness, but the primary enrollment rate, secondary enrollment and university enrollment rates did not have a significant effect on happiness. Therefore, in general, it can be concluded that the higher the level of education of individuals has caused the lower the happiness of individuals or at least did not have a significant effect on happiness. One of the reasons for this is that with the increase of education, a person's expected happiness becomes more gap with his realized happiness, because the promotion of education increases the level of expectations, and as a result, because the realized happiness does not increase in proportion to the expected happiness, improving the level of education will further reduce happiness. This finding could be another indication of the existence of the Easterlin paradox.