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Should bads be inflicted all at once, like Machiavelli said? Evidence from life-satisfaction data

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Should the same number of bad occurrences be spread out over time to increase life satisfaction? Is it better to distribute or group positive events? Paul Frijters answers these questions.

Paul Frijters is a Professor of Economics at MBSC in Saudi Arabia.

Image courtesy of interviewee. February 1, 2024

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This video video is a detailed exploration of the relationship between self-esteem and obesity, presented by a health economist. The speaker highlights their long-standing interest in the topic and notes that previous studies primarily focus on how obesity affects self-esteem, rather than the opposite. The speaker aims to investigate how changes in self-esteem may influence obesity rates without directly altering behaviors around food and exercise.

To conduct this research, the speaker describes the need for a natural experiment that can showcase the effects of life events on self-worth. They suggest using negative life shocks, such as the unexpected death of a friend, as a way to measure changes in self-esteem and its subsequent impact on body mass index (BMI).

The findings indicate a significant causal relationship: a decrease in self-esteem, amplified by negative events, correlates with an increase in BMI. This video video suggests that individuals with low self-worth tend to adopt poorer health habits, contributing to obesity.

Additionally, the speaker draws parallels with Machiavelli’s advice on ruling effectively, proposing that bad and good events should be spaced out to manage public perception and emotional impact. The speaker's analysis contradicts Machiavelli's notion that experiencing all bad events at once is optimal; instead, the data suggests that accumulated negative events are more damaging than spread-out occurrences. Conversely, positive events should also be spaced out for maximum benefit.

The speaker concludes by emphasizing the importance of self-esteem for both individual health outcomes and broader societal costs related to obesity. They advocate for strategies to improve self-esteem, which could lead to better health choices and ultimately reduce healthcare costs. The overarching recommendation is to maintain a balance in experiencing both good and bad life events to optimize emotional well-being.

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I've been a, a long time health economist.

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And so the study of obesity is one

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of the major areas in that field.

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So I've had a long time interest,

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and I think my first papers are almost 20 years

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old on the topic.

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Um, and one of the outstanding questions in

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that literature has been how self-esteem and obesity relate.

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And the majority of the studies on

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that topic go from the other angle, which is

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that if you have, an obesity problem,

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you feel bad about yourself, but what about the other way?

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And so we wanted to study that.

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Um, and the difficulty with that kind of research is

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that you are then looking for something

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that in principle moves the self-esteem, the self-worth,

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but doesn't itself mechanically move obesity levels, right?

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It doesn't, as it were, have,

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another avenue of causality.

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And so you're looking for something which you say, okay,

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well that will change, your, your sort of behavior

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around food and diet and exercise and anxiety and all that,

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but only via the effect on self-esteem.

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So you're looking for something that doesn't itself,

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you know, change food habits or that sort of thing.

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Um, and so what you do then is you, you look

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for an instrument, you look for, as it were,

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a natural experiment, if you like, right?

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It's very difficult to do longitudinal experiments on this

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kind of thing 'cause it's very difficult to get people

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for several years to, as it were, agree

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to be in a trial whereby they really change their habits

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for a long time and they stick at it.

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That's actually very, very difficult.

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So you're looking for something that, that moves them

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independently of the, the researcher.

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Um, and you use negative shocks for that.

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Things that happen to them in life.

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I mean, you say, okay, well, we'll use those

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as if they are experiments.

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And the main, as it were, experiment that we use was

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that some people have friends who die,

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that often is, is somewhat unexpected.

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And of course that'll affect them for quite a while, while

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and really will affect, you know,

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how they feel about themselves.

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It doesn't immediately affect their job

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or the rest of their family or friendship circumstances,

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but they will feel bad about themselves for a while.

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And so you look for that kind of shock,

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and you say, okay, well the obesity change

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that you may see in that period has to causally relate

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to the self-worth, the self-esteem change that we see in

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that, period.

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So Machiavelli, who lived a little over 500 years ago

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and was advisor to the power for, made the chief family

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in Italy and to others as well,

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he advised the Bourgess at some point.

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Um, he gave practical advice to his leaders as to how

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to rule the population.

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And one of his famous pronouncements was about

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what they should do with good and bad events.

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And the idea was that sometimes

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rulers have to do bad things.

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They, they have to subdue the population.

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They have to tax people sometimes they have to rob people,

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they have to instigate wars.

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They may do things which offend religious

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Sensitivities. They effectively

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have to do bad

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things, and they can do good things.

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They can do public works, they can reduce taxation.

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They can, they can, as it were, build, public works

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that please the population.

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And so he advised rulers who want to remain in good stead

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with the population to do all the bad things at wa,

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basically get the pain over with, right?

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Get the pain over with so that they would remember it

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as least as possible.

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And that, they would then, as it would, you know, start

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to appreciate their Lord, their leader.

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The princes as Machiavelli calls him more.

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And he said the opposite for good things.

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He said, in order to, to, as we gain a reputation

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for being a good leader, you want

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to space the good things out over time.

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You know, one good thing every year.

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Do all the bad things at once, maybe at the start

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of your reign, get it over with,

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and then every year do something that pleases the population

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so that they think that you are totally magnificent.

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Um, and there are two aspects of that.

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One is about memory, you know, how does that work?

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And the other thing is, yeah,

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how much do you truly care about your population in terms

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of the overall good

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and bad that you're doing to your population?

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And the paper we have, tackled that second point,

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which is, are you really doing more good

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to your population if you do all the bad things at once

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and you drip out the good things or the opposite?

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And so we take that as a, as an empirical question.

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The memory thing is, yes.

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Another thing, this panel is called the, the Hilda,

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panel data set as the Household England Longitudinal

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Dynamics of Australia.

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And it's their main panel data set

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by which they look at a lot of social economic phenomenon.

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So it's one of the main panel data sets for them to look at,

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health behavior, mental health outcomes,

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how satisfied people are with their life,

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but also income dynamics.

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So what happens to their jobs, what happens

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to their marriages, what happens to their social life,

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what happens when they move?

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Um, I believe this started in 2001, and it is yearly.

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It used to be an in-person survey.

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Uh, they've moved to telephone surveys, I understand,

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because it's easier, you know, you start out with only,

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interviewing people in several places,

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sort of a small number of them.

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But of course people then moved

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to all kinds of random places.

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So, we're so, earlier on you only have to cover,

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let's say 20 places in Australia.

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You certainly have to cover 2000 of them.

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And so they covered about 10,000 households,

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20,000 Australians from 2001 up till now.

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Uh, and that allows you to, to quite nicely track,

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with the correspondence between life events

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and how they feel about their life as a whole

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and how they feel about their mental health.

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And so we particularly look at all the good

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and bad life events and line them up against satisfaction

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with life as a whole, which we take as a measure

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of happiness, wellbeing as the ultimate outcome

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that both individuals and governments care about.

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So the key results is that the,

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the the finding on bad events is exactly opposite to

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what machi veli might suggest.

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So you suggest once a bunch things, when it comes

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to bad events, and of course standard economics tells you

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that two bad events are actually worse than twice

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one bad event, right?

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Um, so you get, as it were, more and more pain with more

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and more bad events with, with each subsequent bad event.

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And that's exactly what the data shows.

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So the data shows that individuals

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who win one year experience, four bad events,

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are more than four times worse off than those

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who just experienced one bad event.

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So these things amplify each other.

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It, it seems to be harder to get over them.

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They have more of an emotional

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and mental health impact on individuals

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and it waxs them around more.

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So if you like, it is not good to us,

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we're at all the bad events over in one big traumatizing,

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big bang that scars you more

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and has more total lifetime effects,

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then if negative things are just drip dripped out over time.

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Um, and when it comes to good events,

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we find the same thing, which is that

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as it word drip drip is indeed what,

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what optimizes So you, you don't get benefits

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as it were from having all good things happen at once over

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and above each positive events.

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So effectively what you want to do is you, you, you want

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to drip, drip both for maximum effect, right?

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Maximum effect on the good side

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and minimum negative effect,

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as it were on the negative side.

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So that's what we find there. And,

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and you basically find that by tracking people over time,

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and those who have, three to four negative life events,

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they are much more negatively affected by those three

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to four life events than they are, of the one event

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that is negative, which happens,

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let's say 10 years earlier or 10 years later.

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Uh, the, the effect of that is not even one third of

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what it is when they have free events punched.

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Now, there are sort of quite tricky methodological issues

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around this because of course,

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not every life event is equally bad.

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Uh, some of them may be more anticipated,

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some individuals may anticipate and experience them more.

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So there, there is also this issue of sort of having to,

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define what this is.

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Were a standard negative life event,

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and a standard negative life event is a little bit like an

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aggregate of the existing negative life event.

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So the obesity results, what we find there is that,

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individuals who experience a friend who die in

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that following year, for every, as it were, unit

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of self-worth that decreases for them a, something like one

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and a half point increase in BMI.

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So body mass index.

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So we quite, we find quite a strong, as it were, effect

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of the death of a friend on the subsequent, BMI rate,

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which is causally related to obesity,

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because obesity is basically that your BMI is over 30.

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Um, and so we indeed, as it will validate our hypothesis

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that people who have low self-esteem, which we measure

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as low self-worth indeed tend

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to have less good habits which make them increase their,

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their obesity.

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And we also find that in the exercise data

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and what kind of food they have as this,

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were not great data on that in the data that, obesity is

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to a significant degree, led by,

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were low self-esteem events and, and general circumstances.

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The, the conclusions as it were from the Machiavelli paper

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are, are easiest, right?

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Because they, they also, come to personal advice

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to the degree that you have any agency in your life about

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spreading good events and spreading bad events.

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It's very straightforward advice. Spread them both, right?

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Spread the negative events to the degree that you can, so,

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you know, don't, don't divorce your wife

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as it were in the year that you lose your job, right?

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Uh, or the other way around, right?

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Hold onto your job when you think a divorce is coming.

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Make an extra effort not

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to also have negative shocks in the other areas

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of your life, right?

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Um, so to the degree that there's any agency in this,

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and of course many live shocks, we have no agency in there,

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just happen to us, but to the degree that we, we do,

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spread both the good and the bad, right?

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And that's just personal advice.

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You, you can try and organize your life such that you,

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you don't bunch the good nor the bad things,

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but you spread them out.

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And of course, from a government perspective,

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it's the same thing, right?

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It also means that you wanna spread

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both the good and the bad.

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So when times are good for a country as a whole,

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for instance, you might wanna increase taxes so

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that you've got some extra money to,

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as it will reduce the blow when things are going bad in the

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country and you have a lot of economic pain.

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Um, you might, similarly as it were in good times

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as it were, save up so that you, other bad things don't have

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to happen, let's say in a war situation

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or let's say when there is high unemployment.

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So to the degree that a government can inflict bad things

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or must inflict bad things,

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and that often is the case when it comes to, you know,

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inflation and money printing and taxing.

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And, but it can also have to do with as

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where painful foreign things like, Brexit to the degree

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that, that as we're spacing of events is possible.

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Uh, there too, the advice would be space, both the good

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and space, the bad one for positive effect

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and one for minimum negative effect.

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So that's their advice.

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Now, of course, the obesity paper, has as were,

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a rather obvious advice which people would follow anyway,

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which is, well look after your self-esteem.

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Uh, you know, it has its own causal impact on obesity

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and further worsens your life in all kinds of other ways

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because obesity, is not a desirable state of affairs.

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It's bad for your health, it's bad for your self esteem.

11:45.635 --> 11:47.585
Again, it's bad for your life, satisfied,

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bad for your relationships.

11:49.125 --> 11:51.345
Uh, it's not a, it's not a desired outcome.

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Sometimes, you know, it's very difficult to avoid.

11:54.345 --> 11:56.485
But it would basically say, look

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after yourself, your self-esteem is,

11:58.585 --> 12:00.125
is worth more than you might think.

12:00.305 --> 12:02.125
And of course, it's also worth something

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to the system as a whole.

12:04.065 --> 12:05.525
So we know, for instance,

12:05.525 --> 12:08.045
that obesity is very expensive to the health system.

12:08.105 --> 12:10.125
So it also makes self-worth

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and self-esteem of great importance to the government

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and to the health service so as to reduce the costs, right?

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Is one of the investments a health service

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and the government can make to reduce health costs, is

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to try to the degree that a government is agency over

12:24.405 --> 12:26.685
that improves self-worth of the population.

00:00 - I've been a, a long time health economist. And so the study of obesity is one of the major areas in that field. So I've had a long time interest, and I think my first papers are almost 20 years old on the topic.

00:12 - and one of the outstanding questions in that literature has been how self-esteem and obesity relate. And the majority of the studies on that topic go from the other angle, which is that if you have, an obesity problem, you feel bad about yourself, but what about the other way? And so we wanted to study that. and the difficulty with that kind of research is that you are then looking for something that in principle moves the self-esteem, the self-worth,

00:42 - but doesn't itself mechanically move obesity levels, right? It doesn't, as it were, have, another avenue of causality. And so you're looking for something which you say, okay, well that will change, your, your sort of behavior around food and diet and exercise and anxiety and all that, but only via the effect on self-esteem. So you're looking for something that doesn't itself, you know, change food habits or that sort of thing. and so what you do then is you, you look

01:11 - for an instrument, you look for, as it were, a natural experiment, if you like, right? It's very difficult to do longitudinal experiments on this kind of thing 'cause it's very difficult to get people for several years to, as it were, agree to be in a trial whereby they really change their habits for a long time and they stick at it. That's actually very, very difficult. So you're looking for something that, that moves them independently of the, the researcher.

01:38 - and you use negative shocks for that. Things that happen to them in life. I mean, you say, okay, well, we'll use those as if they are experiments. And the main, as it were, experiment that we use was that some people have friends who die, that often is, is somewhat unexpected. And of course that'll affect them for quite a while, while and really will affect, you know, how they feel about themselves.

02:00 - It doesn't immediately affect their job or the rest of their family or friendship circumstances, but they will feel bad about themselves for a while. And so you look for that kind of shock, and you say, okay, well the obesity change that you may see in that period has to causally relate to the self-worth, the self-esteem change that we see in that, period. So Machiavelli, who lived a little over 500 years ago and was advisor to the power for, made the chief family

02:29 - in Italy and to others as well, he advised the Bourgess at some point. he gave practical advice to his leaders as to how to rule the population. And one of his famous pronouncements was about what they should do with good and bad events. And the idea was that sometimes rulers have to do bad things. They, they have to subdue the population. They have to tax people sometimes they have to rob people,

02:54 - they have to instigate wars. They may do things which offend religious Sensitivities. They effectively have to do bad things, and they can do good things. They can do public works, they can reduce taxation. They can, they can, as it were, build, public works that please the population. And so he advised rulers who want to remain in good stead with the population to do all the bad things at wa,

03:16 - basically get the pain over with, right? Get the pain over with so that they would remember it as least as possible. And that, they would then, as it would, you know, start to appreciate their Lord, their leader. The princes as Machiavelli calls him more. And he said the opposite for good things. He said, in order to, to, as we gain a reputation for being a good leader, you want to space the good things out over time.

03:42 - You know, one good thing every year. Do all the bad things at once, maybe at the start of your reign, get it over with, and then every year do something that pleases the population so that they think that you are totally magnificent. and there are two aspects of that. One is about memory, you know, how does that work? And the other thing is, yeah, how much do you truly care about your population in terms of the overall good

04:03 - and bad that you're doing to your population? And the paper we have, tackled that second point, which is, are you really doing more good to your population if you do all the bad things at once and you drip out the good things or the opposite? And so we take that as a, as an empirical question. The memory thing is, yes. Another thing, this panel is called the, the Hilda, panel data set as the Household England Longitudinal Dynamics of Australia.

04:29 - And it's their main panel data set by which they look at a lot of social economic phenomenon. So it's one of the main panel data sets for them to look at, health behavior, mental health outcomes, how satisfied people are with their life, but also income dynamics. So what happens to their jobs, what happens to their marriages, what happens to their social life, what happens when they move? I believe this started in 2001, and it is yearly.

04:56 - It used to be an in-person survey. they've moved to telephone surveys, I understand, because it's easier, you know, you start out with only, interviewing people in several places, sort of a small number of them. But of course people then moved to all kinds of random places. So, we're so, earlier on you only have to cover, let's say 20 places in Australia. You certainly have to cover 2000 of them.

05:21 - And so they covered about 10,000 households, 20,000 Australians from 2001 up till now. and that allows you to, to quite nicely track, with the correspondence between life events and how they feel about their life as a whole and how they feel about their mental health. And so we particularly look at all the good and bad life events and line them up against satisfaction with life as a whole, which we take as a measure of happiness, wellbeing as the ultimate outcome

05:49 - that both individuals and governments care about. So the key results is that the, the the finding on bad events is exactly opposite to what machi veli might suggest. So you suggest once a bunch things, when it comes to bad events, and of course standard economics tells you that two bad events are actually worse than twice one bad event, right? so you get, as it were, more and more pain with more and more bad events with, with each subsequent bad event.

06:18 - And that's exactly what the data shows. So the data shows that individuals who win one year experience, four bad events, are more than four times worse off than those who just experienced one bad event. So these things amplify each other. It, it seems to be harder to get over them. They have more of an emotional and mental health impact on individuals and it waxs them around more.

06:40 - So if you like, it is not good to us, we're at all the bad events over in one big traumatizing, big bang that scars you more and has more total lifetime effects, then if negative things are just drip dripped out over time. and when it comes to good events, we find the same thing, which is that as it word drip drip is indeed what, what optimizes So you, you don't get benefits as it were from having all good things happen at once over

07:08 - and above each positive events. So effectively what you want to do is you, you, you want to drip, drip both for maximum effect, right? Maximum effect on the good side and minimum negative effect, as it were on the negative side. So that's what we find there. And, and you basically find that by tracking people over time, and those who have, three to four negative life events, they are much more negatively affected by those three

07:36 - to four life events than they are, of the one event that is negative, which happens, let's say 10 years earlier or 10 years later. the, the effect of that is not even one third of what it is when they have free events punched. Now, there are sort of quite tricky methodological issues around this because of course, not every life event is equally bad. some of them may be more anticipated, some individuals may anticipate and experience them more.

08:02 - So there, there is also this issue of sort of having to, define what this is. Were a standard negative life event, and a standard negative life event is a little bit like an aggregate of the existing negative life event. So the obesity results, what we find there is that, individuals who experience a friend who die in that following year, for every, as it were, unit of self-worth that decreases for them a, something like one and a half point increase in BMI.

08:35 - So body mass index. So we quite, we find quite a strong, as it were, effect of the death of a friend on the subsequent, BMI rate, which is causally related to obesity, because obesity is basically that your BMI is over 30. and so we indeed, as it will validate our hypothesis that people who have low self-esteem, which we measure as low self-worth indeed tend to have less good habits which make them increase their, their obesity.

09:06 - And we also find that in the exercise data and what kind of food they have as this, were not great data on that in the data that, obesity is to a significant degree, led by, were low self-esteem events and, and general circumstances. The, the conclusions as it were from the Machiavelli paper are, are easiest, right? Because they, they also, come to personal advice to the degree that you have any agency in your life about spreading good events and spreading bad events.

09:40 - It's very straightforward advice. Spread them both, right? Spread the negative events to the degree that you can, so, you know, don't, don't divorce your wife as it were in the year that you lose your job, right? or the other way around, right? Hold onto your job when you think a divorce is coming. Make an extra effort not to also have negative shocks in the other areas of your life, right? so to the degree that there's any agency in this,

10:04 - and of course many live shocks, we have no agency in there, just happen to us, but to the degree that we, we do, spread both the good and the bad, right? And that's just personal advice. You, you can try and organize your life such that you, you don't bunch the good nor the bad things, but you spread them out. And of course, from a government perspective, it's the same thing, right? It also means that you wanna spread

10:26 - both the good and the bad. So when times are good for a country as a whole, for instance, you might wanna increase taxes so that you've got some extra money to, as it will reduce the blow when things are going bad in the country and you have a lot of economic pain. you might, similarly as it were in good times as it were, save up so that you, other bad things don't have to happen, let's say in a war situation or let's say when there is high unemployment.

10:54 - So to the degree that a government can inflict bad things or must inflict bad things, and that often is the case when it comes to, you know, inflation and money printing and taxing. And, but it can also have to do with as where painful foreign things like, Brexit to the degree that, that as we're spacing of events is possible. there too, the advice would be space, both the good and space, the bad one for positive effect and one for minimum negative effect.

11:20 - So that's their advice. Now, of course, the obesity paper, has as were, a rather obvious advice which people would follow anyway, which is, well look after your self-esteem. you know, it has its own causal impact on obesity and further worsens your life in all kinds of other ways because obesity, is not a desirable state of affairs. It's bad for your health, it's bad for your self esteem. Again, it's bad for your life, satisfied, bad for your relationships.

11:49 - it's not a, it's not a desired outcome. Sometimes, you know, it's very difficult to avoid. But it would basically say, look after yourself, your self-esteem is, is worth more than you might think. And of course, it's also worth something to the system as a whole. So we know, for instance, that obesity is very expensive to the health system. So it also makes self-worth

12:10 - and self-esteem of great importance to the government and to the health service so as to reduce the costs, right? Is one of the investments a health service and the government can make to reduce health costs, is to try to the degree that a government is agency over that improves self-worth of the population.

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