High life satisfaction reported among small-scale societies with low incomes.

Global polls have shown that people in high-income countries generally report being more satisfied with their lives than people in low-income countries. The persistence of this correlation, and its similarity to correlations between income and life satisfaction within countries, could lead to the impression that high levels of life satisfaction can only be achieved in wealthy societies. However, global polls have typically overlooked small-scale, nonindustrialized societies, which can provide an alternative test of the consistency of this relationship. Here, we present results from a survey of 2,966 members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities among 19 globally distributed sites. We find that high average levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those of wealthy countries, are reported for numerous populations that have very low monetary incomes. Our results are consistent with the notion that human societies can support very satisfying lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of monetary wealth.

The global human day.

The daily activities of ≈8 billion people occupy exactly 24 h per day, placing a strict physical limit on what changes can be achieved in the world. These activities form the basis of human behavior, and because of the global integration of societies and economies, many of these activities interact across national borders. Yet, there is no comprehensive overview of how the finite resource of time is allocated at the global scale. Here, we estimate how all humans spend their time using a generalized, physical outcome-based categorization that facilitates the integration of data from hundreds of diverse datasets. Our compilation shows that most waking hours are spent on activities intended to achieve direct outcomes for human minds and bodies (9.4 h/d), while 3.4 h/d are spent modifying our inhabited environments and the world beyond. The remaining 2.1 h/d are devoted to organizing social processes and transportation. We distinguish activities that vary strongly with GDP per capita, including the time allocated to food provision and infrastructure, vs. those that do not vary consistently, such as meals and transportation time. Globally, the time spent directly extracting materials and energy from the Earth system is small, on the order of 5 min per average human day, while the time directly dealing with waste is on the order of 1 min per day, suggesting a large potential scope to modify the allocation of time to these activities. Our results provide a baseline quantification of the temporal composition of global human life that can be expanded and applied to multiple fields of research.

Field measurements of indoor and community air quality in rural Beijing before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown in China is thought to have reduced air pollution emissions due to reduced human mobility and economic activities. Few studies have assessed the impacts of COVID-19 on community and indoor air quality in environments with diverse socioeconomic and household energy use patterns. The main goal of this study was to evaluate whether indoor and community air pollution differed before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown in homes with different energy use patterns. Using calibrated real-time PM2.5 sensors, we measured indoor and community air quality in 147 homes from 30 villages in Beijing over 4 months including periods before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown. Community pollution was higher during the lockdown (61 ± 47 µg/m3 ) compared with before (45 ± 35 µg/m3 , p < 0.001) and after (47 ± 37 µg/m3 , p < 0.001) the lockdown. However, we did not observe significantly increased indoor PM2.5 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Indoor-generated PM2.5 in homes using clean energy for heating without smokers was the lowest compared with those using solid fuel with/without smokers, implying air pollutant emissions are reduced in homes using clean energy. Indoor air quality may not have been impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown in rural settings in China and appeared to be more impacted by the household energy choice and indoor smoking than the COVID-19 lockdown. As clean energy transitions occurred in rural households in northern China, our work highlights the importance of understanding multiple possible indoor sources to interpret the impacts of interventions, intended or otherwise.

Interdisciplinary applications of human time use with generalized lexicons.

Time use studies quantify what people do, over particular time intervals. The results of these studies have illuminated diverse and important aspects of societies and economies, from populations around the world. Yet, these efforts have advanced in a fragmented manner, using non-standardized descriptions (lexicons) of time use that often require researchers to make arbitrary designations among non-exclusive categories, and are not easily translated between disciplines. Here we propose a new approach, assembling multiple dimensions of time use to construct what we call the human chronome, as a means to provide novel interdisciplinary perspectives on fundamental aspects of human behaviour and experience. The approach is enabled by parallel lexicons, each of which aims for low ambiguity by focusing on a single coherent categorical dimension, and which can then be combined to provide a multi-dimensional characterization. Each lexicon should follow a single, consistent theoretical orientation, ensure exhaustiveness and exclusivity, and minimize ambiguity arising from temporal and social aggregation. As a pragmatic first step towards this goal, we describe the development of the Motivating- Outcome- Oriented General Activity Lexicon (MOOGAL). The MOOGAL is theoretically oriented towards the outcomes of activities, is applicable to any human from hunter-gatherers to modern urbanites, and deliberately focuses on the physical outcomes which motivate the undertaking of activities to reduce ambiguity from social aggregation. We illustrate the utility of the MOOGAL by comparing it with existing economic, sociological and anthropological lexicons, showing that it exhaustively covers the previously-defined activities with low ambiguity, and apply it to time use and economic data from two countries. Our results support the feasibility of using generalized lexicons to incorporate diverse observational constraints on time use, thereby providing a rich interdisciplinary perspective on the human system that is particularly relevant to the current period of rapid social, technological and environmental change.

Socioeconomic and Demographic Associations with Wintertime Air Pollution Exposures at Household, Community, and District Scales in Rural Beijing, China.

The Chinese government implemented a national household energy transition program that replaced residential coal heating stoves with electricity-powered heat pumps for space heating in northern China. As part of a baseline assessment of the program, this study investigated variability in personal air pollution exposures within villages and between villages and evaluated exposure patterns by sociodemographic factors. We randomly recruited 446 participants in 50 villages in four districts in rural Beijing and measured 24 h personal exposures to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and black carbon (BC). The geometric mean personal exposure to PM2.5 and BC was 72 and 2.5 µg/m3, respectively. The variability in PM2.5 and BC exposures was greater within villages than between villages. Study participants who used traditional stoves as their dominant source of space heating were exposed to the highest levels of PM2.5 and BC. Wealthier households tended to burn more coal for space heating, whereas less wealthy households used more biomass. PM2.5 and BC exposures were almost uniformly distributed by socioeconomic status. Future work that combines these results with PM2.5 chemical composition analysis will shed light on whether air pollution source contributors (e.g., industrial, traffic, and household solid fuel burning) follow similar distributions.

Life satisfaction and sustainability: a policy framework.

The growing maturity of the "science of happiness" raises the prospect of enabling government policy to be more accountable to the measurable subjective experience of the population. In its ideal form, the application of this science promises to inform decision makers about the likely distribution of life satisfaction resulting from any prospective policy, allowing for the selection of more optimal policy. Such "budgeting for wellbeing" invites three natural objections, beyond normative quibbles with the subjective objective: (1) non-incremental changes are unlikely in large bureaucracies, so a new accounting system for devising and costing government policies and budgets is too radical, (2) governments do not have an authoritative set of credible cost/benefit coefficients to use in analysis, and (3) long-run objectives, risks, and environmental considerations cannot be feasibly captured in quantitative projections of human subjective wellbeing. Three institutions are needed to address these challenges. I describe (a) an evolving collection of largely objective indicators for monitoring progress, with life satisfaction providing quantitative structure and overarching visibility to the system, (b) a publicly curated, evidence-based Database of Happiness Coefficients, and (c) independent public agencies that decide on a growing list of material constraints on the economy. Rather than overwhelmingly novel, these features have antecedents and analogues. Moreover, most civil service decision-making and projection-making apparatuses need not change. Also, there will be no less room nor less need for political debate and platforms. While shifting society to human-centred measures of progress may be radically transformative in the long run, it can be initiated smoothly and non-disruptively.

Happy without money: Minimally monetized societies can exhibit high subjective well-being.

Economic growth is often assumed to improve happiness for people in low income countries, although the association between monetary income and subjective well-being has been a subject of debate. We test this assumption by comparing three different measures of subjective well-being in very low-income communities with different levels of monetization. Contrary to expectations, all three measures of subjective well-being were very high in the least-monetized sites and comparable to those found among citizens of wealthy nations. The reported drivers of happiness shifted with increasing monetization: from enjoying experiential activities in contact with nature at the less monetized sites, to social and economic factors at the more monetized sites. Our results suggest that high levels of subjective well-being can be achieved with minimal monetization, challenging the perception that economic growth will raise life satisfaction among low income populations.

Global trends toward urban street-network sprawl.

We present a global time series of street-network sprawl-that is, sprawl as measured through the local connectivity of the street network. Using high-resolution data from OpenStreetMap and a satellite-derived time series of urbanization, we compute and validate changes over time in multidimensional street connectivity measures based on graph-theoretic and geographic concepts. We report on global, national, and city-level trends since 1975 in the street-network disconnectedness index (SNDi), based on every mapped node and edge in the world. Streets in new developments in 90% of the 134 most populous countries have become less connected since 1975, while just 29% show an improving trend since 2000. The same period saw a near doubling in the relative frequency of a street-network type characterized by high circuity, typical of gated communities. We identify persistence in street-network sprawl, indicative of path-dependent processes. Specifically, cities and countries with low connectivity in recent years also had relatively low preexisting connectivity in our earliest time period. We discuss implications for policy intervention in road building in new and expanding cities as a top priority for sustainable urban development.

A global assessment of street-network sprawl.

Disconnected urban street networks, which we call "street-network sprawl," are strongly associated with increased vehicle travel, energy use and CO2 emissions, as shown by previous research in Europe and North America. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and globally commensurable measures of street-network sprawl based on graph-theoretic and geographic concepts. Using data on all 46 million km of mapped streets worldwide, we compute these measures for the entire Earth at the highest possible resolution. We generate a summary scalar measure for street-network sprawl, the Street-Network Disconnectedness index (SNDi), as well as a data-driven multidimensional classification that identifies eight empirical street-network types that span the spectrum of connectivity, from gridiron to dendritic (tree-like) and circuitous networks. Our qualitative validation shows that both the scalar and multidimensional measures are meaningfully comparable within and across countries, and successfully capture varied dimensions of walkability and urban development. We further show that in select high-income countries, our measures explain cross-sectional variation in household transportation decisions, and a one standard-deviation increase in SNDi is associated with an extra 0.25 standard deviations in cars owned per household. We aggregate our measures to the scale of countries, cities, and smaller geographies and describe patterns in street-network sprawl around the world. Latin America, Japan, South Korea, much of Europe, and North Africa stand out for their low levels of street-network sprawl, while the highest levels are found in south-east Asia, the United States, and the British Isles. Our calculations provide the foundation for future work to understand urban processes, predict future pathways of transportation energy consumption and emissions, and identify effective policy responses.

Correction: The world's user-generated road map is more than 80% complete.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180698.].

How happy are your neighbours? Variation in life satisfaction among 1200 Canadian neighbourhoods and communities.

This paper presents a new public-use dataset for community-level life satisfaction in Canada, based on more than 500,000 observations from the Canadian Community Health Surveys and the General Social Surveys. The country is divided into 1216 similarly sampled geographic regions, using natural, built, and administrative boundaries. A cross-validation exercise suggests that our choice of minimum sampling thresholds approximately maximizes the predictive power of our estimates. The resulting dataset reveals robust differences in life satisfaction between and across urban and rural communities. We compare aggregated life satisfaction data with a range of key census variables to illustrate some of the ways in which lives differ in the most and least happy communities.

Feasible future global scenarios for human life evaluations.

Subjective well-being surveys show large and consistent variation among countries, much of which can be predicted from a small number of social and economic proxy variables. But the degree to which these life evaluations might feasibly change over coming decades, at the global scale, has not previously been estimated. Here, we use observed historical trends in the proxy variables to constrain feasible future projections of self-reported life evaluations to the year 2050. We find that projected effects of macroeconomic variables tend to lead to modest improvements of global average life evaluations. In contrast, scenarios based on non-material variables project future global average life evaluations covering a much wider range, lying anywhere from the top 15% to the bottom 25% of present-day countries. These results highlight the critical role of non-material factors such as social supports, freedoms, and fairness in determining the future of human well-being.

The world's user-generated road map is more than 80% complete.

OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a particular geographic setting. In this paper, we use two complementary, independent methods to assess the completeness of OSM road data in each country in the world. First, we undertake a visual assessment of OSM data against satellite imagery, which provides the input for estimates based on a multilevel regression and poststratification model. Second, we fit sigmoid curves to the cumulative length of contributions, and use them to estimate the saturation level for each country. Both techniques may have more general use for assessing the development and saturation of crowd-sourced data. Our results show that in many places, researchers and policymakers can rely on the completeness of OSM, or will soon be able to do so. We find (i) that globally, OSM is ∼83% complete, and more than 40% of countries-including several in the developing world-have a fully mapped street network; (ii) that well-governed countries with good Internet access tend to be more complete, and that completeness has a U-shaped relationship with population density-both sparsely populated areas and dense cities are the best mapped; and (iii) that existing global datasets used by the World Bank undercount roads by more than 30%.

Early-life family income and subjective well-being in adolescents.

PURPOSE: Subjective well-being (SWB) in youths positively relates to family income, however its association with income during childhood is unclear. Using longitudinal data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 2234 adolescents, age 12-19 years), we examined whether the timing and duration of low family income in childhood was associated with adolescent SWB. METHODS: We categorized family income during childhood into state-specific quintiles. Adolescent SWB was assessed using a 12-item questionnaire (score range 3-18). We used marginal structural modelling to test for sensitive periods of exposure to low income and tested cumulative effects of income by modelling the number of years spent in the poorest income quintiles. RESULTS: A period in early childhood (age 0-2 years) was particularly sensitive to low family income. Adolescent SWB was 1.65 (95% CI 0.40, 2.91) points lower in those who grew up in the poorest income quintiles during early childhood compared with the top quintile. Further, each childhood year spent in the poorest income quintiles was associated with a 0.10 point (95% CI 0.04, 0.16) lower SWB score in adolescence. CONCLUSIONS: The timing and duration of low family income in childhood both predict individual differences in adolescent SWB. Further studies are needed to clarify the mechanisms of these models and inform public policies.

A century of sprawl in the United States.

The urban street network is one of the most permanent features of cities. Once laid down, the pattern of streets determines urban form and the level of sprawl for decades to come. We present a high-resolution time series of urban sprawl, as measured through street network connectivity, in the United States from 1920 to 2012. Sprawl started well before private car ownership was dominant and grew steadily until the mid-1990s. Over the last two decades, however, new streets have become significantly more connected and grid-like; the peak in street-network sprawl in the United States occurred in ∼ 1994. By one measure of connectivity, the mean nodal degree of intersections, sprawl fell by ∼ 9% between 1994 and 2012. We analyze spatial variation in these changes and demonstrate the persistence of sprawl. Places that were built with a low-connectivity street network tend to stay that way, even as the network expands. We also find suggestive evidence that local government policies impact sprawl, as the largest increases in connectivity have occurred in places with policies to promote gridded streets and similar New Urbanist design principles. We provide for public use a county-level version of our street-network sprawl dataset comprising a time series of nearly 100 y.

Prosocial spending and well-being: cross-cultural evidence for a psychological universal.

This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined and showed that prosocial spending is associated with greater happiness around the world, in poor and rich countries alike. To test for causality, in Studies 2a and 2b, we used experimental methodology, demonstrating that recalling a past instance of prosocial spending has a causal impact on happiness across countries that differ greatly in terms of wealth (Canada, Uganda, and India). Finally, in Study 3, participants in Canada and South Africa randomly assigned to buy items for charity reported higher levels of positive affect than participants assigned to buy the same items for themselves, even when this prosocial spending did not provide an opportunity to build or strengthen social ties. Our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts.

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes observed up to 20 MeV.

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) from Earth's upper atmosphere have been detected with the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite. The gamma-ray spectra typically extend up to 10 to 20 megaelectron volts (MeV); a simple bremsstrahlung model suggests that most of the electrons that produce the gamma rays have energies on the order of 20 to 40 MeV. RHESSI detects 10 to 20 TGFs per month, corresponding to approximately 50 per day globally, perhaps many more if they are beamed. Both the frequency of occurrence and maximum photon energy are more than an order of magnitude higher than previously known for these events.