Beyond Money and Hours

Essay · society · September 2026

This series has asked mostly about money and hours. But the Portuguese became much more satisfied with their lives between 2013 and 2025 while their income rose only modestly, and what still separates them from the most satisfied Europeans is only partly income. Company, health, trust and the places people live also matter. Portugal is strong on some of these and weak on others, and not all of them are out of reach of public policy.

Reading time ≈ 13 min Company · health · trust · place

The question

The Three Goals asked whether an economy could give people more time, do less harm to the environment and leave them more satisfied. On the third goal it concluded that income still matters in Portugal: the Portuguese are less satisfied than other Europeans with their finances, and about as satisfied with their time. This essay looks at what else lies behind satisfaction with life, how Portugal scores on each part, and which parts institutions can change. It sets out two views fairly: that income is what matters most, and that relationships, health and trust matter more.

6.2 → 7.3Portuguese life satisfaction, 0–10, 2013 to 2025; the EU average is 7.2

4% vs 7%people who feel left out of society, Portugal and the EU, 2022

22% vs 17%people with a mental health disorder, Portugal and the EU, 2019 estimates

4.3 vs 5.0trust in other people, 0–10, Portugal and the European average, 2023–24

The level

How satisfied, and with what

The largest European survey, EU-SILC, asks people how satisfied they are with their life on a scale of 0 to 10. The Portuguese average rose from 6.2 in 2013 to 7.3 in 2025, slightly above the EU average of 7.2. Most of the rise came from fewer dissatisfied people: the share giving a low score fell from 39 to 17 per cent.[1] Two other surveys are less generous. In the European Social Survey, Portugal averages 6.5, 23rd of 30 countries; in the Gallup poll behind the World Happiness Report, which asks people to place their life on a ladder from worst to best possible, it scores 6.0, 69th in the world and in the bottom third of the EU.[2][3] Eurostat also flags most of the Portuguese values since 2013 as of low reliability. The level is uncertain; the rise is not, because every survey shows it.

EU-SILC also asks about separate areas of life (Figure 1). The Portuguese are more satisfied than the EU average with their personal relationships, with how they use their time, with their commute and with the meaning of their lives. They are less satisfied with their financial situation and their housing, and much less with the green spaces and the environment where they live, by about a point, more than today’s gap in finances. The questions on place were last asked in 2013, so that gap may have changed.[1]

Fig. 1 — Mean satisfaction with each area of life, persons aged 16 and over, Portugal and the EU, latest year each question was asked. Data: Eurostat, EU-SILC (ilc_pw01b; job satisfaction ilc_pw15). Portuguese values for 2013 and 2022 are flagged as of low reliability.

The rise

Jobs, more than GDP

What moved Portuguese satisfaction is visible in the Gallup series (Figure 2). It fell during the debt crisis and austerity, when unemployment passed 16 per cent, and rose steadily as unemployment fell, from 5.1 on the ladder in the years to 2014 to 5.9 in the years to 2019. Over the same five years GDP per head rose about 12 per cent. Across countries, 12 per cent more income goes with about 0.04 more points on the ladder, one twentieth of the rise Portugal saw.[4] Since 2019 GDP per head has grown another 9 per cent and the ladder has barely moved, from 5.9 to 6.0.[2][5] The EU’s own polls tell the same story more sharply: the share of Portuguese satisfied with their life fell from about 52 per cent in 2008 to 32 per cent in November 2012, while the EU average stayed near 76, and was back to 76 per cent by late 2017.[6] The World Happiness Report names Portugal as the Western country whose life evaluations have risen most since 2006–2010.[2]

Fig. 2 — Portugal: average life evaluation (Cantril ladder, 0–10) against the unemployment rate, three-year windows ending in the year shown, 2011–2025. Data: World Happiness Report 2026, data for Figure 2.1; Eurostat (une_rt_a); author’s averages. The windows overlap, so the points are not independent.

This is the pattern Richard Easterlin describes. In the short run, he and Kelsey O’Connor write, “happiness and income typically go up and down together”, and losses hurt more than gains help: in a recession people compare themselves with the income they had before, not with their neighbours. Over the long run, in their data, the growth of happiness and the growth of income “are not significantly related”. For Portugal their own tables show happiness trends running against growth rates in both periods they cover.[7] The other side is argued by Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers and Daniel Sacks: richer people and richer countries are more satisfied, growth and rising satisfaction go together, and they find no point beyond which more income stops helping.[8] A study of 199 national time series found both at once: growth does go with rising happiness, but slowly, about 0.0034 points for each 1 per cent of growth, so that a full point would take sixty years of 5 per cent growth.[9]

Portugal’s recent history fits Easterlin’s short-run story well: what mattered was the loss of jobs and income in the crisis and their return. It does not settle the long-run question.

The gap

Where the gap now lies

In 2013 the Portuguese were less satisfied than other Europeans at every age. By 2025 those under 65 were at or above the EU average and the remaining gap was among the old (Figure 3).[1] The same groups stand out elsewhere. People aged 50 and over rate their finances at 5.7 to 5.8, against 6.5 to 6.6 in the EU; the young do not. And among people aged 65 and over, 13.8 per cent reported depressive symptoms in 2019, against 9.1 per cent across the EU.[1][10] Portugal’s older generation grew up poorer, has lower pensions and less schooling, and lived through the crisis close to retirement; The Long Retirement showed that they also have fewer years of good health than other Europeans.

Fig. 3 — Portugal’s mean life satisfaction minus the EU mean, by age group, 2013 and 2025, points on a 0–10 scale. Data: Eurostat, EU-SILC (ilc_pw01); author’s differences. Portuguese values flagged as of low reliability.

Company

A country of daily contact

On relationships Portugal is among the best in Europe. Only 4 per cent of the Portuguese say they feel left out of society, against 7 per cent in the EU, and 5.5 per cent of those aged 75 and over, against 9 per cent. In 2015, 37 per cent met friends in person every day, more than twice the EU share of 15 per cent. Fewer older people live alone: 24 per cent of those aged 65 and over, against 32 per cent in the EU.[11]

Direct questions about loneliness give a less exceptional picture. In the EU’s 2022 loneliness survey about 13 per cent of Europeans were lonely most or all of the time, and Portugal was close to the average; in a 2022 Gallup poll for Meta, 17 per cent of the Portuguese felt very or fairly lonely, fewer than the 24 per cent worldwide but more than in Spain, and more women than men.[12][13] The difference may be real: frequent contact is not the same as close company. The surveys also use different samples and questions.

Health

The weakest point: the mind

The Portuguese describe their own health unusually poorly. Only 53 per cent call it good or very good, against 68 per cent in the EU, placing Portugal 25th of 27, although its life expectancy is above the EU average. Much of the difference is in the middle answer: 35 per cent of the Portuguese call their health “fair”, against 23 per cent of Europeans.[10] Part of this may be a way of answering rather than a way of feeling.

Mental health is a harder fact. On estimates for 2019, 22 per cent of the Portuguese had a mental health disorder, against 16.7 per cent in the EU; self-reported depression, at over 12 per cent, was the highest in the EU, and more than twice as common among women as among men. Consumption of antidepressants rose 45 per cent between 2017 and 2022, which the OECD and the European Observatory link to the few psychologists employed by the national health service; the median wait for a non-urgent psychiatric appointment was 109 days.[14]

This matters more for satisfaction than it may seem. In a well-known study of what predicts it, by Andrew Clark, Richard Layard and colleagues, diagnosed mental illness “emerges as more important than income, employment or physical illness” in the three Western countries they studied. In the United States, eliminating depression and anxiety would cut the share of people in misery by 2.35 percentage points, eliminating poverty by 1.71.[15] In a British cohort followed from birth, family income explained only half a per cent of the differences in life satisfaction between adults; all the adult circumstances measured together, including health, explained about 11 per cent.[16] Most of what makes one person more satisfied than another is not captured by any of these measures, income included.

Trust

Trust in others and in the State

The World Happiness Report splits each country’s score into parts associated with six factors: GDP per head, having someone to count on, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceived corruption. The report is careful to say that its ranking is not an index of these factors and that the parts are estimated associations, not causes.[2] With that caveat, the split of Portugal’s gap with the Nordic countries is striking (Figure 4). Of 1.44 points, only 0.15 is associated with GDP per head. The largest single factor is perceived corruption, 0.37; social support and generosity add 0.18 and 0.11; and the largest item of all, 0.52, is unexplained. Against Spain, Portugal is behind on corruption and ahead on freedom.[2]

Fig. 4 — Portugal’s gap in average life evaluation with the mean of Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Norway, and with Spain, split by the World Happiness Report’s six factors, 2023–2025. Data: World Happiness Report 2026, data for Figure 2.1; author’s differences. The parts are associations estimated across all countries, not Portugal’s own weights.

Other measures agree that trust is a Portuguese weakness (Figure 5). In the European Social Survey, the Portuguese score 4.3 out of 10 on whether most people can be trusted, against 6.1 to 6.8 in the Nordic countries and 5.3 in Spain; they trust the legal system and politicians less than the average respondent, and parliament about as much. Transparency International’s index of perceived corruption, which is based on assessments by experts and businesses, has fallen for Portugal from 64 in 2018 to 56 in 2025, its lowest score since the series began in 2012.[3][17] Not every survey agrees on institutions. Asked in the Eurobarometer simply whether they tend to trust them, 54 per cent of the Portuguese said yes of their government and 55 per cent of parliament in spring 2026, against 37 per cent in the EU, though fewer trusted the justice system, 50 against 58 per cent. Trust in government also moves with the political cycle: in the OECD’s survey it was below the OECD average in 2023, the year a government fell.[18] What the surveys agree on is that the Portuguese trust the courts less than most Europeans; on trust in other people, the European Social Survey puts them well below average and EU-SILC only slightly below, 5.5 against 5.8.[1]

Fig. 5 — Trust in other people and in institutions, mean on a 0–10 scale, Portugal and the unweighted average of the 30 countries in the survey, 2023–24. Data: European Social Survey round 11; author’s weighted means.

Studies of trust and wellbeing find large associations. John Helliwell and Shun Wang estimated that living where people expect a lost wallet to be returned as often as in Norway, rather than as rarely as in Tanzania, goes with life evaluations as much higher as would almost 40 per cent more household income. With Haifang Huang they later put the value of social trust at no less than a doubling of income, and found that unemployment, ill-health and discrimination hurt less where trust is high.[19][20] These are associations across people and countries; trusting people may also be people who answer surveys more positively.

Work and place

Control at work, noise at home

At work, the Portuguese are more likely than other Europeans to think their work is useful, 89 per cent against 86, but in 2015 they were among the least able to choose or change how and how fast they work, 68 per cent against 80, 26th of 27 countries. A larger share of employees are on temporary contracts, 15 per cent against 13 in 2025.[21] The Duty to Work described how much control over one’s own work matters for health: among British civil servants, low control almost doubled the risk of heart disease.

At home, commutes are among the shortest in the EU, 21 minutes each way against 25, and the Portuguese are as satisfied with them as other Europeans. Noise is a growing problem: 29 per cent reported noise from neighbours or the street in 2023, against 18 per cent in the EU, and up from 23 per cent in 2013.[22] With low satisfaction with green spaces, it points to the quality of the places where people live as a gap that income alone does not close.

What can change

What institutions can move

Not all of this is open to policy, and the evidence for what works is uneven.

Mental health care has the strongest case. The burden is large and well measured, Portugal’s is above the European average, and treatment is known to work for many people. In rough British estimates by Clark and colleagues, treating depression and anxiety was the cheapest way of lifting a person out of misery, at about £10,000 a year, against £30,000 through labour-market programmes and £180,000 through reducing poverty.[15] Hiring psychologists in the health service is a decision the State makes directly.

Trust in institutions is associated with satisfaction as strongly as anything in the data, and Portugal’s perceived corruption has worsened. But there is no experiment showing how a government raises trust, only the plausible view that honest, predictable and quick institutions earn it over time. Worth Producing argued that rules need referees; courts that take years and regulators that do not enforce are also a cost in trust.

Green space and quieter streets have some good evidence. In Philadelphia, a randomised trial greened vacant lots and the share of nearby residents who reported feeling depressed fell by 41 per cent relative to those near untreated lots; cleaning up rubbish alone had no significant effect.[23] British panel data that follow the same people over time find that living in a greener area goes with less distress and higher life satisfaction, though the effects for each person are small.[24] For noise, the evidence reviewed here is thinner.

Programmes against loneliness, such as “social prescribing”, where doctors refer patients to community activities, are popular, but a systematic review found “an absence of evidence” that link workers improve health or quality of life, and evidence of low certainty.[25] Portugal’s strength here is informal, in families and neighbourhoods, and it is not obvious that a programme can create or replace it.

Income still matters where it is lowest. The Portuguese in the poorest fifth rate their lives 1.3 points below those in the richest fifth, a wider gap than in the EU, and the old rate their finances well below other Europeans.[1] Pensions and the cost of housing belong on this list as much as anything above.

The caveat

Can the answers be compared?

All of this rests on people’s answers to questions about their own lives, and there are reasons for caution. An OECD study estimated that culture, including differences in how people use answer scales, accounts for about a fifth of the differences between countries that circumstances do not explain.[26] Timothy Bond and Kevin Lang showed that ranking groups by average happiness requires strong assumptions about how people use the scale; Caspar Kaiser and Andrew Oswald replied that a single number for how people feel predicts later actions such as moving, quitting or separating better than economic and social facts combined.[27][28] For Portugal there are specific warnings: three surveys disagree on its level, most recent values are flagged as of low reliability, and the Portuguese choose the middle answer on health far more often than others. Comparisons over time within Portugal are safer than comparisons with other countries.

The balance

Beyond money, not instead of it

Both views in this debate hold, at different margins. Income matters most when it is lost, and where it is low: Portugal’s satisfaction fell in the crisis and recovered with jobs, and its poorest and oldest remain the least satisfied. Beyond that, the factors that separate Portugal from the most satisfied countries are mostly not income: mental health, trust in institutions and in other people, and the quality of the places where people live. Its strength, company, is the one factor that policy has done least to create.

For the question this series set out to answer, that is good news of a limited kind. An economy that gives people more time and uses less energy need not make them less satisfied, if it keeps them in work, looks after their minds and runs institutions they can trust. None of those depends mainly on growth. But none of them is free either, and the evidence that governments know how to deliver the second and third is weaker than the evidence that they matter.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The figures and derived numbers are computed by scripts/satisfaction.py from Eurostat’s EU-SILC well-being tables, the World Happiness Report 2026 data and the European Social Survey. Most Portuguese EU-SILC values after 2013 are flagged by Eurostat as of low reliability, and the three surveys used disagree on Portugal’s level, so levels are compared cautiously. The ladder-against-unemployment figure uses overlapping three-year windows and shows an association, not a cause. The World Happiness Report factor split is the report’s own, relative to a hypothetical lowest-scoring country; the differences between countries are the author’s. The loneliness figure for Portugal in the EU survey is read from a map legend, not a table. Results are in docs/satisfaction-results.json and the figures in docs/satisfaction-figures.html; the downloaded sources, with the dataset code or page for every number, are kept with the script’s data.

The cover photograph is Jardim da Estrela by Pedro from Lisboa, Portugal; CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. The Three Goals — time, the planet and satisfaction together.
2. The Duty to Work — what work gives people besides pay.
3. The Long Retirement — pensions, exit ages and healthy years.
4. Hours on the Road — the time paid for cheaper housing.
5. Work, Time and Money — the reading guide to the whole series.
6. What We Found — the conclusions of the whole series in ten points.

Sources

1. Eurostat, EU-SILC well-being tables: ilc_pw01, ilc_pw01b, ilc_pw02, ilc_pw03, ilc_pw05 and ilc_pw15 (mean satisfaction, trust in others and shares, persons 16+), retrieved 30 September 2026; author’s differences.
2. J. F. Helliwell, R. Layard, J. D. Sachs, J.-E. De Neve, L. B. Aknin and S. Wang (eds.), World Happiness Report 2026, Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, ch. 2, pp. 18, 20 and 26 (PDF pp. 6, 8 and 14), and data for Figure 2.1 (2011–2025).
3. European Social Survey ERIC, rounds 9 (2018–19), 10 (2020–22) and 11 (2023–24), ESS Data Portal; author’s weighted means and ranks.
4. B. Stevenson and J. Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2008, p. 13; author’s calculation.
5. Eurostat, GDP per head in chain-linked volumes (nama_10_pc) and unemployment rate 15–74 (une_rt_a); author’s three-year averages.
6. European Commission, Standard Eurobarometer 69–93, question on satisfaction with the life one leads (“very” plus “fairly” satisfied), data annexes.
7. R. A. Easterlin and K. J. O’Connor, “The Easterlin Paradox”, IZA Discussion Paper 13923, December 2020, pp. 1, 4 and 13–14, and appendix tables A1–A2.
8. D. W. Sacks, B. Stevenson and J. Wolfers, “The New Stylized Facts about Income and Subjective Well-Being”, IZA Discussion Paper 7105, December 2012, abstract.
9. R. Veenhoven and F. Vergunst, “The Easterlin illusion: economic growth does go with greater happiness”, International Journal of Happiness and Development, 2014, abstract.
10. Eurostat, self-perceived health (hlth_silc_01), 2025, and European Health Interview Survey 2019, depressive symptoms (hlth_ehis_mh1e).
11. Eurostat, EU-SILC: feeling left out of society (ilc_pw10, 2022), frequency of contact with friends (ilc_scp09, 2015); Labour Force Survey, households by type (lfst_hhindws, 2025); author’s shares.
12. F. Berlingieri, M. Colagrossi and C. Mauri, “Loneliness and social connectedness: insights from a new EU-wide survey”, JRC Science for Policy Brief, 2023, p. 1; C. Mauri et al., ch. 2 in S. V. Schnepf, B. d’Hombres and C. Mauri (eds.), Loneliness in Europe, Springer, 2024, pp. 31–33.
13. Gallup and Meta, The Global State of Social Connections, 2023, country table for Portugal (PDF p. 49).
14. OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Portugal: Country Health Profile 2023, State of Health in the EU, 2023, PDF pp. 22–25.
15. A. E. Clark, S. Flèche, R. Layard, N. Powdthavee and G. Ward, “The Key Determinants of Happiness and Misery”, CEP Discussion Paper 1485, 2017, pp. 6, 8 and 10.
16. R. Layard, A. E. Clark, F. Cornaglia, N. Powdthavee and J. Vernoit, “What Predicts a Successful Life? A Life-Course Model of Well-Being”, Economic Journal 124, 2014; CEP Discussion Paper 1245, pp. 9 and 15.
17. Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, results and trends tables.
18. European Commission, Standard Eurobarometer 105, spring 2026, data annex, QA6.3, QA6.10 and QA6.11, pp. 71, 85 and 87; OECD, Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions, 2023 wave, Government at a Glance 2025 indicators.
19. J. F. Helliwell and S. Wang, “Trust and Wellbeing”, International Journal of Wellbeing 1(1), 2011, p. 48.
20. J. F. Helliwell, H. Huang and S. Wang, “New Evidence on Trust and Well-Being”, NBER Working Paper 22450, 2016, abstract and pp. 9–10.
21. Eurostat, European Working Conditions Survey 2015 (qoe_ewcs_7b1, qoe_ewcs_7b3); temporary employees (lfsa_etpgan), 2025.
22. Eurostat, Labour Force Survey 2019 ad hoc module (lfso_19plwk28); EU-SILC, satisfaction with commuting time (ilc_pw01b, 2013) and noise from neighbours or the street (ilc_mddw01).
23. E. C. South, B. C. Hohl, M. C. Kondo, J. M. MacDonald and C. C. Branas, “Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Mental Health of Community-Dwelling Adults”, JAMA Network Open 1(3), 2018, e180298, abstract.
24. M. P. White, I. Alcock, B. W. Wheeler and M. H. Depledge, “Would You Be Happier Living in a Greener Urban Area?”, Psychological Science 24(6), 2013, abstract.
25. B. Kiely et al., “Effect of social prescribing link workers on health outcomes and costs for adults in primary care and community settings: a systematic review”, BMJ Open 12(10), 2022, e062951, abstract.
26. C. Exton, C. Smith and D. Vandendriessche, “Comparing Happiness across the World: Does Culture Matter?”, OECD Statistics Working Papers 2015/04, abstract.
27. T. N. Bond and K. Lang, “The Sad Truth about Happiness Scales”, Journal of Political Economy 127(4), 2019, abstract.
28. C. Kaiser and A. J. Oswald, “The scientific value of numerical measures of human feelings”, PNAS 119(42), 2022, e2210412119, abstract.