This article examines the influence of living conditions in early life on life satisfaction in old age in eleven Western European countries. It combines the influence of individual conditions, for example housing and family background, with country characteristics in the decade of birth. Using pooled data from the second and third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, multilevel models show that early life living conditions have an influence on life satisfaction in old age. Furthermore, interaction effects between current and past living conditions show that adverse living conditions strengthen the effect of early life on life satisfaction in later life and therefore are an indication of cumulative inequality over the life course.
A lot has been written about the association between socioeconomic status – income, wealth, education – and wellbeing. The results from these studies indicate that a favourable position in society is related to higher levels of wellbeing. People with a higher income are more satisfied with their lives (e.g., Diener and Oishi, 2000 and George, 2010), live longer (e.g., Phelan, Link, Diez-Roux, Kawachi, & Levin, 2004), and have a better health (e.g., Kim, Sargent-Cox, French, Kendig, & Anstey, 2011) than people with a lower income.
Apart from the positive association between socioeconomic status (SES) and wellbeing on the micro level, the wealth of a country among other country characteristics is also important (Böhnke, 2008, Diener and Oishi, 2000, Heukamp and Ariño, 2011, Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010 and Zheng, 2012). In addition to the net effect of country conditions, the connection between income and life satisfaction is less pronounced in wealthier countries, although there are still differences between the rich and the poor in these countries (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999).
There are also studies dealing with the relationship between life events and satisfaction such as marriage dissolution, becoming unemployed or getting married (Headey and Wearing, 1989 and Lucas et al., 2003). Apart from life course events a long term influence of living conditions in early life on successful ageing (Brandt, Deindl, & Hank, 2012), on health (Lawlor et al., 2005), depression (Wickrama, Noh, & Elder, 2009), and mortality (Palloni, Milesi, White, & Turner, 2009) can be found. Astonishingly, the impact of early life socio-economic status on life satisfaction has – to the best of our knowledge – not been studied explicitly yet, and it is an open question if a comparable impact of early adversity can be found.
