Many recent theoretical and empirical findings both in Economics and in Psychology show that, in addition to the effects on policy outcomes, political participation may affect individual utility and increase happiness and well-being. In this paper we devise a theoretical model where the individual utility grows through the civic engagement, which may be enjoyed only with a sufficient level of investment in civic capital accumulated through education. We show that investing in education may have important consequences for subjective well-being by enhancing civic capacities which are relevant to improve individual’s civic engagement and social outcomes, even without any monetary effects. More specifically, we identify a form of non pecuniary benefits of education represented by the possibility of taking an active and successful part in social and civic life which significantly contribute to life satisfaction.
Civic engagement has been defined as “the expanse of activities, in which participation in social life with other citizens takes place involving the pursuit of common goals related to the betterment of the community” [
Nevertheless it has been shown that it may increase the subjective well-being as it implies the development of the combination of skills, values, and motivation, due to the fact that people work together to lessen crime, improve schools, increase service to the needy, deepen social trust, etc. Individual benefits of civic engagement also include increased knowledge and trust, positive feelings about the self and the community [
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In his famous work on social capital [
According to a recent OECD survey (available at http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/) the higher levels of education may contribute to life satisfaction beyond their effect on income.2 Life satisfaction denotes how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings. For empirical purpose it is measured by asking to people to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10. For example, tertiary education may help individuals to develop skills, social status and to access networks which could lead to greater satisfaction with life. Education can enhance social outcomes by helping individuals make informed and competent decisions by providing information, improving cognitive skills and strengthening socio-emotional capabilities, such as conscientiousness, self-efficacy and social skills. It can help individuals to increase their engagement in civil society. Educational institutions such as schools can also offer an ideal environment for children to develop participatory attitudes and norms conducive to social cohesion. For instance, open classroom climate, practical involvement in civic matters and school ethos that promote active citizenship can foster civic participation.
In this work we address these issues from a theoretical point of view. In the next section we introduce our research question in more detail. In Section 3, we depict a basic theoretical model on investment in civic education and well-being. In this section we show our main results and introduce also an alternative version of the model to take into account the effect of social norms, which can enforce the effect of civic education and produce higher sense of community. Section 4 contains the conclusions.
In our work we devise a theoretical analysis arguing that income is not a sufficient condition for access to some non-materialistic goods and that something similar occurs in the provision of civic capacities enhancing people to accumulate enough knowledge, skills and conscientiousness necessary to participate in civic engagement and to benefit from it and also to reach better social outcomes.
Our argument is sketched in an intertemporal theoretical model in which individuals alongside with traditional goods, have also what we call civic capital as an argument in their utility function. Current civic engagement yields superior contribution to happiness vis-á-vis the enjoyment of traditional goods, but such enjoyment crucially depends on civic capital which can be accumulated through education. The investment in education has also some opportunity costs since it requires to renounce working hours which can provide additional income for current consumption of traditional goods. We document that, under reasonable parametric conditions, individuals with higher time impatience do not accumulate enough civic capital and cannot benefit from civic participation. On the contrary, individuals with low time impatience accumulate sufficient civic capital which enables them to consume stronger participation in civic and social life and to benefit from it.
Since the main objective of our analysis is to explore the effects of education on civic engagement, we consider in our theoretical model the limiting case in which returns to school are zero, i.e. the human capital has no impact on future income. This allows us to show that, even under this less favorable scenario, there is an incentive to delay satisfaction of traditional consumption goods by investing in education. In this sense we substantially share the [
We present two alternative versions of the model. In the first one individuals have time invariant heterogeneous preferences while in the second one their preferences crucially depend on the utility arising from their conformity to social norms. With these two alternative benchmarks we try to discriminate on the well-known controversy between [
Our findings add original elements to the literature on returns from human capital accumulation. They show that the benefits of education are not just pecuniary such as those traditionally measured by the return to schooling and by the skill wage differential literature. More specifically, we identify a form of non pecuniary benefits of education represented by the possibility of enjoying civic participation. Our research offers useful insights to empirically test how positively and significantly this contributes to life satisfaction and if we can not reject the hypothesis that such enjoyment can be “trained” with education.
We consider a model in which individuals have a utility function
The individual’s utility function has the traditional properties, being convex and exhibiting marginal decreasing returns so that it can be represented by a Cobb-Douglas utility function, containing the arguments described above. We also assume that engagement in a stock of civic activities has a stronger impact on utility than the consumption good, that is,
The second constraint implies that time can be dedicated to
Finally, we assume that civic engagement, having a positive effect on life satisfaction, can be performed only if the value of the civic capital is above a certain threshold, that is,
An individual faces the following problem:
subjected to the law of motion of civic capital
under the following three constraints:
a civic capacities’ activation constraint
a budget constraint
a time constraint
where
For simplicity we also assume that there is not any time devoted to leisure, as this does not substantially affect our result being not a variable of choice in our framework. Notice also that for
Clearly, from (5), we have
To analyze the model described in previous section, we assume that (3) is satisfied. Evaluating L from (5) and substituting it in relation (4) we consider the following constraint:
Hence, we find
If we substitute
Searching for the open-loop information structure with respect to (1), we write down the current-value Hamiltonian function
where
・ FOCs
・ Costate equation:
・ Transversality condition:
Evaluating
and subtracting (10) from (9) we obtain
Proposition 1. Let parameters
then there exist steady state equilibrium values
Proof. In order to get the steady state we require
We equate (13)-(14) and (17)-(14) in order to obtain steady state values for
and the following relationship between
Notice that for
the steady state value of
in fact, evaluating
The steady state
Notice that from condition (20) it is clear that the pursuit of civic engagement is positively correlated with education because the denominator is positive. It crucially depends on
According to Equations ((18) and (19)), the investment in education is higher as more patient the individuals are (so
In addition, by differentiating
The main result of our theoretical framework is in Proposition 1. It states that there exist a threshold in individual time preferences such that more impatient individuals do not invest enough in education to overcome the civic capital threshold that enables to enjoy civic activities. This implies that there might be a group of more impatient individuals, with fewer education years and lower stock of civic capital, who are not civically engaged and a second group of less impatient individuals, with more education years, higher civic capital stock, who can enjoy the utility by performing civic activities. Due to the different contributions of the consumption good and the civic capital/civic activities to the utility function, the second group ends up being happier than the first.
Therefore, when individuals have utility functions and constraints as in our dynamic model, if they are so impatient to give no value to the future, the optimal choice for them would be to use their time to work and consume at the present the traditional good
On the other hand, there may be parametric conditions under which more patient individuals giving nonzero value to future periods utility, decide to forgo to current consumption in order to invest in education and enjoy in the second period the utility arising from performing civic engagement with better social outcomes.
In order to reason on the issue of social norms versus social preferences (see among others [
[
In this case a subject solves:
subjected to the law of motion of civic capital (2) and S is a variable that stands for social norms, under the same budget and time constraints (4)-(5) as before.
It is clear that if there are no social norms
In this paper we construct a model which addresses two issues. First of all, the civic engagement can be consumed and enjoyed only if individuals have accumulated enough civic capital via investment in education. In any period individuals choose to allocate their time between work, engagement in civic activities (available only if enough civic capital has been accumulated) and investment in education. The model shows that only the more patient individuals accumulate more education, perform and benefit from civic engagement. More specifically, we identify a form of non pecuniary benefits of education represented by the possibility of taking active and successful part in social and civic life which significantly contribute to life satisfaction.
Secondly, our findings show that the benefits from education are not just monetary such as those traditionally measured by the return to schooling and by the skill wage differential literature.
LeonardoBecchetti,NazariaSolferino,M. ElisabettaTessitore, (2016) Education Not for Money: An Economic Analysis on Education, Civic Engagement and Life Satisfaction. Theoretical Economics Letters,06,39-47. doi: 10.4236/tel.2016.61006