Trust Me, I'm An Expert: what the huge HILDA survey reveals about your economic well-being, health and family life
The enormous Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey tells the stories of the same group of Australians over the course of their lives. Mavis Wong/The Conversation NY-BD-CC, CC BY-SAOn today’s episode of the podcast, we’re talking about what one of Australia’s biggest longitudinal surveys and richest data sets, released today, says about how the nation is changing. And some of the trends may surprise you.
The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey tells the stories of the same group of Australians over the course of their lives. Starting in 2001, the survey now tracks more than 17,500 people in 9,500 households, asking about their economic well-being, health and family life.
So what does this year’s report tell us about the country Australia has become?
Here to break it all down for us today is Roger Wilkins from the University of Melbourne, lead author of the report.
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Wilkins said he was surprised by what this huge survey showed about Australians’ financial literacy, our energy use, how many of us are putting off getting a driver’s licence, how our economy is changing, and how our attitudes toward marriage and family life are shifting.
The report reveals some insights into where we perhaps need to concentrate our public policy efforts to boost Australia’s economic well-being.
What does it all mean for you and me? Listening to Roger Wilkins explain it all may just inspire you to rethink your own financial future.
Roger Wilkins spoke to The Conversation’s deputy politics and society editor Justin Bergman. We’ve included an edited transcript below.
What is HILDA and why does it matter?
Justin Bergman: Roger, in a nutshell I’d love to start out by just hearing what the HILDA survey is and why this matters to people.
Roger Wilkins: The HILDA survey is Australia’s nationally representative longitudinal study of Australians. It started in 2001 and it’s a bit like the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) cross-sectional surveys we’re familiar with, where we get information on people’s employment, their family life, their incomes, their health and well-being. But what distinguishes HILDA is that we’re following the same people year in, year out.
So we are getting a moving picture of people’s lives rather than the cross-sectional snapshot or photograph that the ABS surveys give us. So that’s really what’s unique about HILDA.
We’re now entering our 18th year. So we’re getting a really rich picture of how people’s lives evolve over time, and it allows us to answer all sorts of questions that we couldn’t do with cross-sectional data.
Things like: if someone is poor in one year, how likely are they to be poor the next year? You can’t answer that with cross-sectional data but with our data you can see how long, whether it’s the same people who are poor year in, year out, or whether it tends to be a temporary affair.
And moreover, you can look at: well, who are the people who managed to get themselves out of poverty? And who are the people who don’t?
This gives us incredibly useful information for policymakers about who are the people who are persistently struggling, for example, and therefore we should be thinking more about from a policy perspective. And that’s just one example of many in terms of the value of the HILDA Survey.
Some of the findings in this year’s HILDA report.
Energy spending is falling
Justin Bergman: I realise it’s probably a great deal of data to pore through and lots of interesting findings we’re going to get into in this podcast. Were there any that you found particularly surprising or interesting, just off the top?
Roger Wilkins: Well, we have been tracking people’s household expenditure since 2005 and that includes their expenditure on home energy. Things like electricity and gas. So, we thought, well, there’s been a lot of attention recently to rising prices for electricity and gas. So we thought, well let’s have a look at what’s been happening to household expenditure. That’s different to the price because your expenditure depends on not only the price but how much of the energy you use.
And one thing that surprised me was that the HILDA data is showing that people’s expenditure actually peaked in around 2014. So since then people have actually been decreasing their expenditure, in real terms at least, adjusting for inflation.
So that was something that I wasn’t expecting because there’s been a lot of recent media about prices continuing to rise since 2014 and yet expenditure hasn’t been rising since 2014.
What it seems is that people are have been adapting to these higher prices and doing things like buying energy-efficient appliances, insulating their homes, installing solar panels, perhaps heating fewer rooms in the house in winter. That sort of thing seems to have been going on.
So, as I said, the total expenditure on home energy has actually declined slightly since 2014.
Cognitive ability and decline
Justin Bergman: Great. And one of the interesting chapters that we thought was quite surprising was the one about measuring cognitive ability. And I wanted to ask you, starting off, what are the factors that you looked at in this chapter, when it comes to what contributes to cognitive decline?
Roger Wilkins: Yes, so we have now in two years - in 2012 and 2016 - administered these tests which are called “cognitive ability tasks”. They ask the respondents to perform various activities which allow us to produce measures of their cognitive functioning or their cognitive ability.
And because we have, as I said before, we’re following the same people year in, year out, we can actually look at how these measures of cognitive ability changed between 2012 and 2016.
And we do indeed find that, particularly at the older end of the age spectrum, that there is considerable cognitive decline; that people’s performance on these tests does decline, particularly once you sort of get over the age of 70 - 75. That’s when we really start to see that decline becoming quite sizeable.
So one of the things that we did in this year’s report is looked at whether there were things other than age that were predictive of cognitive decline. And we were particularly interested in whether there were various cognitive activities or other activities that you might engage in that could protect against cognitive decline.
So we looked at things like how often you do puzzles, things like crosswords, how often you read, how often you write, whether you use a computer regularly, whether you do any volunteering, whether you are actually doing any paid employment, how often you look after grandchildren. These sorts of activities, the basis that perhaps the more stimulated you are cognitively, the less decline you’d experience.
And the overriding result we found is that very little seems to protect against cognitive decline. We find some evidence in favour of doing puzzles regularly, things like crosswords, where on one of the measures of cognitive ability it did seem to reduce the extent of decline.
But broadly speaking, most of these cognitive activities didn’t seem to impact on the extent of decline.
Justin Bergman: But doing puzzles was one that you saw that did have an impact. Any idea why that might have been?
Roger Wilkins: Well, I mean, the logic is that it’s sort of the “use it or lose it” argument; that if you’re using your brain, in the same way as if you were exercising a muscle, it keeps it in better condition. That’s sort of the logic. But for some reason we don’t, for example, find that with writing regularly.
That probably is suggestive that doing your crosswords or Sudoku or the like is perhaps not a bad idea, particularly if you enjoy doing them, because it might be having this beneficial side effect.
We also looked at perhaps what you think of as behaviours that might be adverse to cognitive functioning. So, in particular, things like smoking and drinking. And there is some evidence that heavy consumption of alcohol does accelerate cognitive decline but we don’t find any effects of smoking.
Justin Bergman: Very interesting. So do your puzzles and try to avoid alcohol as much as possible.
Roger Wilkins: Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it?
More young people are delaying getting a driver’s license
Justin Bergman: So, going to the chapter about people driving in Australia, what did you notice about the data on driver’s licences?
Roger Wilkins: Yes, well, I mean, people would not be surprised to learn that most people do have a driver’s licence. Although a surprising - well, for me, at least - quite a surprisingly high proportion of young people in the 18-24 range don’t have a driver’s licence.
So while most people — over 90% — eventually get their licence, for many of them it’s not until their late 20s or even their 30s when they do get their licence. So, for example, in the 18-19 range, over a third of people in that age range don’t have a driver’s licence.
And something that we see in just the four-year period between 2012 and 2016: when we asked people whether they have a driver’s licence, even over that short period, we have seen a decline in the proportion of people who have a driver’s licence in that age range.
So whether that’s because the requirements in order to pass the test have been tending to ramp up in most states, I’m not sure. Certainly, there obviously have always been significant costs for obtaining a licence which might be a barrier for young people but I’m not sure that, you know, the extent to which those costs have increased