  What predicts the evolution over time of subjective well-being? We correlate
the trends of subjective well-being with the trends of social capital and/or
GDP. We find that in the long and medium run social capital largely predicts
the trends of subjective wellbeing in our sample of countries. In the
short-term this relationship weakens. Indeed, in the short run, changes in
social capital predict a much smaller portion of the changes in subjective
well-being than over longer periods. GDP follows a reverse path, thus
confirming the Easterlin paradox: in the short run GDP is more positively
correlated to well-being than in the medium-term, while in the long run this
correlation vanishes.
