Happy for how long? How social capital and economic growth relate to happiness over time

•GDP and social capital have different inter-temporal correlations with subjective well-being.•In the long and the medium run subjective well-being and social capital are positively related.•In the short run this relationship weakens.•GDP and subjective well-being are unrelated over the long run.•In the medium run their correlation is positive. In the short run it further strengthens.

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 the medium run social capital largely predicts the trends of subjective well-being. 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.