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ndomly sampled individuals across eightmajor European nations. Importantly, f co es. B d over the life cycle?’ ’ (Blanch-idence that human well-being th thro it flat strong the typ he sen onal va work, variables are omitted. This was shown by Easterlin (2006) and was discussed in detail in early versions of work by Blanchflower (2009) and Blanchflower and Oswald (2004). Strangely, Glenn looks only at data from a single nation, whereas the object of our original article (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2008). Second, we disagree with Glenn’s methodological position, which seems to be that social scientists should not hold constant substantive results are the same if we use instead an ordered probit equation or equivalent. We deliberately estimate the equation behind Fig. 1 with none of the supposedly ‘inappropriate ’ control variables we used in our 2008 (Blanchflower and Oswald) paper. Here we use only year dummies, country dummies, and a dummy for gender. Moreover, to show that the broad mathematical shape in the data is not driven by the imposition of a quadratic estimation form, we do not impose any parametric structure. Instead, we do something simple. We enter q We thank Doug Staiger for valuable comments