Happiness is being young or old, but middle age is misery   The
results, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine,
showed that people's levels of happiness followed a U-shaped
curve, a pattern that was remarkably consistent in the vast
majority of countries the researchers looked at, from Azerbaijan
to Zimbabwe.   Andrew Oswald, from the University of Warwick,
and David Blanchflower, from Dartmouth College in the US, led a
study of more than 2 million people from 80 countries to find if
happiness was related to age.  They found that the signs of mid-
life depression were consistent across many groups of people,
irrespective of socio-economic status, whether they had children
in the house, were divorced, or were facing changes in jobs or
income.  "Some people suffer more than others but in our data
the average effect is large," said Oswald.       A total of 72
countries were found to follow the U-shaped pattern of
happiness. In the eight countries that did not seem to follow
the pattern - mostly devel