The Economics of Happiness, Part 4: Are Rich People Happier than Poor People?

Continue the topic of the relationship between income and happiness (previous post: 1, 2, 3) and tell me what Betsey Stevenson and I learned when comparing the happiness of the rich and the poor.

Let's start with the latest data from the 2006 social survey. "Overall, what do you think about the present?"

Rich people seem to be "happy" than our other people. Is this a big impact? In 2005, Robert Frank says:

When we derive the average happiness and income of a particular country's population at a particular time, we can see that the wealthy people are actually happier than the poor.

This is actually surprisingly big difference. You can not believe that your life can improve your happiness from at least 5% up to 5% of your income.

By comparing wealthy countries and poor countries, we estimate a happy income gradient that is similar when its gradient compares rich and poor countries.

Okay, that's America, how about other countries? In the Gallup World Poll, we estimated the slope of welfare income in over 100 countries. We will not show you dozens of individual coefficients, let's tell the story a story (Let me admit, I like this picture)

The arrows in the figure indicate the slope of the happiness income gradient of each country, and the points represent the average happiness level and G.D. P. of each country. The dotted line shows the best fit through these points

The fact that both arrows have a slope similar to the dotted line suggests that the comparison of rich and poor produces a very similar conclusion with comparisons between wealthy and poor countries. In this paper, we recorded that this finding applies to various data sets.

In international data, the difference in happiness between rich and poor countries has not been confirmed, as expected from domestic differences in economic status.

Wealthier people are more happy than ordinary citizens, wealthy countries are more happy than poor countries. However, even if the wealth of the country grows, the happiness of the country does not necessarily increase. This is the famous Easter lord paradox named after the economist Richard Easterl. I have observed mysterious phenomena. Between 1946 and 1970, the United States experienced significant economic expansion. However, throughout the postwar boom period, there was no increase in happiness in this survey. (Read the full text)

Easterlin discovered that it is not - the country's wealthy people are often more happy than the poorest in the same country, but in general, richer countries are more happy than the poor There was not. These findings, known as the Easterlin paradox, contradict the general assumption that wealthy people enjoy a more happy life. In the research on winners of lottery tickets and victims of serious accidents, we are further exploring the relationship between money and happiness. The happiness of 22 big lottery winners was compared with 29 control people and 29 people who were paralyzed by accident. The joy of winning the lottery is that people are numb with less enjoyable daily life - resistance that researchers call "live" because only more important events can bring joy to the winner Brickman, Coates, Janoff- Bulman, 1978) 3).