All projects: Gel, Jobs, Gootodo, Games, Uncle Mark, Goovite, Blog, Bit Literacy
Study: does money buy happiness?
Here's a graph from a NYT story about affluence and happiness, based on a Wharton study:
(see full-sized)
The graph appears to invite two main conclusions:
• The more affluent a country's citizens, the happier they are with life. (This seems reasonable, almost stating the obvious.)
• The more affluent they are, the more satisfied the higher-income earners, relative to lower-income earners.
It's the second conclusion that I have trouble with. There's a piece of data missing: the size of the income gap in each country, between high and low earners. The larger the gap, the higher I'd expect the "satisfaction" of the high earners.
Notice that Denmark and Japan have flat lines: the higher-incomes are nearly equally happy as the lower-incomes. I'd guess that the income gap is fairly small there. Hungary, Portugal, Germany, the US, where the lines are steeper, I'd guess have much broader gaps.
As noted in the NYT piece, past behavioral studies have shown that relative wealth is more important to many people than absolute wealth. But the graph above, even as it purports to disprove those studies, misses that piece. Without normalizing for the size of the income gap, it's impossible to tell whether the chart is accurate. And one source of perceived happiness for many people, unfortunately, isn't what money can buy - it's the "satisfaction" of doing better than one's neighbor.
(via kevin)
