Re:The relationship between money and happiness
by zwischenzug on Saturday April 07, 2018 @09:02AM
(#16780533)
I happened to study this in my History degree back in 1995 (I took 'quantification in history' because I liked math, then utterly sucked at it. But I digress).
Happiness is an extremely tricky subject, and the Latin America thing brought back memories of discussions about whether LA countries and cultures simply self-identified as happy, or whether they really were happier. I always thought just asking people if they were happy was a really dumb way of comparing levels of happiness, and that more objective measures of populations, like number of suicides (however problematic in itself, eg a reluctance in some cultures to identify death as suicide) was more reliable.
Regarding what it's showing I have some real reservations about the satisfaction score. It's pretty subjective how happy a person is, and it's not actually that easy to translate the question into foreign languages. Just consider in English:
- Are you happy?
- Are you generally happy?
- Are you satisfied with life?
- Are you overjoyed?
All these things mean something similar but cannot easily be translated to all other languages in the study.
Plus there's a question of how people really think about the question. If I'm living in Scandinavia I will constantly be bombed with the results of this exact type of study. Maybe I won't think so hard when I consider what the answer should be. Because I know it, I read it in the paper.
On the income side, you could argue that the score should be the median income, not the average. There's a number of small, rich countries where a few people are insanely rich. I think Equatorial Guinea showed up on one of those GDP/C lists last time I looked.